What is Business Process Automation?
Just imagine this, as a business based on multiple products, you need to identify which product of yours is giving you a higher conversion rate and in which geographical area so that you can streamline your efforts and workforce. To make such an informed decision, you will need to gather data for the past 2-3 years. Doing it manually can be a tiresome task. What if you could do it just by applying a few filters on your laptop while sipping that refreshing cup of coffee? That is where business process automation [BPA] comes into play. Business process automation aims to reduce your business tasks’ time consumption and efforts while maintaining the quality of the work you desire. As per a McKinsey report, 45% of current paid activities can be automated using contemporary technology, equivalent to a mighty $2 trillion of total annual wages! You may have already understood that business process automation utilizes technology to complete periodic jobs or processes in a firm where manual effort can be replaced. The objective is to minimize costs, improve efficiency, and streamline business processes.
Often “Business process management” is misunderstood with “Business process automation” but it is necessary to understand that while the first one is a larger spectrum of multiple tasks , the second one is just one of those tasks that that spectrum is made up of.
Now that we have established what BPA exactly means and how important it is, let us quickly understand the five advantages of the automation process that make BPA need of the hour for your business.
Five major advantages which make automation necessary
For Centralized Communication Between Teams
Just imagine this, one of your customers raises a ticket on your website, your feedback team looks into it immediately and finds out it is a technical issue which can only be solved by the technical team, so they send the problem manually in the form of physical documents to the technical team and technical team sorts it out and sends the solution back to feedback team by a same method of communication.
That itself sounds like a time-consuming process with chances of important documents being misplaced by an organization’s employees or even misused. But what if you could create a central communication database between different teams of your business so they can communicate via it and send important documents via messenger, which has the security of end to end encryption.
This helps employees have any information that they may require just at the tip of their finger, which helps them increase their productivity and thus of business. How? One report found that successfully finding knowledge improved the stress levels of low-stress employees by 27% and enhanced the stress of high-stress employees by 42%. It’s crystal clear that not having access to the information you require to finish your tasks drastically affects productivity. And this is just one of the many benefits your teams can have due to establishing centralized communication using business process automation services.
2. For establishing a smooth workflow process
Automating tasks helps you free up your important resources from manual jobs to focus your efforts and time on strategic and new initiatives rather than repetitive manual work.
Based on how important documents are being shared and saved in your firm, teams may have to wait for consent from the higher-ups so that they can start the work. This often results in delays in getting tasks accomplished. And unfortunately, if any employee is on leave or not present in the office, it can simply throw everyone dependent on that off schedule. But a proper BPA tool can help your firm in getting approvals with just a click of a single button.
3. For proper accountability distribution between employees
When employees of any firm are overburdened with a goal to finish periodic back-end jobs and tasks that are more customer-facing, it results in the company’s diminishment’s ability to meet their deadlines and reduce customer satisfaction. That can easily kill any business.
Most employees, when asked, would say that they are exceptional multitaskers. However, research has proved that very few employees have quality multitasking abilities as they trust themselves to be. One study has shown that around 40 percent of someone’s productive time can be lost due to switching between different tasks. This level of distraction can lead to a lower quality of work with more mistakes. Therefore, automating repetitive tasks should be a high priority.
4. For better control over business
Research has reported that CEOs spend 20% of their time on tasks that could be easily automated, such as observing operational data and analyzing status reports. One of the major objectives of business process automation is that it can greatly help you combine all the jobs within your firm and transform all of them into one overarching solution.
This leads to smooth control over your business, clear accountability distribution between employees, and important insights and analytics, and quick turnaround times. That helps in easier elimination of wasteful and repetitive tasks and focuses on enhancing the amount of tasks that can help you add value. Research clearly said that the most popular and considered reasons for applying automation to a business were saving time (30%) and big data analysis (25%).
5. For optimizing performances of employees
There isn’t any exaggeration in saying that your employee’s productivity is the spine of your business. If you plan to play long and hard, your employee is a player you need to rely upon. BPA is a tool that can empower your employees by eliminating tasks that don’t have to be handled manually and helping you as an owner in proper tasks allotment to your employees.
To understand how allocating tasks properly to employees can save your firm from facing multiple issues, let’s take an example. Suppose Sam, an employee in your organization, is really good at “Graphics Design.” So when a work-related to it comes in the organization, other employees who received it decide to tell Sam to handle it.
They forget to think that Sam might have the same request from the other employees of the organization as well and his/her work might get into the queue, which will lead to delay in meeting requirements. Also, what is necessary to think is that, does that task really require Sam’s efforts, or is it the basic one that can be handled by themselves?
An automated work management system is one of the many business process automation services, objectives of your business. This will help you measure the quality of output that you are gaining and accordingly modify your strategy for the process so that you can have the maximum advantage of the automation process.
Key takeaways
Market research firm IDC has said that organizations lose around 20 to 30% of business revenue every year because of inefficient processes. So it is essential to contemplate that after you’ve decided to automate your business processes, you must consider that every part of it can be put under the automation lens and analyzed to have the maximum benefit from this tool.
Apart from the proper implementation, you also need to make your employees aware of this change and how it isn’t only for the benefit of business, but rather about their benefit. The benefit of the business will be byproducts once employees feel benefited from this change. What are your ideas and opinions on Business Process Automation? Have you already included Business Process Automation as a limb of your business body, or are you planning to do so so you can take advantage of the automation process? Do provide your valuable feedback about this article.
Leave a Reply