In today’s economy improving productivity and cutting costs is essential to business survival. One of the most proven cost cutting and productivity raising activities is business process automation. Business process automation is the use of technology to improve the efficiency of business processes. This typically includes the automation of operations that were previously manually performed. Information technology can be applied to automate many functions by use of software development to integrate various applications. Continuous improvement of business processes is a competitive advantage that a company builds over time. It begins with a thorough examination of a company’s existing business processes. Identifying, analyzing, and improving processes can have a drastic impact on a company’s productivity and bottom line. Many business process automation efforts are most useful when created as web applications. Many web applications are integrated with the front-end of a company's web site. A web application can offer access to the application from any location with Internet access, allowing employees to contribute to a project from remote locations. It can also establish a direct line of communication with a business's current and potential customers. Web applications can be use to collect customer information, create and manage a customer database, track inventory, run reports, and many other processes that would otherwise be extremely laborious. Certainly the effectiveness of a company's web applications plays a large role in it's competitiveness within the market. PHP, a scripting language designed specifically for web development, has quickly become one the most widely used development tools for creating web applications that automate business processes. PHP offers faster development time and more widespread adoption than is typical for other scripting languages. Since it was conceived as a scripting language specifically for the the Internet environment it offers many advantages when it comes to developing web applications. PHP has been used to create millions of web applications, and will continue to dominate web application development projects due to its already widespread adoption and usage. PHP has many uses, from creating a content management system allowing non-technical users to easily manage the content on a website, to creating e-commerce applications allowing one person to easily operate a large eCommerce operation, PHP is easily applied to almost every business process involving information technology.