5 Benefits of Business Process Automation
Think about the regular tasks in your business that require a sequence of events—first this and then that…get approval from finance, route through marketing, escalate to legal, get another approval, and so on. Your organization has any number of business processes that get you from Point A to Point B.
By automating that work-flow, you can increase productivity, reduce mistakes and reach your goals with as little lag time as possible.
From human resources and accounts receivables to back office processes and product delivery, companies are finding any number of ways to automate work-flow, streamlining business processes that were once highly manual or paper driven.
These are just a few examples of business processes you might automate:
- Employee training (requests, approval, completion records, reimbursement)
- Job applicant tracking
- On-boarding – employees, vendors, customers
- Purchase orders and invoice processing
- Due diligence processes
- Product changes
- Anything requiring a routine intake, notification, approval process or manual hand-off
Here’s how business process automation pays off:
1. Visibility With business process automation, you get visibility into process status. You can see where an item is in the work-flow. That can be particularly useful for capacity planning and deadline management. Need to know if your team is on track to deliver on-time? Check your work-flow software.
2. Accountability With visibility comes greater accountability. There’s less opportunity for mix-ups, lost files, and finger pointing. By automating your business processes, managers can see who’s responsible for what and where processes are getting stuck. Managers can even get alerts when a certain step in the process hasn’t occurred according to schedule.
3. Document Management Skip the paper chase. When combined with a document management system, BPA reduces the time employees spend filing and retrieving documents. Cut down on lost documents and search time. Plus, customers enjoy better service when employees have immediate access to information and process status from any location.
4. Efficiency Business process automation helps your employees do more with less. Processes can move ahead faster because no one is waiting for files to be transported from desk to desk and no one has to remember to notify the next person in line. Alerts and task reminders can be generated automatically. On a management level, team leaders can get a macro-view of the process, allowing them to be more proactive about addressing and correcting potential bottlenecks. That high-level visibility means teams can reduce the time they spent in update and review meetings.
5. Business Insight A good business process automation tool will include analytics capabilities. That allows managers to analyze business trends, identify repeat bottlenecks, and track response times. Which processes trigged the most missed deadline alerts? When are new process requests most likely to initiate? When processes terminate without completion, what’s the most common failure point? Check your workflow software.
Perhaps of equal importance, some BPA software will calculate whether automation is saving you money in terms of employee time, paper, less product returned, or any other number of metrics. If you can measure the cost savings, it’s easier to justify the upfront costs of automation.
The Essential Argument for BPA
Manual work-flow processes create multiple opportunities for delay and error. With business process automation, you can improve organizational efficiency by automating redundant tasks. Figure out where administrative processes are putting a strain on employee time and free them up with work-flow automation.
