A Guide to Business Process Automation in Retail & Ecommerce

Nicole Laurier • January 28, 2025

From managing inventory to processing sales data, repetitive manual tasks can drain employee time and increase the risk of costly errors. Whether you operate a brick-and-mortar store or an eCommerce platform, these challenges can impact productivity and profitability long before your product reaches the shelves.


Business Process Automation (BPA) offers a game-changing solution by eliminating the need for manual data processing. BPA Platform automates essential retail tasks such as updating product information, generating sales reports, and handling returns, allowing employees to focus on more strategic responsibilities. By reducing operational costs, minimizing human error, and streamlining workflows, automation empowers retail businesses to process sales and manage critical data more efficiently—all without employee intervention. Keep on reading for more details!


What is a Business Process?


Business processes refer to a series of interrelated tasks or activities performed within an organization to achieve a specific goal or deliver a desired outcome. They represent the systematic way in which work is organized, executed, and monitored to ensure smooth operations and efficient resource utilization.


Business processes can encompass various functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, human resources, operations, customer service, and much more. These processes often involve the flow of information, materials, or services across different departments or individuals, following predefined rules or guidelines. They can range from simple tasks to complex workflows, and their optimization is crucial for enhancing productivity, quality, and overall organizational performance.


Automated Business Process Examples


So what types of business processes can be automated? Well, the list is endless and is dependent on the type of business or company structure that it is going to be applied to, and the specific needs, goals and challenges of the organization. 


Business process automation provides the ability to carry out and fulfill business processes without human intervention. These processes can cover a wide variety of business activities, tasks or workflows, ranging from order management and financial reporting, to data monitoring and critical notifications. Likewise, automated workflows can be used across a variety of industries and functions, from customer service and marketing, to finance and HR. 


Here are some common examples of business processes that can be automated:

  1. Invoice processing: Automating the invoice processing workflow involves capturing invoice data, validating it against predefined rules, routing it for approvals, and generating payment notifications. This automation can streamline the accounts payable process, reduce manual data entry, and improve accuracy.
  2. Order fulfillment: Automating order fulfillment involves integrating systems for order capture, inventory management, order processing and shipping. Automated workflows can help track orders, update inventory levels, generate shipping labels and send order status notifications to customers.
  3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Automating CRM processes involves capturing and managing customer data, tracking interactions and automating communication workflows. This automation can help in lead generation, sales pipeline management, customer segmentation and personalized marketing campaigns.
  4. Performance reporting: Automating performance reporting involves collecting data from various sources, aggregating it, and generating reports for analysis. Automated reporting can save time, provide real-time insights and enable data-driven decision-making.
  5. Expense management: Automated systems can capture expense data, validate it against policies, route it for approval and streamline reimbursement processes, saving time and reducing errors.


Why BPA Platform is the Right Choice


BPA Platform provides the tools needed to quickly and easily build automated processes that are unique to the way a business works. It allows for changing business environments by providing the flexibility for automated processes to be adapted or completely re-written to meet new conditions.


BPA Platform also provides a powerful and flexible workflow automation solution for managing and monitoring the flow of work within an organization, ensuring that business rules are adhered to and administration is removed. It permits users to receive and authorize multi-level workflow jobs, regardless of the device and business system the workflow starts or ends within, and creates an audit trail for complete peace of mind.


Additionally, BPA Platform makes it extremely easy to automate any number of data management alerts and notifications for a host of different scenarios. They can be sent automatically in response to predefined conditions or events and be used to notify customers, partners or administrators of important, informative or critical system events.


BPA Platform can monitor business systems for key data changes (to business rules) and automatically send email or SMS business alerts to both internal and external recipients when needed. They can be generated based on specific business events, such as stock level notifications, sales notifications, delivery alerts, service alerts, credit control notifications, support team updates or warehouse alerts.


Ready to Automate your Business?


Business Process Automation (BPA) is transforming the retail industry by streamlining operations, reducing costs, and minimizing errors. By automating essential workflows—from inventory management to performance reporting—retail businesses can save time, improve accuracy, and focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences. With the flexibility and robust functionality of BPA Platform, your business can adapt to changing demands and achieve greater efficiency.


Ready to unlock the potential of automation for your retail operations? Contact Fisher Technology today to learn how BPA can elevate your business processes and drive lasting success.

Our Opinion on Ai: A Tool, Not a Magic Wand

By Nicole Laurier • June 26, 2025
It seems like everywhere you turn—from coffee shop conversations to boardroom meetings—artificial intelligence dominates the discussion. As someone who's spent years in the technology industry, I've watched this wave of Ai enthusiasm with both excitement and a healthy dose of realism. The AI Conversation Everyone's Having There's no denying that Ai has captured our collective imagination. Social media feeds are flooded with ChatGPT screenshots, businesses are scrambling to integrate AI solutions, and investors are throwing money at anything with "Ai-powered" in the pitch deck. The enthusiasm is infectious, and frankly, some of it is well-deserved. Working in technology, I've been hearing countless questions from colleagues and partners about how they can leverage Ai to transform their operations. The questions range from the practical "Can Ai help us automate our customer service?" to the almost magical "Can Ai solve all our efficiency problems?". This spectrum of expectations tells a story about where we are in the Ai adoption curve—somewhere between realistic optimism and unrealistic expectations. Ai's Real Role in Technology Here's the thing about Ai that I wish more people understood: it's incredibly powerful, but it's not omnipotent. In the technology industry, Ai serves as an amplifier of human capabilities, not a replacement for human judgment and creativity. The most successful Ai implementations I've observed across the industry have been those where Ai addresses specific, well-defined problems. For example, companies are using machine learning to optimize supply chain logistics, reducing waste and improving delivery times. Others are leveraging it to automate quality control processes, catching defects that might slip past human inspection. Many businesses are also deploying Ai-powered phone systems to handle initial customer inquiries and schedule meetings, eliminating the need for expensive answering services while freeing up employees to focus on higher-value client interactions. A Powerful Assistant, Not the Whole Team This brings me to my main point—Ai is an assistant. It’s sophisticated, intelligent, and powerful, but not a standalone solution. Too often, I see businesses approaching Ai as if it's the missing puzzle piece that will magically solve all their operational challenges. The reality is messier and more nuanced. Successful Ai implementation requires the same fundamentals as any other technology project: clear objectives, quality data, proper infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance. You need to understand your current processes before you can improve them with Ai. Most importantly, you need humans who understand both the technology and the business context to make Ai work effectively. Looking Forward Realistically As we continue to navigate this Ai revolution, I encourage business leaders to maintain a balanced perspective. Embrace the possibilities that Ai offers, but approach them with realistic expectations and solid planning. At Fisher Technology, we're excited about the future of Ai and its potential to drive innovation across industries. But we're equally committed to helping our clients understand that Ai's greatest value lies not in replacing human judgment, but in augmenting it.  The conversation about Ai will undoubtedly continue to evolve, and that's a good thing. As the technology matures and our understanding deepens, we'll find even more creative and effective ways to harness its power. Just remember: Ai is a powerful tool in our technological toolkit, but like any tool, its value lies in how skillfully and thoughtfully we use it.

Empowering Everyone through BPA Platform's Automation Tools

By Nicole Laurier • June 2, 2025
Automation has become essential for organizations seeking efficiency and competitive advantage. BPA (Business Process Automation) Platform provides powerful tools that streamline operations across departments, empowering employees at all levels to accomplish more with less manual effort. Warehouse Management Transformation Warehouse operations rely on precision, speed, and real-time visibility—BPA Platform delivers all three by seamlessly integrating with your existing warehouse management systems. By automating inventory tracking, order fulfillment, shipping notifications, and stock reconciliation, the platform eliminates tedious manual processes and reduces the risk of errors. Additionally, it can trigger automatic reordering when stock reaches critical thresholds, synchronize picking, packing, and shipping to cut down fulfillment time, and generate actionable performance analytics to identify bottlenecks before they disrupt operations. With BPA Platform, your warehouse team can focus on value-added tasks and exception handling, driving both efficiency and customer satisfaction. Support Ticket Resolution Acceleration BPA Platform empowers customer service teams by automating key aspects of support ticket management. Through intelligent routing based on predefined rules and content analysis, tickets are automatically assigned to the appropriate specialists, reducing response times and ensuring consistent, high-quality support. Issues are prioritized according to customizable business logic, while automated status updates keep customers informed every step of the way. The platform also integrates with knowledge bases to suggest solutions for common problems, enhancing both agent efficiency and customer satisfaction. With comprehensive performance reporting and pattern analysis, BPA Platform not only improves resolution times but also delivers the insights needed to continually refine support operations. CRM Enhancement for Deeper Relationships When integrated with CRM systems, BPA Platform empowers sales and marketing teams to build deeper, more personalized customer relationships. Automated data enrichment pulls insights from multiple touchpoints, creating comprehensive customer profiles and enabling precise segmentation. Timely alerts for follow-ups and renewals ensure sales teams never miss an opportunity, while intelligent lead scoring streamlines qualification efforts. Marketing campaigns benefit from behavior-triggered communication flows and synchronized data across departments, resulting in a unified customer view. The outcome: improved conversion rates, stronger forecasting, and more effective, personalized engagement at every stage of the customer journey. ERP Integration for Operational Excellence BPA Platform transforms fragmented ERP systems into a unified, agile ecosystem by seamlessly connecting data across departments like finance, HR, procurement, and production. By eliminating duplicate data entry and automating key workflows such as financial reconciliation, reporting, and approval routing, the platform reduces errors, improves compliance, and accelerates processes like financial close. With real-time data flowing between modules, leadership gains comprehensive visibility and actionable insights to drive smarter, faster decision-making. Transform Your Business Today with BPA Platform Don't let manual processes hold your business back any longer. Fisher Technology can help bring the full power of BPA Platform to your organization, customized to your unique processes and integration needs.  Contact us today for a personalized consultation and discover how our automation solutions can drive efficiency, reduce costs, and position your business for sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

The Power of iPaaS: Streamlining Business Integration

By Nicole Laurier • March 22, 2025
When your business uses different tools and softwares that don't communicate, critical information can get lost and workflows can break down. This blog explores how Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solves this problem by connecting your essential business applications. We'll cover why iPaaS is the best choice to help businesses overcome common challenges, the key benefits of implementing an integration platform, and a look at BPA Platform's specific iPaaS capabilities. Keep on reading to discover how the right integration strategy can transform scattered data into a powerful, unified business resource. Why iPaaS? Data visibility across an organization is crucial for improving efficiency, seizing new opportunities, and identifying potential threats. In the past, businesses operated within a single system, but today, the vast array of available software has led different departments to adopt applications tailored to their specific needs. While these tools enhance departmental efficiency, they also contribute to data silos, where critical information is stored in separate locations. This fragmentation can disrupt sales and accounting processes, hinder collaboration, create inefficiencies, and increase the risk of data errors. Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) provides a cloud-based solution that seamlessly connects, automates, and manages applications, systems, and data across business environments. By replacing traditional middleware with a standardized approach, iPaaS delivers cost-effective integration capabilities. How does iPaaS work? iPaaS is a cloud integration platform that creates a centralized ecosystem for managing data workflows. The platform offers pre-built connectors and automation tools that seamlessly link applications, services, and databases. With iPaaS, businesses gain a unified view of their integration landscape, allowing them to control and modify data flows across their infrastructure. As organisations grow, iPaaS scales effortlessly; new systems and services can be connected without significant cost, and custom functionality can be implemented to meet evolving business needs. The Advantages of iPaaS Reduced costs: Saves costs by automating integrations, reducing manual processes, and improving operational efficiency, which minimizes IT expenses and resource allocation. Reduced resources: Reduce the amount of time and number of personnel concentrating on system integration and data migration. Improved scalability: Easily add new applications and tweak business processes as the business grows. Centralised management: Once central ecosystem to manage data, integrations, processes, and workflows. Improved decision making: With access to real-time data across an organisation, employees and management can make better decisions to help improve efficiencies. ROI: iPaaS can help businesses drive company revenue and go to market quicker. BPA Platform’s iPaaS Solution BPA Platform’s iPaaS tool capabilities include: Drag and drop integration between cloud-based and on-premises systems and applications so that system integration steps are visually represented within a wider automated process. Innovative transformation functions that can be dragged onto the mapping area to change the data between inputs and outputs. RESTful web service integration by removing the need for bespoke development. SOAP web services integration Support OData and SData services Transform Your Business Integration Strategy with iPaaS As businesses continue to navigate the complexities of digital transformation, iPaaS solutions stand out as essential tools for maintaining competitive advantage. By breaking down data silos and creating seamless connections between applications, iPaaS empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their data. The result is not just improved operational efficiency, but also enhanced agility to respond to market changes, better customer experiences through integrated data flows, and ultimately, accelerated business growth.  Ready to eliminate data silos in your business? Contact Fisher Technology today to learn more about how BPA Platform's powerful iPaaS capabilities can transform your integration challenges into competitive advantages. Don't let disconnected data hold your business back!