Streamlining Business Processes
Automation has become a fundamental aspect of many business operations, finding its way into industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, banking, and financial services, just to name a few.
How business processes perform impacts a company’s growth directly, and therefore, business growth is synonymous with continuous process improvement and efficient change management. It would help if you had well-defined and implemented business processes to streamline your operations and help the company attain its targets.
The best way to automate and streamline business processes is to employ the right tools, such as business process automation software. Such software empowers your organization to understand and manage critical company resources, including people, systems, and applications.
This post will discuss business process automation, key processes that can be automated, and how you can automate them. We’ll also highlight some advantages of employing automation tools in your business operations and how you can leverage them to take your company to the next level.
Read on to learn more.
Table of Contents
What is Business Process Automation?
Business process automation entails reshaping organizational operations, empowering organizations and people to achieve more with fewer resources, and aligning and scaling processes to match business growth. It employs technology to execute mundane or repetitive tasks that consume valuable resources and time that would be devoted elsewhere to grow the business.
Therefore, a business process service (BPS) specializes in identifying repetitive tasks and taking care of them without or with minimum human intervention.
BPS services rely on advanced technologies like robotic process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to comprehensively automate your company’s digital processes and contribute positively to business operations.
These technologies enhance strategic decision-making, minimize errors, improve efficiency, and decrease manual work. As a result, you can incorporate BPS services in any unit of your company and are not restricted to a particular industry.
Types of Business Automation Technologies
Business automation depends on several techniques, tools, and technologies to automate critical business processes. Therefore, the automation journey differs from one company to another, depending on their automation level.
Let’s discuss some of the technologies involved in business process automation.
1. Business Process Automation
Business process automation can be applied to simple tasks and more complex workflows. It involves introducing simple workarounds and no-code and low-code automation to help employees meet their needs.
A great example of a simple BPA is a social media management software designed to automatically upload social media posts on various platforms at predetermined times.
Complex workflow automation for a company’s marketing department could comprise automatic lead outreach and customer behavior analytics across various touchpoints.
2. Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a business automation technology many companies use to automate their repetitive manual operations. It utilizes software robots to learn and imitate human actions using pre-programmed scripts.
RPA is ideal for data entry, customer support, and other larger-volume tasks.
3. Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation (IA), sometimes called hyper-automation, is an all-inclusive strategy for automating a company’s internal processes with the help of artificial intelligence and automation tools such as intelligent document processing and robotic process automation.
As IA can execute repetitive tasks in a split second, it relieves companies of having to complete them, saving them valuable time that could be invested in other aspects of growing the business.
Business Processes that You Can Streamline
As mentioned earlier, process automation cannot benefit every business process. The ideal candidates for automation are rule-based, repetitive, and predictive processes.
Automating these processes helps to enhance their efficiency and productivity. Let’s explore three key processes that a business can automate:
1. Employee Onboarding
Hiring your company’s staff members may seem like a simple process, but it is a labor-intensive activity that entails numerous mundane tasks such as completing employee details, organizing training and induction sessions, establishing bank accounts, verifying the relevant documents, and more.
An organization that doesn’t have an automation system for the onboarding process would find it relatively difficult and chaotic to manage the missing documents, endless paperwork, employee dissatisfaction, and low productivity.
On the other hand, automating the onboarding process would guarantee smooth transitions to the subsequent tasks, resulting in an efficient process and satisfied employees.
2. Project Management
Managing a project from start to finish requires numerous steps that must be completed in a particular sequence. Skipping or delaying any of these steps would potentially result in the collapse of the whole project.
Therefore, automating these steps would help eliminate miscommunication by organizing information files, to-do lists, and emails.
3. Customer Service
Customers are the backbone of any business, and timely resolving their complaints would elevate your business. Customer support personnel often experience a barrage of complaints, and most often seem urgent.
Fortunately, an automation tool would sift through these complaints and categorize them depending on their priority. This would greatly reduce the customer support team’s workload and allow them to address their customer concerns more objectively.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, the advantages of embracing business automation are undeniable. Business automation is integral to digital transformation processes, helping businesses enhance efficiency, strengthen their decision-making capabilities, and reduce operational costs.
More companies are implementing automation solutions; hence the future of business automation looks quite promising. If you want to automate your business operations at scale, searching for a simple-to-use, flexible platform that is powerful enough to manage your company’s needs would be best.