Who or What is the “Glue” in Your Operations?

business process automation
5-Min Read | August 3, 2026|Scott Hirschfeld|

Think about a typical morning across your team. Your salesperson is in your CRM. Your project managers are living in a separate project management app. Accounting is pulling numbers into a spreadsheet because your different systems don’t quite talk to each other. And for many of us, the list goes on. Everyone is busy, everyone is working hard, and your software platforms are doing their job, but most of the systems don’t really talk.

Sound familiar? You may not experience this firsthand, but you feel it in what rolls up to you. Maybe the report is late again, or there is a “which number is right?” email. The project is running late because a handoff was dropped. Often there are lots of emails going back and forth to keep everyone in sync. None of the hidden work is anyone’s fault. Each tool is doing what it is supposed to do.

How many applications are in your stack? How many of them have document storage, workflow, and maybe built-in AI? And yet, there still seems to be something missing.

What is missing is the “virtual” glue, something in the middle that connects the parts, moves work between them, and gives everyone one place to see what’s going on. You might be thinking, “I know who the glue is,” or “Which spreadsheets are the glue,” or “What email chain is the glue?” But we have to ask, is there a better way?

Often, to solve this problem, we push harder to use the tools themselves, their inherent workflow, and their document management better. The better solution is to use a dedicated BPA solution to create a layer that ties the differing applications together. BPA allows people to stop being the glue and enables true automation.

Here are 8 Advantages of Using a BPA Solution Effectively

  1. Fill the gaps between systems. Real business pain lives in the handoffs between applications, where the CRM ends and accounting begins. Built-in tools are often siloed and have no visibility into other applications. BPA orchestrates the whole process, start to finish, automating steps and follow-ups so nothing falls through the cracks.
  2. One source for truth. Often, we need to track down many systems or key data across multiple apps. BPA can end the need to bounce between CRM, ERP, accounting, and PM tools to move one process forward. A centralized platform streamlines things so that data rekey ends. It reduces context-switching and the mental tax of remembering where each task or piece of data lives.
  3. Centralized visibility and control. This can provide significant value for the leader. Dashboards, statuses, and metrics are presented in one place instead of being scattered across systems that each tell half the story. Leaders get a true view of where work actually stands, not a patchwork of disparate reports.
  4. Reduce the system spread. BPA can be a big win for your team.   Often, you can shrink the number of tools your team has to learn, because the data is available without going to the tool.  This shortens ramp time for new hires, reduces the risk of that one key person, and means a process doesn’t stall when the one person who knows a workflow is out.
  5. Purpose-built tools beat bolt-on features. Built-in workflow, dashboard, and document management features are often afterthoughts to a vendor’s core product. A platform designed specifically for automation offers deeper capabilities: complex routing, conditional logic, integrations, and document intelligence that a CRM or ERP “workflow tab” will never match.
  6. Your processes survive a change of software. When you swap CRMs or upgrade your ERP or accounting, your automation doesn’t get thrown away. Because the workflow logic, documents, and other data lives in an independent but connected BPA platform, a change of software becomes a smaller matter of reconnecting, not a full rebuild.
  7. Stronger controls over security and process. Implementing a BPA solution brings one consistent set of security controls, retention rules, and audit logs, rather than satisfying compliance separately in every system. This can create a compelling solution, particularly in regulated environments.
  8. A single home for AI. Rather than waiting for each vendor to bolt on their own AI or learning many different AI solutions, a centralized BPA platform applies AI, document classification, data extraction, and intelligent routing consistently across every process, using data from all connected systems.

You might be getting by with the siloed group of vendor systems that all do their own version of workflow, document management, and maybe even AI. But what is the real toll behind the scenes?  How much extra work falls on your team, what gets lost, and what is the hidden work created by unconnected systems? BPA can create that consistency, resiliency, and even compliance that many of us are missing.  It is a platform for growth and for creating an edge in the fast-paced world of today’s business economy.

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