Automating digital operations is easier than you might think, and the benefits can be huge. Gaining an understanding of these benefits will be helpful for developing support for a project to automate operations. Office workers waste an estimated 4.5 hours a week on repetitive manual tasks. Automation can streamline workflows and boost productivity and efficiency throughout your organisation.
Read on to learn some key benefits of automation and guidance on how it can be achieved.
What are the main benefits of automation for businesses?
1. Boost Productivity
Organisations have ever-increasing technology demands and this can impact productivity. More manual tasks like data entry and consolidation take time and resources. Automated operations can help ensure these important yet tedious tasks don’t harm productivity.
Things like job scheduling can increase batch output by automating the scheduling of production batches. Automating this workflow means no lag time between jobs and operator intervention is kept to a minimum. This can trim hours off the process times. And automation like this can extend to the recording of financial data, the creation of invoices and orders and much, much more.
All these time-consuming processes can be handled in seconds rather than hours, so productivity increases naturally.
2. Reduce Operational Costs
Profitability is a top concern for all businesses and reducing costs can help. But the best solution isn’t to reduce the capabilities of the computer centre.
Automation software is a more efficient way of containing and reducing costs. It’s a fantastic opportunity to increase service to end users whilst reducing costs at the same time. It works because it is cheaper than hiring multiple personnel to do a task, and it does that task faster than a team of humans could.
3. Improve Resource Management
Manual processes take up resources. Automation means less time, money and materials to get things done. Consider approval processes as an example. Employee capacity is an important resource and many processes have to be signed off before being rolled out in any company.
Doing this can use up a lot of employee capacity. Time is spent making phone calls and sending emails as well as reviewing spreadsheets and documents. Automation can make all of this more organised and save that crucial resource of employee capacity. This extends to other resources when you automate different processes, thus ensuring your resource management is tightened up.
4. Standardisation
In any industry, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page throughout the organisation. With a constant flow of different requests and solutions, the management of the workflow can get complicated. There are lots of moving parts and different people managing them. Without standardising these processes, things can quickly become very messy.
Automation makes it easy to standardise processes across departments. Requests, decision-making and record-keeping can be made consistent and it all happens on autopilot. This will keep everything organised and make it easier to track progress in real-time.
5. Compliance
Compliance can be very demanding and automation is here to help. Consider GDPR, for example. All customer information must be deleted after a certain period of inactivity. This means it needs to be removed from your system after a certain time.
Doing this manually can be very hard to keep track of. But you are legally required to comply with these rules. Automation takes all the hard work out of your hands. No need to worry about missing anything or doing something wrong.
How can you achieve automation in your business?
There are many opportunities to implement automation in modern businesses. Let’s explore a few common examples of business automation that can be adopted by organisations of any size.
1. Automate Repetitive Tasks
We mentioned these tasks and the time they can take up. Automation tools can enable you to set up automatic workflows that carry out these repetitive tasks on-the-fly; like sending a promotional tweet each time a blog post is published. Take this out of employees’ hands and you will save a lot of time for your teams.
2. Automatic Email Campaigns
Software that automates email can help trigger emails based on certain actions. It can also establish email drip workflows, deploy A/B testing, personalise your emails and more. Many email platforms have an array of built-in tools and you can explore other solutions to find more.
3. Deploy ERP Software
Enterprise Resource Management software provides an array of automation tools as well as big data, machine learning and a single, centralised database. The benefits of this are many, and you will be able to implement automation in financials, sales, CRM, supply chain and much, much more. Even better, these solutions are scalable so even smaller businesses can access the modules they need to benefit from their power.
4. Use A Solution For Centralised Internal Communications
Automating communications processes can streamline and ease human interactions within your organisation. This frees up leaders to look after their teams and support growth and development. Automation can enable reminders to prepare for meetings, create follow-ups on tasks after predetermined intervals, easy sharing of materials, reporting dashboards and more.
5. Create An Instant Response to Customer Service Requests
Chatbots and similar tools can help ease the burden on customer service teams. Many problems customers need help with can be solved using stock responses from a database of solutions. Chatbots are an automated method of dealing with customer service requests and finding common solutions based on the information in the database. If someone from the team is needed, they can be made available, but the automation tools will help reduce the influx of customer service requests that your team has to handle.
Final Thoughts
Automation helps businesses streamline the complete workflow. Less time will be spent on repetitive tasks, meaning more time spent on being productive and improving business profitability. With so many tools and opportunities available, there really is no excuse for not taking advantage of what’s available.
An ERP solution can be the most comprehensive tool for leveraging automation to its full capabilities. If you want to learn more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Why choose Eventura for your digital transformation journey?
Eventura have been helping businesses in their digital transformation journey for two decades. From the implementation of industry-leading ERP solutions such as Sage 200 and NetSuite, to helping them move their entire operations to the cloud and away from costly and restrictive on-premise solutions.
As well as being NetSuite Solution Providers, Sage 200 Partners and Microsoft Gold Partners, we also offer a wide range of managed IT services, meaning we can take your business as a whole and help it achieve digital transformation.
If you would like to speak to one of our experts, you can request a free call back here.
