Is business process automation software worth it?

This article answers the question of whether business process automation software is a worth investment for businesses looking to automate.

Image source: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-05-08-gartner-survey-reveals-that-ceo-priorities-are-slowly

According to this Gartner survey on business priorities, growth tops the list. In order to achieve the much-needed growth, 82% of the CEOs are looking at digital options.

We are going to focus on two aspects that significantly contribute to company growth: cost management (which ranked at number 8) and efficiency and productivity (coming in at number 9). 27% of the respondents said that technology would come in handy to help curb costs while increasing productivity and efficiency (47%).

Using business process automation software ensures that you achieve your goals while ensuring that the above-mentioned priorities are taken care of.

What is business process automation?

Business automation is simply streamlining workflows, processes, and tasks so that they are handled by software. It results in increased efficiency and even margins in some cases. It is sometimes referred to as digital transformation or BPA.

Why automate your business processes?

There are several reasons why your business needs to automate its processes. Let’s look at some below:

• Prompt and accurate communication

Imagine working on a business pitch. You are well prepared and during your presentation, one person in your audience (on whom you want to leave an impression) asks why the prices you shared an hour before that are way lower than what you are currently presenting.

During the pressure to prepare for the presentation, you missed the email from the sales team to let everyone know of the changes in pricing. Worse still, you are here convincing them that your company does a great job of automating business processes. The odds of signing up this client suddenly go down the drain, don’t they?

While this might be an extreme case of how costly a lack of automation can get, the fact is that streamlined communication can result in significant financial losses.

If a system was in place to automatically update the prices, then we would not end up with scenarios like the ones above.

• Cost reduction

According to a 2019 Forrester Prediction Goes Pragmatic Report, business leaders will “use automation to free human capital and the associated costs from the mundane and repetitive tasks”.

Every business has repetitive tasks that take up valuable time, for example, sending emails to new clients to onboard them, report compilation or data entry. Repetitive tasks, when valuated, costs up to $2 trillion annually for companies in the United States, according to this McKinsey workplace automation study.

• Increased productivity

Your team actually needs you to automate, in order to save them the time that they spend on repetitive tasks, according to this productivity infographic by Smartsheet Inc. The top 3 productivity killers that your team would like you to automate are data collection, approvals, and updates.

• Other reasons

There are many other reasons why you need to automate your business processes. We will not, however, get into their details here. Here are more reasons why automation is beneficial for businesses:

• It minimizes human error
• It increases customer satisfaction
• It results in faster turn around times
• It increases transparency and accountability
• It ensures consistent and standard outcomes

What can you automate with business process automation software?

When it comes to determining the processes or workflows to automate, it can easily become overwhelming, especially if you do not have them well defined. This image summarizes some of the processes that you could automate:

Image source:

https://www.cflowapps.com/5-business-processes-every-company-will-need-to-automate/

On the other hand, each business has unique aspects. In this section, let’s focus on business process automation examples:

• Hiring and onboarding

A lot goes into hiring — you need to craft a job advert, choose the platforms where to share it, receive applications, filter through the applicants’ documents, shortlist, interview (which may be more than once), and then finally onboard. We have not even broken down onboarding, which is another entire process in itself.

As you can see, the amount of work to be done here quickly piles up. Having to do all the above manually is extremely time-consuming, and error-prone.

Automation will literally come in to save the day — you could automatically post the job on different platforms, sift through the applications, and later on after onboarding, create all the necessary portfolios (add the employee to payroll, create their account data, and enter their data into the biometric system that you use to access the office).

• Report generation

Reports are necessary to keep tabs on the progress of a project or even expenditure. Generating reports can, however, be repetitive and time-consuming. Automating report generation and distribution to the necessary people on the team will save a significant amount of time, reduce human error (and possibly save someone a bit of frustration). All you need to define is the data that needs to be retrieved, where to retrieve it from, how to display it, and whom to send it to.

• Customer support

How promptly you respond to your customers’ concerns can make or break your business. Automating your responses will make it possible to respond promptly, providing the customers with the information that they are looking for within a fraction of the time it would take if you had to keep them waiting for someone from customer support to respond.

A great thing about automation in the customer support department is that you can automate your responses on live chat, customer tickets, and even social media.

In conclusion

As we have seen, automation can help you achieve growth in your business by taking care of mundane, repetitive, time-consuming, inefficient and expensive processes and tasks. The best time to start reaping the benefits of automation is now.

We are the specialists when it comes to automation software. Are you looking to automate? Talk to us about business process automation with Python today.