In today’s rapidly growing business world, automation is becoming a prominent need for businesses, because there is a great need for speed, efficiency and accuracy in various business processes like marketing, customer service, recruiting etc.
As the companies grow rapidly, they face more competitors in their way. This competition is pushing companies to work faster. Every organization is trying to go further to expand its business and automation is helping them to achieve it, by reducing the time required to do a task. With the utilization of automation, many startup companies are surfacing with a considerable growth in their business. Following are some suggestions to utilize automation in a business.
- Understanding the process: The slow start is always beneficial, by properly understanding the business process, in which we are going to install automation. Trying to automate an existing process, without ever looking at the process itself may result in an unsuccessful attempt. Taking time to evaluate the process and searching for the pitfalls will help to find out where the process is lagging.
- Involving the team: The individuals, who work on the process daily know almost every part of that process. Letting them to test and implement a variety of solutions for the respective process to be optimized will make the decision making much easier.
- Planning ahead:Automation isn’t always easy to implement, but it’s the key to success in lots of different areas of business. Automating some processes need higher investment as compared to their output after automating, rather than investing in such processes, it will be better to avoid such processes. To reduce confusion, one can make a list of processes which can be automated and the processes which need to be avoided. That’s why planning ahead is always a good decision. One can plan the ROI (Return of Investment). Calculation of the Rate of interest of a particular process gives a short idea about the outcome of automation. Making sure to calculate the time and cost to get implemented, will be helpful for cost estimation with respect to investments. One can also prioritize automating the processes, saving most of the time and money.
- Finding ready-made resources: After deciding which process is best to automate, researching a bit will add an advantage before creating the full setup for automation. There are lots of ready-made resources available on the internet, that can not only save time and money, but also improve the understanding about the process. For example, if you’re going to use an automated expense reimbursement software to make the reimbursement process easier for your employees, you can look for information on how it works and its benefits to businesses.
- Starting with the easiest process: Introducing automation to a pack of processes at a time, without having the proper resources to control and use it, will increase load on the system, and could lead to a breakdown of the process as well as it could negatively impact the regular flow of data, and products, resulting in disruption of the process, and it will also affect day to day flow of employees’ work. Instead of that, one can go for the easy process, with the high rate of interest and automate every process one by one with enough resources.
- Team compatibility with automation: Team is the key point of every organization; all the team members need to adopt with the new automated process. Automated process works at its peak level, only when it is compatible with the people who use it. Adopting the change is hard; most of people don’t like it, even if it will ease their work. So, a proper guidance or training will make employees comfortable with the automated process.
It’s essential to take the time, to make sure employees are aware of the likely changes the automation will bring about, and how it will impact their work. Investing in a sufficient time and money, for each and every employee connected to the process can improve the productivity of automated process, thereby increasing the business productivity.
- Flaws elimination: Many automated processes get blown,if an implementer doesn’t have any information about flaws in the respective process. It’s always useful to have a clear vision about the flaws in the process we are investing. Knowing what could be the end product will look, and work like, will reduce the chances of failure after installation of technology. Flaws are like pot holes on roads, if someone doesn’t see it, it will definitely give a shock with high intensity.
- Quality is everything: Quality is a thing which cannot be compromised. It’s an inevitable part of any successful attempt in the process automation.
Today’s quality can lead to a better, reliable and smooth output in future. With excellent quality, automated process will last longer. This requires intermittent quality checks, and simultaneous inspection, which will maintain the reliability of the process.
- Future scope: Automating the process, which will contribute more in the long run, can help to get more profit for a long span of time. The process should have the scope and flexibility to be compatible with the future changes. It means automated process should be future proof and modular.
- Sustaining the change: Work will not be finished until and unless automation runs in the entire process’ veins and everything gets familiar with the new change, from machines to human employees. Being updated and accessible to employees anytime, anywhere will help the team to recover quickly, if automation fails temporarily.
As automation gets streamlined and employees get familiar with the new process, it will minimize manual errors and save time, leading to a more acrobatic back-office, more simplified operations and a significant increase in cost saving across the board.
