We live in an automation age, and its use is growing every day. As emerging technologies reshape the business environment, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, business automation has penetrated nearly every industry throughout the world.

Business automation is critical in igniting the digital transformation of organisations and can benefit your company by streamlining recurring tasks and eliminating error-prone manual tasks, which will translate into more efficient operations and higher agility to meet new business challenges and customers’ expectations.

Find out how you can achieve success in automating your workflows and achieve streamlined processes with our best practices.

What Is Business Process Automation (BPA)?

Business process automation also referred to as BPA, is all about transforming your complex business processes. It aims to simplify steps of the current business processes to enhance efficiency while minimizing the use of time and human effort.

Investing in BPA will allow a boost in a company’s productivity and efficiency, but it can be challenging to deal with the entire digital transformation process. Nowadays, more and more businesses are relying on external partners to manage their IT services.

What Are The Benefits Of Business Automation?

Business automation plays a vital role in transforming your business. It is meant to bring process efficiency and generate an overall competitive advantage.

• Enhanced productivity and operational efficiency: by automating manual tasks, automation can streamline business processes to become more efficient and effective.
• Revenue growth: automation can generate more revenue by increasing the number of customers or improving the customer retention rate.
• Customer experience: automation can help businesses provide a better customer experience by streamlining customer service functions such as live chats.
• Risk reduction: automation substitutes many manual tasks prone to human error, which can lead to higher-quality products.
• Staying ahead of the competition: automation helps your business stay on the cutting edge of digital innovation by testing new ideas.
• Faster time to market and cost-effectiveness: By freeing employees of manual tasks, automation allows your business to work faster and at a lower cost than if you did everything manually.

Best Practices for Business Automation

Automation can bring many advantages to your company so it might be tempting to try to automate every process in your business. However, it is crucial to structure a plan before going all-in. Here are the best practices that will help you achieve a successful business automation.

Determine your business automation goal

The first step in creating a successful automation strategy is determining your organisation’s goals for automation that meets your needs. You can choose if your goal is to improve operational efficiency by streamlining business processes with automation, enhance customer experience, increase revenue growth, sharpen your innovation rate, or even reduce risk by cutting manual tasks prone to human error.

Choose the right processes & tools

While process automation is the solution to many of your business problems, not every process is worth automating, especially all at once. Therefore, it’s essential to evaluate and decide which processes should be automated to help you test the impact of automation on your business.

Once you know which processes you want to automate, you can select the right tool to automate them. You should opt for the tool that best suits your business needs in terms of scalability, capabilities, and types of users. For example, it is important to choose an easy-to-use software so that non-technical users can easily adapt to it.

Involve your team in the adaptation process

Automation can be a drastic change for a traditional business that is not used to new technologies, and it might lead to some resistance from your employees. The unknown can be frightening, especially when it comes to the idea that automation will substitute employees.

It is therefore essential to address the concerns of employees and engage the whole team in the adaptation process by explaining the benefits of automation, updating them at every step of the process, and establishing roles once automation is implemented in the organisation. Train your employees to use it, be open to questions, and explain how automation will help make their lives easier instead of replacing them.

Keep track of the progress

Automation is an ongoing process. Without continuous monitoring of the results that automation brings to your organization, it’s impossible to improve the efficiency of the process. To understand if automation works on your business and if you should expand automation to other areas, you should keep track of metrics to measure its effectiveness and evaluate its overall performance.

Always have a backup plan

Although new technologies are less prone to error, they are not infallible. In case there is a technical error or a system crash, you should protect yourself by having a safety plan. Thus, you should make sure that you have the human intervention necessary to handle the processes manually in case something happens.  

Business automation can take your company to the next step. If you need a hand to ensure that your business benefits from automation as much as possible, PrimeIT is here to help you implement a successful automation strategy. Talk to us!