Content

Intent:

Education on tailored business automation perks and benefits. How it directly affects your workplace

Dedicated to:

• Managers
• Business Owners
• Employees

Key Questions?:

• How does business automation affect business?
• Why is business automation important?
• What is business automation?
• How can I automate my business?
• How does automation help business?
• What business processes can be automated?

What business automation is all about

Automation is present in businesses of all sizes – including subtle artificial intelligence features in common software applications, and more obvious implementations like self-driving vehicles or autonomous robots. At this point in time, every business process is on the table for automation (BPA), especially as technology becomes more sophisticated. Humans are starting to work with automated tools side-by-side, assisting their day-to-day processes and tasks more effectively. Companies, who are utilizing this technology, are on the road of becoming more rapid, strategic and lower their cost of error overall. They also become more competitive in these fierce market conditions that we are facing for the last few years. So every business owner, manager, shareholder and employee should ask themselves: How is our workplace automation benefitting our business?

If It Can Be Automated, It Will Be

At its core, automation is about implementing a system to complete repetitive and easily replicated tasks without the need for human labor. It can be as simple as a set of tools, housed within common business software programs. When we look into tasks that we tend to complete repetitively, we can start forming an understanding of how that part of the business processes can be automated. At first glance it may be seen as a doubtful decision by many inexperienced managers or business owners, because of simply failing to look at the bigger picture. Processes can be enhanced overtime, therefore firmy embedded, as a part of other company‘s automated processes or newly transitioned from a working task into maintenance with the right process automation software.

Save Time

When we talk about time management, usually it envelops most of the business processes that can be automated, thus saving a lot of time in the end. The decision on what should be done is mostly the hardest part that managers tend to cross. For many businesses, there is a false belief that automatization is a complicated and costly experience, but that is not necessarily true. On one hand, the initial cost of creating a custom automation solution may be higher than the hired workforce, but on the other hand, automation is a competitive investment that plays a part in the long-term. Nevertheless, ROI compared to not having business automation solutions is significantly higher. At some point in time, hiring new employees for your business will become an inefficient solution when dealing with processes. Businesses scale, they need more and more people to hire to efficiently run the operations, in automation, this is not the case. Instead, tools can be adapted to change, thus avoiding any more business expenses. For organizations, wasted time is money, but even more importantly, it can impact other areas of the enterprise – from inefficiencies across the business to a drain on employee‘s productivity, or worse, employee burnout. In spite of that, time is one of our most precious commodities, and none of us want to waste it.

Allow Resources to be Diverted Elsewhere

Proper prioritization is key when diverting business resources for specific tasks of projects. Wouldn‘t it be nice to know exactly how important or urgent your processes are, so you can manage them accordingly? That is usually the idea on everyone's mind, but accomplishing it all by yourself is a bit more complex. Automating parts of a project, tasks, communication and team management, saving time as a result, allows you to diversify resources elsewhere and be a lot more flexible with the workload. If we look into the sales department for example, using the right CRM software can help your company gain tons of potential customer leads that would have been lost otherwise, help your personnel work more efficiently and track their progress a lot better. The same can be said about the efficiency that task/project management software or team building software brings with automation and the list goes on when we talk about saving time in the process, which then, converts into other valuable outcomes as a result.

Which Processes Can Be Automated

When looking for a way in automating business processes or searching for those highly repetitive tasks, there is a broad spectrum of possibilities and usually it is considered pretty difficult to decide. Again, depending on your business’ vital processes, internal structure, production and product, some businesses may find that automating one process instead of another is way more efficient when compared with other companies. Here are some of the categories which are worth to consider automating:

• Hiring Process
• Employee Analytics
• File Transfers
• Report Generation and Distribution
• Email Automation
• Claims Processes
• Accounting Tasks
• Meetings
• Facility Management
• Project/Task Management
• Communication
• Batch Processing
• Team-Building
• Data Science
• ERP Integration
• Marketing
• Customer Service Management
• Lead Management
• Supply Chain Management

And the list goes on... Sometimes, companies can not find sufficient information by themselves, on what specific processes they can automate and incorporate in their day-to-day tasks. Solution usually involves a team of experts who can listen to your needs and, depending on the situation, develop a strategic plan to maximize your process capabilities tailored to your own business. At the end of the day this is usually the fastest and the most efficient way of achieving the best results for your company.

Healthier Profit Margins for Businesses

What goes around comes around. Every aspect of your business reflects profit margins in one way or another. If we choose to save time, it gives us resources to start another task earlier, but without automation systems it could also give place for human error when we rush the time that we have. Scaling your business now has been easier than ever with all the tools and services within an arm‘s reach. Save labor costs of repetitive tasks or make human-oriented processes much smoother and with greater results like increased speed, productivity, and efficiency. Allocate that workforce to strengthen other fields of your business. Also, Hiring more staff members can be costly, especially if you’re doing it to fill roles that don’t have a big effect on your bottom line. If you hire more people to fill these roles, you’ll add a big financial burden to your business. The right automation solution won’t only perform these tasks better, it’s also cheaper in the long run. These benefits will also incur lower costs for the operations to run as a whole. This means increased customer satisfaction rates, improved quality and speed to market, or STM, gained scalability and agility as a business. For long-term, freeing up resources from repetitive tasks lets you focus on strategic and innovative initiatives.

An Ocean of Softwares and Tools

The market is now filled with various scattered tools that you can use for automating your business processes. They are adjusted to the masses so they are all user-friendly and relatively affordable to use for start-ups or small businesses. The thing is, that they may just lack personalization, because every business is different and prefers to be treated in the proper way, right? As companies get bigger and their processes require more complex solutions it will be harder to find a match. Businesses are developing overtime, alongside with their processes. On top of that, it is important to notice that processes may overlap with one another, just the same as they may be merged to complement each other. These solutions require expertise and development. It is highly suggested to at least allocate a good amount of time and resources to a good research of the choices that you have or even better, request a consultation or a DEMO. Otherwise, this may twirl back, resulting in some of the outcomes we mentioned above.

Customer Satisfaction

As a result of lowered cost of error, increased time to market and business efficiency, customer satisfaction rate will likely increase in parallel. Customers love to get their inquiries sorted on time, products manufactured and delivered without any delays. With the help of artificial intelligence, companies can speed up their processes and keep up with the constantly increasing demands and growing expectations that people tend to have when ordering products or services today. Being perfect has become a standard in the eyes of a customer, there is no room for mistakes anymore or these mistakes can cost you your business. Automation ensures that there will be no mistakes made where business automation solutions operate, giving people exactly what they are expecting to get from your company. Especially, when the demand is constantly growing and on top of new and innovative technical solutions there is an increasing need for strategic initiatives. Automation may help you save time and strengthen your focus on the company's vision and mission, and how to please your customer base, while business automation experts develop a plan for your technical solutions.

Where to start

When it comes down to what tools or software can you use for automating your business processes, it usually indicates that your company is in need of automation. As there is a saying- there are two types of modes of thinking, one is thinking, another one is observing. Usually, it is hard to do both for your business and you get lost in your day-to-day tasks, constantly thinking about what to do next and how to do it. But notice and observe these thoughts when they arise, consider the possibility of incorporating new business workflows and business automation systems. Again, ask yourself or consult the experts on the following questions:

• How can I automate my business?
• How does automation help business?
• What business processes can be automated?
• What companies use automation?
• What are the business automation benefits?
• How does business automation affect business?
• Why is business automation important?

If you feel that you do not have the expertise to come up with the answer yourself, consulting with the experts in this field who have years of practice and helped many companies overcome these issues or requesting a DEMO for you is the way to do it. Hopefully we answered most of them here, in our article. The decision on whether to consult, automate, or not, is your responsibility. And the decision will bring corresponding changes in how you do business and compete in the future.