What are some real business process automation examples?

Processes that get automated end to end

Procure-to-pay: invoice intake, three-way match against the purchase order and goods receipt, approval routing, payment release. Finance stays in for new-vendor setup and anything that fails the match. Ardent Partners put top-performing AP teams at $2.78 and 3.1 days per invoice in 2025, against an all-buyer average of $10.89 and 10.9 days.

Order-to-cash: credit check, invoice generation, cash application, dunning reminders. Credit holds and disputed balances go to a collections analyst. APQC's benchmark has top-quartile organizations collecting in 30 days or less while the bottom quartile takes 46 or more.

Employee onboarding: one accepted offer fans out into parallel HR, IT, and facilities tracks. A manager still signs off on system access and equipment.

Expense approval and claims intake: policy rules clear the routine case and a person handles the rest. Leading carriers report 40-60% straight-through processing on auto glass and minor auto physical damage claims.

Where the humans go

The word "automated" oversells every one of these. Best-in-class touchless invoice processing sits at 49.2%, so even the top decile still routes more than half its invoices past a person. What changes is what that person sees: exceptions and vendor relationships instead of data entry. Exception rate is the number to hold a team to (9% for top performers against 22% for everyone else), not the share of steps automated.

Worth doing where one rule settles the common case and exceptions are countable. Skip it where every case is an exception, because a rules engine there just adds a queue in front of the same people.