Business process automation (BPA) has been a trending term used in the technology world for a while now. Many businesses are adopting BPA as a part of their strategy to gain a competitive advantage in their respective industries. Why should you adopt BPA and what automation can you start with? Let’s take a deeper look.
When you run a business, there are a lot of tasks and processes you have to take on as an owner to ensure your business can grow and thrive. Even for large corporations, departments can be overburdened with menial tasks and may struggle with standardised processes that can cause overlooking essential details. Those tedious, repetitive tasks can be extremely time-consuming and cause you to fall short on many of the important aspects of running a business that can help you with rapid growth.
To navigate and thrive in a volatile and unpredictable post-pandemic economy and political landscape, businesses must be agile, smarter, and streamline business processes to reduce costs.
Angelo Peter – Head of Microsoft Practice, Inextricable Group (IG)
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools you can implement in your business to help streamline many of those repetitive tasks. Automation has quickly gained traction in development and has been integrated into everyday operations within the business world over the years to take on those tedious tasks. When you use business process automation, you get the opportunity to focus more on rapid growth and building your brand. So, what is business process automation, and how can you implement it into your daily routine to allow you to focus on building your business?
What is Business Process Automation?
The world has experienced an unprecedented challenge in the labour market leading to many supply-side issues, labour challenge is also set to become more acute therefore many businesses have accelerated their automation and digital transformation goals.
Utilizing business process automation can be surprisingly easy with the right tools. Business process automation or BPA uses advanced technology to streamline business processes and perform tasks to take them off employees’ hands. Automation can be programmed and customized to perform a particular function when a specific action is triggered, so you don’t have to.
There are a lot of automation technologies available to help with many processes across all industries, but business process automation can manage businesses through dedicated software and increase productivity and efficiency, driving business growth. Automation tools were designed to help replace manual labour so you and your employees can dedicate their energy to other areas in the business.
Business process automation can be beneficial for many aspects of your company. It can help you reduce your manual errors, reduce workload, cut costs, promote efficiency, increase productivity, and boost morale to help you grow your business.
31% of businesses have fully automated at least one function. —McKinsey
5 Business Process Automations For Rapid Growth
Now that you’re familiar with what business process automation is and how it can benefit your business, let’s take a look at the automation that can help you with rapid business growth the most. Here are 5 business process automation that can help you transform your business.
- Accounts Receivable – Consistent cash flow is how a business stays afloat and continues to drive success. Automation can help with much of the accounts receivable work that can take a lot of work. With automation, you can create invoices, send them out on scheduled days, automatically send payment reminders, maintain payment records, and help out with account reconciliation, so you know you are on top of your business’s finances. Business process automation can help you get paid faster and reduce the risk of any costly human errors.
- Orders and Inventory Management – When you run a business that needs to ensure you can manage supplies, you need to communicate with your suppliers, distributors, and customers effectively. Automation can help you improve those essential communications, simplify inventory management, monitor your stock, and help track order status. With business automation in place, you can process orders quickly and ensure you stay on top of your supply without worrying about running out of important products.
- Expense Tracking – One workflow that can have a major impact on the entirety of your business is expense tracking and approvals. Any business owner knows how important it is to stay on top of your expenses, but it can be a big hassle, especially when you have to manage expenses manually. The process usually involves employees submitting the expense, managers having to approve, they have to go to accounting, and they have to line up exactly before they can gain approval. Automating expenses can save a lot of time and a lot of the manual math to ensure your expenses line up to streamline approvals. When you can automate your expenses, you not only remove the manual processes, you can easily and quickly keep track of money going out of your business. You gain instant valuable insights into how money is spent in your company.
Finance departments can save their teams from 25,000 hours of preventable rework caused by human error by automating processes, according to a report from Gartner.
- Sales/CRM Process – Every business has a specific process for working with leads. Once you obtain a lead, you have to continue to nurture them by providing a solution your business can solve to their core problems and eventually transform them into a customer. By automating the many processes of capturing information, tracking stages, and contact logs, sending automated communications for specific triggers can leave your sales teams the time to foster relationships and spend more time on selling.
- Customer Support – Your customer’s experiences with your business can help to determine your success. Manually answering every inquiry, phone call, email, or customer support ticket can be time-consuming and exhausting. You want to be able to provide the support your customers need in order to ensure they have a good experience and have their questions answered. Business process automation can allow you to create standard replies to your customer’s communications that can be sent out immediately when they first reach out. You can even customize each message to be sent out when specific keywords are used. If you understand your customers’ needs, you could automate over half of their responses. BPA tools can enable you to send Amazon-grade order tracking details automatically without human touch to improve customer experience and reduce cost.
Adopting software that can help you automate your business processes can provide you and your employees more availability, higher efficiency, and productivity, reduce costs and human errors, and streamline many tedious tasks. You can benefit from business process automation by saving you and your employees valuable time and helping you focus on rapid growth and see major successes and big wins moving forward.
Wrapping up
Today businesses no longer have the luxury of time. Companies must benchmark each segment with the best-in-class technology to excel to the next league, navigate inflation, and improve margins. Growth is the only way up, using yesterday’s business methodologies to do business today is risking tomorrow’s business. Process automation allows businesses to stay afloat in the ever-changing digital world through flexible systems that support any situation that may arise.