Reduce Your Costs with Business Process Automation Solutions
 

Automating business processes can reduce the overall cost of overall transactions by minimizing the number of human “touches” while increasing accuracy.

During the past decade of Internet adoption, the ubiquity of Internet connections and the brisk pace of technology have been rapidly lowering overall transaction costs. By allowing global price comparisons, online purchasing and bartering systems, and low-cost auctions for just about anything, the overall cost of doing a deal has plummeted.

Over the last several years, the technology industry has been working to replace the large, centralized, proprietary transaction networks based on electronic data interchange with open, shared, XML-based transactional networks. The technology is in place to allow not only centrally hosted trading networks, but also software solutions that allow companies to interact as peers rather than relying on large host networks. In 2004, Microsoft will release new versions of its BizTalk Server software as well as service offerings you can use to help your customers build trading networks.

What Is BPA?
To understand the opportunity, consider the standard business process in place for companies to purchase from suppliers. A company issues a purchase order to their supplier. The supplier sends an invoice to the company. The supplier sends a bill of lading with the shipment. The company receives the goods and sends a check to the supplier. With each step more paperwork is generated and there are more opportunities for errors. Automating this business process can reduce the cost of the overall transaction by minimizing the number of “touches” and increasing the overall accuracy of the transaction.

The goal of business process automation (BPA) is to replace paper-based, time-intensive processes with systems that connect a company’s systems and employees to those of its trading partners. A well-designed BPA infrastructure will have the tools to manage and provision trading partner relationships, will provide information workers with timely access to business process information, and will support automatic tracking and review of key business indicators for those processes it manages. The BPA system should allow its users to configure and interact with existing business processes and to both establish and manage business process rules on the fly.

With the 2004 release of Microsoft® BizTalk® Server, Microsoft will deliver a BPA platform that you and your customers can use to deliver BPA solutions that have all of this functionality. But the 2004 release is significant also because Microsoft is expanding the marketing of the technology in ways that will make it more accessible to a broader range of customers and the partners who serve them