5 Benefits of Process Automation You May Not Have Considered
When people hear the term process automation, an image of Elon Musk’s gigafactory probably jumps to their mind with heavy robotic arms along an assembly line replacing all forms of human labor. Such imagery makes process automation seem like a daunting initiative to implement and only reserved for companies in manufacturing or technology. However, that can’t be further from the truth.
The reality is that process automation projects have a wide range of complexity. In its simplest form, process automation can be achieved as easily as using a macro in an Excel spreadsheet to automatically format cells with a single click.
In this post, we will take a look at several process automation benefits that you may not have considered before, including how simple it is for every company to start taking advantage of them.
1. Increase business productivity
Probably the most obvious reason for people to consider process automation is the ability to eliminate any manual workflows. The promise of time-saving and freeing up your manpower for higher-value works is exactly what makes process automation a compelling corporate initiative in the first place. It’s not the productivity benefit of automation that is overlooked by most companies but how little the amount of effort it takes to achieve great results.
A workflow that follows a simple if-and-then logic is well suited for process automation. Here are a few examples where simple automation can have a huge impact on productivity:
- Repetitive task — Any tasks that happen regularly and are predictable are great candidates for automation. A few examples of such tasks include scheduling follow-up meetings, paying monthly bills, or updating sales records.
- Communication — Automation is great for any communication that is required when a certain criterion is met such as sending a reminder email to a customer who missed a payment for a week.
- Decisioning — Any request that requires approval based on some predefined decisioning criteria is another good candidate for automation.
The possibility of simple automation is limitless. Salesforce’s Process Builder is the perfect tool for automating these simple if-and-then processes. You can set a trigger, a processing criteria, and either an immediate action or a scheduled action to take if the criteria evaluate to true. The type of action that it can execute include creating records, updating the record, sending emails, and even posting to a Chatter feed.
2. Reduce human error
A less obvious benefit of process automation is the ability to reduce human error and increase the reliability of the output. For regulated industries, this is a very important benefit that helps minimize compliance risks including lowering the cost of audits and penalties as a result of human error.
When applied to document processing, automation helps ensure data consistency using automated forms to collect user input. With proper data validation in place, automation can uphold data integrity and structure the data in the desired format to be consumed.
You may have experienced this benefit personally when you apply for a credit card online. The forms guide you through the process and collect all the relevant and must-have financial information that allows an issuing bank to make decisions within seconds. There is no more mailing back an application via the slow mail just to find out a couple of the fields are not entered correctly. The process is almost seamless and this brings us to the third benefit of process automation.
3. Provide better experiences
When automation is done right, it eliminates inefficiencies and provides the seamless experience expected by both consumers and employees alike. Your users are increasingly more digitally native and their expectations for seamless interactions with a company is higher than ever. For example, a customer now expects the ability to place an online order in one click and the item delivered within hours to his or her doorstep.
This type of seamless experience is powered by automated workflows with visual elements. The visual elements collect user input and guide users through the process to streamline the interaction. To make it seamless, the workflow needs to be made available at every user touchpoint whether it’s on the web, mobile, or even voice.
Sounds complicated? It doesn’t have to be. Salesforce’s Flow Builder is designed for automating interactions requiring visual elements such as collecting user input, guiding user interaction, and embedding the workflow at every user touchpoint.
4. Make integrated data actionable
Having a grand unified view across all your enterprise data, be it internal customer data or external data sources, is great; but being able to take action on the integrated data is better as it truly extracts value out of the data integration effort. Process automation is the key to unlocking the value of integration and making those integrated data actionable.
Back to the credit card application example, in order to provide a seamless application experience, the credit card issuer needs to confirm the customer identity, check the customer’s credit, open a new account, and finally send out the new credit card in the mail. The seamless experience involves combining customer profile information with external credit bureau data while taking action in a connected workflow.
With Flow builder, you can build workflows that span across connected data sources both inside and outside of your Salesforce org using Salesforce platform events, external services, and Apex for customized integration.
5. Create reusable best practices
When you digitize workflows, another benefit is the ability to package components of collected data and workflows into reusable building blocks for another larger workflow. Similar to object-oriented programming, you can create modular pieces of a workflow that can be plug and play in a different but related workflow. A few ideas for modularization:
- Input — leverage an army of visual screens for collecting similar customer information
- Notification — display notification after an automated action has been executed
- Integration — create reusable API calls to an external database
As you build more building blocks, the path to automation becomes easier and easier. Simply customize a pre-built workflow as a template without building one from scratch.
Salesforce provides a wide array of pre-built automation solutions on the AppExchange. You can install standalone flow actions to add functionality such as phone verification or payment processing. With flow templates, you can leverage industry best practices built by our partners and customize to your specific business use cases.
Perhaps the sixth benefit of this list is that it’s really not that hard to automate processes with the right tool in place, a tool that can help you digitize manual workflows, provide visual experiences, and create workflows bridging various data sources. This is where Salesforce’s Lightning Flow can help.
