Automation in Business: Examples, Benefits and Solutions
Automation in business in this day and age is absolutely inescapable. It’s necessary for every business to thrive and compete more effectively. Without such automation, you are looking at greater inefficiencies and resource wastage, which could be detrimental to the health of your business.
This is where business process automation comes to the fore as a leading method to help organisations buckle up for the road ahead while scaling and streamlining their operations and making their businesses leaner, more agile and efficient.
In this article, we explore what business process automation is as well as share examples, benefits and solutions. Keep reading to find out more!
What is business process automation?
Business process automation takes tasks that are high in volume, recurring, time-sensitive, involve multiple people and which require audit trails, among other features, to ensure that business processes are streamlined.
This is achieved through the use of automation tools and technology (a.k.a. specialised software or business process automation tools) that makes these repetitive tasks easier on your workforce and makes the workload lighter for them, enabling more time and resources to be allocated for more complex tasks.
Why should you automate your business processes?
From the above, you can already imagine that there are ample business process automation benefits. But to make things a bit easier, we’ve curated a list for you. Take a look at all the advantages you stand to gain.
- You and many members of your team will be able to save a lot of time
- Your business will become more efficient and therefore more profitable while reducing costs
- Teams that rely on technology to automate processes are also more productive
- Greater operational efficiency is another benefit when automating a business process
- Margins for error become significantly lower
- There is also better standardisation of processes for consistent results
- Using automation tools enables you to leave auditable trails and records
- Automating processes enables you to improve your compliance obligations
- It enables you to create a far more superior customer experience
- There is also the opportunity to improve your scalability efforts
- Document management becomes more streamlined and simplified
- You’ll be better able to promote visibility and transparency
- Employee morale is much more likely to be improved
- Make data-driven decisions and gain insight into process success and failures
Examples of automation in business
If the definition of business process automation above sounds a bit too unclear at the moment, it’s worth considering some examples of cases where it can actually be used, applied and implemented for business purposes. Take a look at a few examples below:
1. Service delivery
Service-based businesses need business process automation for a number of very important reasons. From online bookings to check-ins/check-outs to real-time location tracking or on-site price changes, automation can help with this and so much more.
You can also use it to help you with surge pricing, on-demand requests, workforce management and even the creation of checklists that are easy to manage.
2. Sales
The purpose of every business is to sell more and boost profitability. And that’s where sales departments come in. However, you can do this the easy way or the hard way.
The hard way involves a lot of labour, a lot of time and a lot of resources. The easy way involves business process automation, which can help with online and offline booking forms, sales scripts, automating call centre activities, video consulting and call-to-booking applications.
3. Customer service
To make sure that every customer is happy, you need a proper complaints management system in place. Meanwhile, an online training programme can help you reduce repetitive tasks while ensuring your team is performing at its best. In addition to this, with automated business processes, you can also boost your customer relationship management to ensure happy customers and better profitability.
4. Suppliers/employee relationships
Suppliers and employees are important stakeholders in your business. And with business process automation tools at your fingertips, you can offer customers features such as live availability management for more efficiency as well as create partner profiles with performance dashboards.
5. Finance
Not everyone is good with numbers and you don’t have to be a specialist to know what the numbers are showing you. With many important finance tasks being automated, you can better manage your commission plans, automated payments and even legal matters that are repetitive in nature such as collections.
6. Marketing
Everyone knows the importance of marketing your business. But does every marketing task need to be handled by a human? The answer is no and that’s because you can avail of advanced notifications that are automatically created at different stages of the customer lifecycle.
In addition, automated marketing processes can help you better manage membership clubs, loyalty programmes and subscriptions.
7. Human resource management
Ideal for businesses that want to save time and money on onboarding processes, business process automation tools can help with employee leave requests, time and attendance tracking, online training and more.
8. Purchase orders
As frequently-recurring processes in most organisations, it’s common for purchase orders to be carried out by entire teams. These repetitive tasks can be streamlined with a few clicks of a button where each request is sent to the relevant approving party. After this, the order is rejected or approved with payments being automatically made when approval is given.
This can save teams exceptional amounts of time in terms of ensuring that the purchase of supplies on a regular basis doesn’t take longer than necessary and becomes a more streamlined process.
Benefits of using business process automation tools
With customer relationship management, marketing automation, customer service automation, an online booking system, mobile apps and a whole lot more, you can now use ServiceOS to help you:
- Reach more customers
- Work more efficiently
- Increase your revenue
- Dominate the market, and
- A whole lot more!
Final thoughts
The time for thinking about it is over: in today’s competitive business world, applying business process automation software is not a luxury, it’s a must.
Whether you need field management software for your service business or you’d like to streamline your business processes and operations, implementing business automation should be your priority.
Take the first steps now and ensure that your business continues to thrive by getting in touch with us at ServiceOS or simply booking a free demo by clicking the link below.