What Is Digital Process Automation (DPA)?

Definition

Digital Process Automation (DPA) is a discipline focused on digitizing and automating end-to-end business processes to drive operational efficiency and improve customer experiences. Forrester Research coined the term in 2017 to describe the evolution of traditional Business Process Management (BPM) toward customer-facing, digital-first process orchestration.

Unlike BPM, which historically focused on documenting and optimizing internal back-office processes, DPA emphasizes building automated digital workflows that span multiple systems, departments, and customer touchpoints. DPA platforms typically combine visual process designers, form builders, rules engines, and integration connectors into a unified environment.

Core Characteristics

How DPA Differs from BPM and RPA

In practice, many organizations combine DPA and RPA: DPA orchestrates the end-to-end process while RPA bots handle specific steps that involve legacy systems without APIs.

Practical Applications

• Employee onboarding: A DPA workflow triggers account provisioning, equipment ordering, training assignments, and manager notifications across HR, IT, and facilities systems when a new hire record is created
• Insurance claims processing: A DPA process captures claim submissions, routes to adjusters based on claim type and value, triggers document verification, calculates payouts, and sends customer notifications
• Loan origination: A DPA workflow manages the full lifecycle from application submission through credit checks, document collection, underwriting review, approval routing, and closing document generation

Industry Adoption (as of 2026)

The global DPA market reached approximately $16.7 billion in 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4%. Forrester reports that 65% of enterprises have adopted at least one DPA platform as of early 2026, up from 41% in 2023. Financial services, healthcare, and insurance are the leading adopters, driven by regulatory complexity and high-volume process requirements.

Gartner positions DPA within its broader "Hyperautomation" framework, noting that DPA platforms are increasingly adding AI capabilities for intelligent document processing, predictive routing, and automated decision-making.

Editor's Note: We deployed Kissflow for a 350-person financial services firm's client onboarding process in Q4 2025. The previous manual process involved 14 handoffs across three departments and averaged 11 business days. After DPA implementation, the same process completes in 3.5 days with 4 automated handoffs and 2 human approval steps. The initial build took 6 weeks, but the team has since launched 8 additional processes without developer involvement. The main limitation: processes requiring integration with their legacy mainframe still needed custom API wrappers.