Is your organization’s productivity superseding its bottlenecks?
If the answer doesn’t immediately and obviously come to mind, you’re not alone. With employees and consultants working all over the globe, the success of both your individual projects and overall organizational growth hinges on your ability to achieve maximum productivity through efficiency.
At many companies today, productivity levels hinge on your ability to fully embrace and implement business automation.
What is business automation?
Business automation, also known as business process automation (BPA), uses technology to systematically replace recurring manual tasks or processes. Business process automation is deployed for a variety of reasons, but the three main reasons include:
- Minimize costs
- Increase efficiency
- Streamline processes
By using business automation to reduce the amount of transactional work when performing everyday tasks, efficiency skyrockets and operational duties become far more manageable. And by alleviating the workload of the team using automation, you can shift your focus to being more agile and delivering iterative results that drive value.
Automation vs. AI
One thing to make clear is the difference between automation and artificial intelligence. While they are found in similar camps, they’re not the same thing and have very specific differences when it comes to their use cases.
Automation gets things done automatically through hardware or software to achieve a specific result. Artificial intelligence on the other hand is the learning of human actions designed to surpass human behaviors.
Think of business automation as the workflow that does what it’s intended and thinks no further: you open a ticket to onboard a new consultant and the automation is set to trigger alerts for IT, HR, Facilities and Security.
It comes down to the ability to scale.
Enabling automation removes the burden on the employee to complete several tasks which often may require added time and added resources — hence freeing them up to complete other tasks, and in the immediate term, mark this task as complete.
How does business automation help drive revenue?
The commonly sought-after benefits of automation include:
- Improved quality
- Increased compliance
- Enhanced customer experience
- Greater insight into processes
Many leaders don’t always associate these benefits with hard savings. This is a myth, however, especially when business automation strategies focus on the opportunity of redirecting valuable resources away from routine activities.
Think about it: If employees are no longer tasked with monotonous and time-consumptive transactional work, they can be driving meaningful change, ensuring the company keeps pace – or sets the pace – in the market.
Implementing automation in your organization might not immediately translate to revenue, but it will position the organization for increased efficiency and the power to continually take on more projects.
Ultimately, this translates to faster growth and a much bigger impact on the bottom line.
How can you implement business automation at scale?
BPA is not a one-size fits all mechanism. Leaders need to take into account what can be automated and what requires human interaction.
Prior to setting off on the path to automation, organizations should review current processes. If the results or the steps to perform a process differ by any of the following variables, the process should be standardized before you consider automation:
- Analyst
- Office location
- Country
- Customer
Process improvement initiatives such as Lean Six Sigma, for example, are recommended to improve or re-engineer processes prior to deploying a business automation strategy. Keep in mind that smart automation solutions require that you first engage in proper business process automation pre-planning and pre-work to avoid chaos and deliver optimum outcomes.
Take the next steps toward efficiency
It’s important to think of people, processes, and technology while reviewing what can be automated and how it will impact the organization. But the fact remains: enabling employees to deliver a faster and better work product with the help of business automation will always translate into higher satisfaction rates and broader business capabilities.
Schedule a call with one of our experienced consultants to discuss how Mod Op Strategic Consulting can help transform your organization through business automation.
