I think that BPA is a good start point for those organizations that requires to be in control of their processes before they start to think in a broad BPM strategy.

Business Process Automation (BPA), can be seen as the physical carrying out the actual steps of a particular business process (automatically) in order to improve overall efficiency, and by extension, reducing costs.

BPM does not physically “do” anything other than pinpoint painpoints of a particular business process. Once these pitfalls have been uncovered, there is no mechanism in place by which to improve or otherwise modify the process. An “action layer” is required on top of the BPM layer in order to correct or otherwise improve the performance of the business process.

While most BPA solutions primarily focus on providng this “action layer” to the management of business processes (whether utilizing a BPM tool or not), some solutions act more as platforms providing the modeling, evaluation, and execution of business processes in realtime. These BPA platforms uitilize workflows to document a particular process and call specified conditions and events to dictate how the process flow should be carried out. In addition, good BPA tools provide conditional branching and error-handling so that the BPA solution is reacting and interacting to errors and other dynamic events occuring in the environment of the business process.

While the largest organizations may require separate tools for BPM and BPA, most organizations’ needs are less bureaucratic and more pragmatic. SMBs, for example, do not have the resources to fret over every nuance of a particular process. Instead, they have defined goals and actions that need to be carried out and known issues that interupt or otherwise complicate these processes. BPA is the perfect solution for these organizations as it provides all of the management functionality required to effectively document and analyze the process as well as the ability to automate the proocess in order to improve efficiency and lower overall cost. In addition, using 1 solution for the modeling, evaluation, and execution of a process takes less of a toll on IT departments and is an added cost savings benefit.

And then there is the discipline of actively monitoring and analyzing running processes using a process state engine, but without actually automating those processes with an execution engine. This is in some ways the intermediate point between BPM-the-methodology and BPM-the-automation-technology. We refer to this capability as “business process intelligence” in our product’s marketing material, but other terms could also apply.

In any case, fertile ground for confusing terminology!