A business that waits to automate its workflow and processes, is incurring the risk of inaction that will reflect later as an opportunity cost that will outweigh other benefits. The cost of waiting is a laggard in building, leading, and scaling growth to its true potential. Any business that feels stabilizing the process before automation is a priority, will find it difficult in every aspect of operations.
Timing plays a crucial role in the growth graph of an organization. The business acumen of leaders is often tested. Specifically, when one has to make strategic decisions that weigh between the immediate and future costs and benefits. However, a shortsighted approach will not help an entity when competing companies from the same industry are actively adopting workflow automation across all business units.
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Benefits of process automation
The direct benefits of business process automation will be seen immediately, and the indirect will take time to reflect through repeat business and reduction in business acquisition costs. Consumers who experience the benefits of good and timely product or service delivery come back and bring in a few more interested people. Here are some of the most common benefits of automation:
- Improved productivity
Automation eliminates repetitive tasks and reduces the redundancy in processes through algorithms that help in multi-tasking, data importing through optical character recognition, and the use of semantic language that uses pre-filled data for regular processes where data collection is the objective. The speed of a machine is far superior to humans and can deliver results ahead of time
- Accuracy
As the speed of a human being is required to increase to deliver results, often the human mind either ignores or omits information and misses a few steps in the workflow. As a result, the quality of the end product or service is affected. However, a machine is pre-programmed, and backtesting takes care of high accuracy levels. It can be scaled for process improvisations whenever it is required.
- Elevates roles for employees
The burden of time and productivity targets are lessened for employees. Good hires are valuable, and when their time is free from repetitive and mundane tasks, they can spend more meaningful roles like improving consumer relationships.
- Business as usual
Automation aids short and long-term volume increase without disruptions, as the business analytical tool will indicate if the entity is producing beyond the market demand capacity. As and when required as per the business intelligence reports, automation can scale down or up productivity levels.
- Streamlined processes
Business process automation will include identifying the hurdles in the workflow and removing or correcting them through required measures on a real-time basis. This step saves the business from monetary and time loss. In traditional processes, such hurdles often cause technical snags and glitches that delay the delivery to consumers and disrupt not just the cash flows, but risk reputation and customer patronage.
- Enhanced security
The automation tools that are largely AI-powered come with built-in embedded systems for higher encryption and security of data. With the use of automation, chances of slippages and leakage in information and data security essential for business integrity are reduced.
Processes that can be automated for any business
Every business, irrespective of its size and operations has a few core functions that can be automated, at the beginning. Once a business starts yielding the benefits of automation, it can automate other functions. Here are some of the core business process automation
- Accounts payable and receivable
Every business runs on transactions that are both payments and receivables in a business. Whether it is a manufacturing, retailing, or service-oriented business, some vendors give trade credit to the business, and some customers take credit from the business.
Automating the function of accounts payable and receivable helps the business in reducing the days outstanding from customers, tracks the receivable revenue, and sends reminders to remaining customers to pay promptly through productivity tools that generate alerts.
Automated accounts payable can track the invoices that need to be paid, and reconcile these with purchase orders, purchase returns, discounts received and advance paid upfront, and actual goods or services received. All these steps are automated and hence eliminate errors
- Inventory management
Inventory management automation with features like vendor and category management will help the business to maintain order flows and reduce the pile-up of inventory through strategic business alerts. Decisions like when to refill the raw material or products from vendors are no longer a laborious process and the details are updated on a real-time basis. Even goods in transit can be tracked accurately thereby allowing enough room and space for planning the consumption of the current stocks of inventory.
- Human resources
Human resources are critical to business in hiring and managing the expectations of the employees. Human capital is an indispensable asset in the economics of trade and industry as well as experience. Qualified people with integrity are not easily replaceable and are always lured by other organizations with higher pay and perks.
Automation helps in completing all the tasks related to human resources like payroll management, recruitment planning, training, communications, and grievance redressal more efficiently and with less time.
- Customer relations
Automation is enhancing the consumer experience values of brands by milestones. Right from onboarding to the end of the cycle, chatbots offer a range of interactive messages to guide the consumer to fill out the applications, submit the required information, are informed about the status of their application or order, offered timely messages if there are any minor mishaps and employees follow up for major tickets to maintain the human touch. Till the end of delivery, the consumer experiences efficient service because of automation.
Conclusion: Automation of business processes is the need of the hour. It is no longer the question of if but when the automation of the business takes place. And the sooner better as every passing moment is creating the gap between what your business has to scale post-automation and what your competition has managed to already achieve through one.