Organisations are often made up of multiple business processes that define how day-to-day activities must be conducted. Many tasks, like tracking leads, following up with prospects, or preparing reports, need to be performed. However, completing each activity requires spending enormous amounts of time that can otherwise be used for business operations. Depending on the complexity of tasks, the need for automating activities comes into the picture to make businesses more efficient and productive.
What does automation of business processes mean?
Automation of business processes refers to repeating specific business activities without human intervention. This helps simplify and speed up processes in an organisation, making them more efficient and productivity-boosting.
Some ways in which the automation of business processes can prove to be beneficial for your business:
- Reduced errors
Errors can creep in when tasks like tracking sales leads or managing employee attendance take place manually. Despite team members trying their best to reduce them, these ‘’human errors’’ pop up from time to time. Businesses can eliminate these problems with the help of automation.
Let’s take the example of CRM software to help you better understand how automating business processes can help you reduce errors. This software automatically filters the leads obtained by the sales team based on their contact number, email id, and so on. Since the data gets stored in a single place, it ensures that no contact details are left out. Therefore, no opportunity to convert a lead to a client gets lost, which may have happened if the firm stored the data related to the customers in multiple different locations.
- Time savings
Time is money. When there’s enough time, many productive operations can be carried out, including closing more sales deals, preparing financial statements, generating leads, etc. Automating business processes saves crucial time for any enterprise.
Let’s further explain time-saving business activities with the help of an example. A company may regularly send members of its sales team to sales meetings. It may become difficult to track which meeting occurred at which location and at what time. A lot of time may be wasted in this tracking process, deviating the sales team from their primary task, i.e., closing more sales deals. With tools like Biz Analyst, sales teams can quickly view their time in meetings or sales orders on a single platform. The list of sales meetings gets updated automatically, leading to business efficiency.
- Improved scalability
Business growth is a primary focus for every organisation, irrespective of size. How can you ensure that? Scalability.
Scalability refers to the ability of a company to grow with the availability of sufficient resources.
Take the case of a small business using Excel sheets to manage leads, prospects, and customers, when it is a one-year-old startup. As the company’s business grows, the quantum of these leads, prospects, and customers increases; hence, more sophisticated technology is required to handle such a large amount of data. Relying only on Excel sheets can be challenging.The company can start using a CRM software and mark the leads as warm, hot, or cold to understand its customers’ preferences based on their purchase history.
- Standardisation of processes
Each time an activity is undertaken in a company, one may complete it differently. That can lead to confusion among the team members when working collaboratively on a project. Let’s take an example of unpaid invoices. It is possible that the sales team sends a payment reminder every 14 days on one occasion, and every 7 days on another occasion. Standardisation can avoid inconsistencies like this.
For example, by using the CredFlow mobile application, one can automate this business process and achieve consistency. The standardisation of processes, like deciding to send a payment reminder once every 7 days, can be made possible.
- Ensures extraction of business insights
When tasks are performed manually, keeping track of data and viewing insights becomes challenging. For example, a company sells products X and Y to customers. With business insights, one can overview the number of products sold for X and Y daily, monthly, or yearly.Business intelligence tools can help extract insights about the inventory levels available to help with the manufacturing timeline of products X and Y.
Without business process automation tools that automatically update the level of inventory, sold items, revenue, and so on, it becomes challenging to make decisions for the business’s future success. The company may realise that a high quantity of product X is sold, but very few quantities of product Y. So, the company can decide/choose to keep fewer inventory levels of product Y to avoid overstocking and wastage associated with it.
Summing it up..
Automating business processes is key to unlocking business efficiency. If you’re looking to move towards greater business efficiency, software solutions can help.
Nandini Infosys is one of the leading software providers in Gurgaon, helping businesses increase business productivity through efficient product and service solutions. If you want to learn more about the offerings of Nandini Infosys, click on this link.
