What is business process automation?
Business process automation (BPA) is the use of software to run repetitive business tasks that people do by hand: typing data from one system into another, building the same report every week, chasing approvals by email or keeping a process alive in a shared spreadsheet.
Automation can be a scheduled job that runs every night, an integration between two systems, or a full internal tool with its own users and permissions. The goal is the same in every case: fewer manual steps, fewer errors and data that is current when someone needs it.
Which business processes should you automate first?
Start with tasks that are frequent, rule-based and error-prone: order entry, quote preparation, invoice and receipt collection, inventory updates, customer onboarding, recurring reports and reconciliation between systems.
A practical test: if a person follows the same steps every time and the steps can be written as rules, the task can be automated. Tasks that depend on judgment keep a person in the loop, with the software preparing the data for the decision.
Should you use no-code tools or custom software for automation?
No-code tools such as Zapier or Make work for simple connections between popular apps. They get harder to maintain when the process has many steps, needs local integrations (Azul, CardNet, DGII formats), handles sensitive data or runs at a volume where per-task pricing adds up.
Custom automation runs on your own infrastructure, connects to any system with an API or a file export, and belongs to you. DevLunch builds it with Ruby on Rails, background jobs (Sidekiq or Solid Queue) and PostgreSQL. The client owns the repository and the code from day one.
How much does it cost to automate a business process?
Cost depends on how many steps, users and systems the process involves. A scheduled report or a single integration is a small piece of work. An internal tool with roles, approvals and several integrations takes a full 6-week cycle or more.
DevLunch prices work per fixed 6-week cycle (Shape Up). The process is mapped with you first, then price and deadline are set before development starts. No hourly billing. At the end of each cycle the automation is running in production.
Can AI automate business processes?
Some steps involve reading unstructured text such as emails, PDFs or chat messages. Language models from OpenAI and Anthropic (Claude) can classify, summarize or extract data from that text as one step inside an automated workflow, with a person reviewing the result where errors are costly.
Most of the work in an automation project is still regular software: data models, integrations, permissions and reports. For projects where the language model is the core of the work, see AI integration services.
