The focus of IT has shifted from serving internal needs, like efficiency and cost control, to engaging with external customers and creating new business opportunities. That’s why it is believed the traditional business automation model needs to evolve. Instead of focusing solely on streamlining processes, businesses need to develop new strategies to automate the business itself. Building these apps requires business and IT leaders to become partners, sharing their expertise to open new lines of opportunity.
Business process automation can be a game-changer for your business. Business spending on these solutions is expected to grow to $12.7 billion by 2021. According to a 2020 McKinsey global survey, 66% of businesses across industries were automating at least one business process.
Whether you focus on streamlining workflows or making the employee-facing experience better for everyone involved, you’ll see the results throughout your operation. Essentially process automation is anything requiring a routine intake, notification, approval process, or manual handoff.
A report found that business automation:
- Allows employees to focus on higher-value work.
- Provides 24/7 support and operability.
- Creates faster service reducing processing time from days to minutes.
- Increases savings by 20% or more.
Business Process Automation, BPA refers to codifying and programmatically incorporating a connected set of software applications to automate processes and workflows across a business’s departments to occur without manual, human intervention. More than focusing on individual tasks, BPA focuses on overall processes.
- Operational efficiency
Many employees get hired for jobs requiring specialized skill sets and discover that most of their day gets taken up by paperwork and other administrative tasks. Business process automation eliminates the need for skilled workers to have these time-consuming tasks in their workload. This is because most or all of the workflow gets automated, which frees up their time for other duties.
Automation helps small and medium-sized enterprises more than giants as they do not have a lot of human power to delegate tasks to as most of the jobs are handled by a condensed team. Almost all the tasks related to paper processes can be completed using automation. These days, you can digitally sign documents, sign contracts and also easily manage organizational expenses using various software available in the market.
- Improved accuracy
Moreover, human beings are bound to make mistakes. Rectification errors cost businesses a ton of money every year. The greater the rate of error the more is the cost for rectification. A small misconfiguration can expose vulnerabilities to attackers or disrupt business processes. Automation can help you in improving efficiency and ensuring accuracy. You can take basic tasks out of human hands and engage their brain more in developing strategies and more important functions. BPA substantially reduces human data input and insight errors and increases efficiency since employees’ time is no longer wasted on repetitive, low-level work.
- Increasing Productivity
As an organization’s technology demands grow, productivity becomes a bigger concern. Typically, as other business areas were given tools to increase their productivity and effectiveness, IT operations took a back seat. The proliferation of desktop productivity software has created substantial gains in the office and HR environments. But, instead of alleviating the workload for the IT professionals in the backroom, the spread of PCs has meant more tasks to be accomplished.
As people use computers more, they place greater demands on the system. More users are generating more jobs, and printed output has increased despite efforts to reduce printed reports. In spite of the trend to online transaction-oriented and client/server systems, batch workloads continue to grow. Production batch jobs still consume the majority of CPU time, and in large shops, jobs are constantly being added.
- Deliver superior customer service
With major advancements in the field of technology, today, the way customer service is provided has changed a lot. Experts say that by 2020 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without the need of any human agent. With automated customer service, you can provide faster and more accurate assistance to your users, all while reducing the costs that are required to manage a support team.
Using artificial intelligence, you can create great customer service that will answer all of their questions directly and provide the team working at the back end with the required information and resources. Automated customer service can help you greatly reduce the response time. Constraints such as public holidays or different time zones do not affect automated customer service. Chatbots can help in responding to customer queries almost instantly, something which human support cannot guarantee. Thus, customers no longer have to wait for hours just to get a response.
- Virtual assistance
Considering the advancements in technology, especially artificial intelligence, very soon, virtual assistants will be able to predict what customers are looking for by tracking their actions and understanding their needs. Once you identify the customer issues, you can provide real-time support using chatbots or displaying FAQs. Purchase abandonment is a major concern these days.
If you can actually understand their issues, virtual assistance will not only reduce customer complaints but also improve consumer satisfaction and in turn reduce product abandonment rates. Using AI for automation can provide your employees with the information required to close a deal or to be successful in general. The best part about such platforms is they come programmed with domain knowledge and you only have to train such models once.
- Ensuring High Availability
Companies are continually more reliant on their computers. Day-to-day business is routinely conducted with online systems: order entry, reservations, assembly instructions, shipping orders—the list goes on. Today, with the high volume of cloud computing, the outage of key systems can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and tarnish a company’s reputation.
High availability is clearly one of IT management’s primary goals. Here too, automated operations can help. A disk drive may crash, but the situation becomes serious when there is not an adequate backup— or worse, the tape cannot be found. A key advantage to automation is the ability to automate your save and recovery systems to ensure protection from the potential disaster of disk loss, or inadvertent damage to system objects from human error.
- Improve employee morale
The main aim of any industry, whether it’s manufacturing, food service, or healthcare, is to maximize output. To attain such high levels of productivity, businesses may lengthen the shifts of their employees. However, this can have a serious effect on employee morale. Customer disengagement is a more severe problem. A recent study has shown that it costs US businesses around $300 billion annually. When the employees are disengaged, they consistently give you their time and don’t put the best of their efforts.
With automation, employers can automate tasks and free up time for high-value work. According to a report, 69% of the employees thought that automation will reduce the wastage of time during their workday and 59% thought that they would have more than six spare hours per week if repetitive jobs were automated. This will improve the engagement and morale of the employee.
- Enforce governance
Automation is a great way to implement governance in business, however, it is rarely considered as one. Any task that an automated process completes is essentially always documented. For every task, you get clear logs that tell you what was done, who did it, and when it was done. As stated before, automation plays a major role in reducing human errors as well as speeds up tasks that need to be performed repeatedly.
All automation jobs can be done by service accounts and do not need direct access to the managed systems. So, system managers and other officials can monitor all the tasks easily via a single-screen interface. There is no denying the fact that automating business processes is contributing to an organization’s success. People have been using it for Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), workflow platforms as well as to develop Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.
- Improved insights
Increases leadership’s ability to track the completion of a business process, as well as understand the steps in the process. This makes it easier to refine processes for faster and better business outcomes. BPA also allows leaders to dig deeper for more insights and to analyze more and newer data. Further, it standardized business processes, which helps ensure fairness and weed out biases that can skew insights.
Business process automation gives you a better view of what’s going on with your projects and staff at any given time. You can track whether a team meets milestones or if they’re going to miss an upcoming deadline. The improved insight shows you whether you are over or underutilizing your human resources. You can optimize the teams over time so everyone works at peak efficiency.
- Shorter turnaround times
The improved visibility also gives you better problem-solving opportunities. You can identify issues before they happen, such as missing a critical deadline. Since you know about the situation in advance, you can address it by allocating more resources or bringing in additional team members. The faster turnaround times will help you go to market faster, fulfill larger orders, build better client relationships, and grow your company’s overall capacity.
No matter what type of business or process, whether it be referral program automation or scheduling automation. Your business can’t afford to do without business process automation. You end up freeing time and making many processes easier. This means that these changes pay for themselves. Start improving all areas of your operation by identifying opportunities to make changes and incorporate automation.
