Whether you run a small business or a large corporation, business automation is a great way to streamline operations and drive growth. Business automation tools are designed to replace human effort with machine labor so that you can use that human resource elsewhere in your organization.
To realize the full potential of automation, companies must consistently apply proven business automation solutions and best practices to all workflows—from creating faster digital customer experiences to streamlining internal processes. However, not all solutions contain the technologies necessary to automate operations completely, leading to multifaceted solutions, higher costs, and a lack of scalability.
What are the common uses of business automation?
Business automation is great for streamlining processes in nearly all areas of an organization. More detailed information about the types of business automation and their uses can be found in our previous blog post. Here is a short summary:
Streamline marketing
Email and social media marketing automation allows businesses to use software to send messages to customer distribution lists on a predefined schedule, reducing the cost of manual campaigns. Marketing efforts can be linked to a customer relationship management (CRM) system, enabling businesses to send automated consumer-targeted messages on different platforms simultaneously.
Optimize human resources
HR systems can automate various HR tasks, including processing applications, scheduling interviews, job postings, onboarding, payroll, and benefits administration. From data analytics, these systems can also provide insights into employee productivity.
Boost sales
Sales automation tools allow sales teams to spend less time documenting deal-related activities and more on calls to close deals. These tools automate repetitive tasks throughout the sales process, create data-driven sales forecasts, identify leads based on the buyer journey, and match them to the right reps.
Simplify finance and accounting
Organizations can save time for essential tasks such as analysis, strategy, and stakeholder collaboration by automating financial planning and accounting functions. For example, automated Accounts Payable can automatically receive and send data, reconcile invoices and documents, and send approvals, reducing data errors and helping prevent payment fraud in the background.
What are the advantages of Business Automation?
Minimizes costs
Manual implementation of business processes requires significant financial and human investment. However, automating specific time-consuming and tedious tasks can help reduce the required financial and human resources. This saves money because employees can save time dealing with more complex issues. Additionally, the automation of specific error-prone business processes can help avoid the risk of human error that can lead to a massive waste of company resources.
Supercharges productivity
One of the most apparent benefits of process automation is increased productivity from offloading repetitive tasks to automation software, which can work longer and faster than humans. Automation solves some of the wasted time created by the productivity paradox, where more technology slows down the process as people spend more time navigating through and switching apps, learning, and more.
Businesses can automate administrative tasks such as regulatory compliance, payroll, and paperwork that would otherwise have to be performed manually by company employees. This enables your employees to engage in higher-level, creative, and more intellectually stimulating business processes to increase efficiency and productivity.
Eliminates human errors
Although human errors are often unavoidable when performing certain tasks manually, they can cause irreversible damage to specific projects and the organization as a whole. Bugs are often costly and time-consuming to fix and ultimately affect your company’s profitability. However, automated tools can almost eliminate the risk of human error because little to no human intervention is required.
Bolsters reliability
Businesses are increasingly reliant on computers. Online systems often handle day-to-day business: order entry, reservations, assembly instructions, shipping orders, and so on. Today, a single critical system failure can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and damage a company’s reputation.
Drives can crash, but without proper backups, things can get serious. One of the many benefits of automation is the ability to automate your backup and recovery systems to ensure protection against potential disasters due to human error that can result in the loss of hard drives or accidental damage to systems.
Coordinates governance and compliance
Every business has a predetermined set of organizational rules, government regulations, and policies that must be followed. However, manually tracking documents and paperwork can be tedious and complicated. Business process automation software can help automate the collection and tracking of company data to ensure your organization adheres to various governance and compliance regulations and establish standardized procedures to monitor different business processes.
Generates valuable insights
Performance insights are vital to ensuring your organization achieves current and future goals. Business process automation software can be set up to automatically collect, monitor, and analyze enterprise data to provide actionable performance insights. Business automation dashboards can be personalized and customized to provide relevant insights.
Process automation collects data about everything it does and can be set up to generate reports full of useful analytics that can be analyzed to identify problems in your processes, helping to locate typical process issues such as bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and problematic areas.
Fortifies customer service
Business process automation can significantly improve customer service by performing automated quality assurance checks and introducing automated chatbots equipped with predefined responses from cloud-based databases. Optimizing customer service channels and touchpoints can help your business gain a competitive advantage.
Fosters scalability
As your business grows in terms of resources and profits, you must increase the scalability of your organization accordingly. Because business process automation can help your organization get more done in less time than ever before, it can help foster long-term scalability, ultimately increasing your organization’s productivity and profitability.
Deepens collaboration
Business process automation software enables cross-departmental collaboration by introducing tools such as automatic reminders, project update tracking capabilities, and more. The software doesn’t get tired or need to sleep – it handles and keeps specific business tasks and processes running 24/7. It can also put the task on hold until morning if something needs human attention.
Optimizes performance
Automation has a significant impact on the overall efficiency of your business through faster processing. Compared to humans, process automation software that simulates repetitive human actions can iterate over multiple completed processes, allowing you to achieve more things faster than ever before. At the same time, faster processing times also positively impact customer experience and reduce the time required to answer queries.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size or type of business, companies worldwide realize that automation is the key to their productivity and profitability. Clearly, in many cases today, many business processes can be highly automated to ensure compliance and continually reduce errors.
And for a good reason: new tools make such technologies relatively inexpensive to set up, use, integrate, and perhaps more importantly, accessible to a broader audience.
At Itirra, we provide companies with customized solutions and opportunities to explore potential improvements to support their business goals. For a personalized recommendation based on your unique business model, don’t hesitate to get in touch or schedule a meeting with me.