What is business process automation? Your guide for 2025
It’s not easy to run a successful business in 2025. Competition is fierce, customers demand flawless experiences, and the slightest operational inefficiencies can quickly hold you back.
This means your business needs to operate faster, smarter, and leaner than ever before – and it’s why business process automation has become essential.
By automating repetitive tasks and optimizing complex workflows, you can free up resources, reduce errors, and focus on innovation and growth.
This guide will show you how to harness the power of business process automation in 2025, showing you the benefits as well as tips on getting started, plus some real-world automation inspiration.
Business automation vs business process automation
Business automation and business process automation (BPA) are two terms often used interchangeably. Although the meaning is similar, there are key differences to keep in mind.
Business automation is the big picture. It involves using tech tools to streamline tasks across different areas of your business, from marketing to customer support. Think automating email campaigns, syncing apps, or scheduling social media posts.
Business process automation (BPA) goes deeper. It covers the automation of emails and social posts but also focuses on specific workflows and rule-based processes. For example, BPA can be used for onboarding new employees, processing invoices, or managing entire workflows within teams.
The best automation tools like Make are designed to enable both, offering a huge range of business benefits.
Benefits of business process automation
Business process automation (BPA) is a powerful way to streamline your operations, save time and set your business up for growth. Here’s how it makes a difference:
Saves time: Automating key areas of your business will eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks and free up valuable time for more important work.
Reduces errors: Removing the risk of human error with automation boosts accuracy and consistency, which is especially important when it comes to critical processes like invoicing and inventory management.
Boosts productivity: Manual tasks bog people down and often lead to burnout. Business process automation can free up your team to focus on more meaningful, rewarding work.
Improves customer experience: Speed is everything when it comes to customer satisfaction – and automating your workflows with business process automation software can streamline everything from order processing to customer enquiries.
Enhances scalability: Without automation, most businesses run into problems when they reach a certain level of growth. Having automated workflows in place using trusted business process automation software can boost your ability to scale.
Keeps you competitive: In a competitive marketplace, automation can help you stay ahead of the crowd by running faster, leaner, and more responsive operations.
Delivers better insights: From creating reports to identifying bottlenecks, BPA can help you generate data that offers deeper visibility into business performance and opportunities.
Automation inspiration
Wondering what you could automate? The opportunities are endless.
Here are six of the most common areas Make customers across the globe use our business process automation software for:
Marketing activities: From automating email campaigns to optimizing paid campaigns, BPA with Make can help you reach the right audience, track results instantly, and run workflows smoothly.
Content creation: Automation tools like Make can harness the power of AI to streamline content creation, saving hours every week on tasks like drafting blogs, generating social media posts, and personalizing email content. This means your team can focus on creativity and strategy while maintaining a consistent flow of high-quality content.
Customer comms: Keeping up with customer comms manually can be a huge drain on resources. Automating these workflows – including follow-ups, abandoned cart reminders, and order notifications – can boost conversion rates and improve customer satisfaction.
Financial tasks: When it comes to finance-related workflows, it’s vital nothing falls through the cracks. By using automation software you can generate invoices, approve expenses, and nudge clients about overdue payments, saving time while keeping your cash flow on track.
HR workflows: Whether it’s payroll or onboarding new staff, HR can be a maze of paperwork and manual tasks. Automating HR workflows can help you save time, reduce errors, and create a seamless experience that everyone prefers.
Order management: For e-commerce businesses, automation can be a complete game-changer. From tracking and fulfilling orders to updating inventory, BPA can help you process orders smoothly without manual input.
Getting started with business process automation
The idea of automating your business can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.
Automation isn’t about replacing people or creating a complex system you can’t manage
– it’s about making life easier by handling repetitive, time-consuming tasks so you and your team can focus on the big picture.
Here’s a simple five-step guide to help you get started:
Step 1: Identify repetitive tasks
Look for tasks that eat up hours and follow the same steps every time. These include data entry, invoice generation, or sending reminders – tasks which are usually the most obvious candidates to kick off automation with.
Step 2: Map your workflows
Lay out each process step-by-step, from start to finish. This helps you spot inefficiencies and see where automation can have the biggest impact.
Step 3: Choose the right tools
Opt for an automation platform that’s powerful, flexible, and easy to use – like Make. As the leading visual no-code automation platform, Make gives you the power to connect, streamline and automate workflows across a huge range of CRMs, tools, and systems using its unique drag-and-drop interface.
Backed by over 500,000 Make users worldwide, Make offers native integrations with 1,600+ apps and access to thousands of free workflow automation templates. It’s everything you need to build efficient, customized automations without writing a single line of code.
Step 4: Start small
Pick one or two processes to automate first – like sending follow-up emails or managing inventory. Starting small lets you see results quickly and build momentum. The best business automation software will let you easily duplicate and tweak automations (rather than creating them from scratch each time).
Step 5: Test and optimize
Keep an eye on how your automations perform. Are they saving time? Reducing errors? Adjust and fine-tune as needed – even experienced automators can often find room for improvement.
Get inspired by these business automation success stories
Restaurant franchise saves $1,500 a day
Pacific Drive-Ins, a Sonic Drive-In franchise with 16 locations across California and Arizona, was struggling with hiring bottlenecks, delivery disruptions and increasing compliance demands.
By implementing Make for business process automation, they now manage 700+ employees with just five back office staff and have streamlined their delivery service via platforms like DoorDash and UberEats to avoid an average loss of $1,500 per day from delivery issues. They’ve also reduced non-compliance with breaktime rules to near zero, cutting the risk of lawsuits.
Marketing firm triples blog output
Basilica, a strategic marketing firm in Atlanta, faced tight deadlines and resource constraints in producing high-quality, technical blog content.
By using Make to combine the powers of AI and automation, the business has streamlined its content creation process, reducing the time required to create each blog by 5-6 hours. This has led to an 167% increase in productivity, allowing the team to nearly triple their blog output without adding resources.
VA service saves hours on every task
Wing Assistant, a virtual assistant (VA) provider for startups and enterprises, was bogged down by time-consuming newsletter creation and manual data synchronization across platforms.
By setting up no-code automation workflows with Make, they have cut the time it takes to create each newsletter from four days to just a few hours. They have also automated data syncing between Pipedrive, Customer.io, and their billing system, saving significant time and improving efficiency.
Check out more real-world stories of automation success.
FAQs
How does business automation impact employee roles?
Automation is good news for everyone. With tools like Make, automation frees employees from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on creative, strategic or customer-facing activities – which boost morale and productivity.
What are the initial costs of implementing business automation?
The costs depend on the tools and scale of implementation. Make offers flexible pricing plans, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes.
How secure is business automation?
Make’s business automation prioritizes security with features like encrypted connections and strict data privacy standards, ensuring your sensitive data is always protected.
What are the common challenges in adopting business automation?
Adoption hurdles include initial setup costs, integration complexities, and employee resistance. Make’s intuitive visual dashboard and comprehensive support make it easier to get started, plus we offer a range of useful features to help you scale your automations over time.
What is the difference between RPA and BPA?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates specific, repetitive tasks, like data entry. Business Process Automation (BPA) focuses on automating entire workflows to improve efficiency.
Do more with automation in 2025
Ready to see how automation can transform your business? Get started with Make today.
