When Should You Rely Your Business on an Automation Software?

Approximately 37 percent of employees are nervous or worried about losing their jobs to automation. It makes some sense since so many jobs in transportation, storage and manufacturing are already seeing the effects of automation. There’s always the question: What will our jobs look like when automation takes over?

While it can be scary to consider the ramifications of automation and how it will affect your job or business, it’s also an opportunity to consider how you can work smarter, not harder, accomplish more for your company and save money. But, first, what are some of the instances where you should automate your business needs?

• Business process automation (BPA): Where there are recurring tasks, you can use automation to streamline the workflow of technology, while saving time and money. For example, you can set up forms that automate the onboarding process, travel authorization and other HR paperwork without your hands-on input.
• Chatbots: You can use the chatbots that have a human behind the blinking prompt or you can automate part of that communication process. Chatbots are becoming a more popular way to respond to requests from prospects and customers.
• Inventory Management Automation: You can easily add, edit, delete or even transfer product details depending on where it is in the process of manufacturing and fulfillment. Inventory management is also a consideration for eCommerce sites, where delays in the updates to inventory can be a huge cost factor.
• Marketing and eCommerce automation: There are lots of instances in your marketing and communications processes where you can automate your collection of data and the distribution of messaging across channels. It allows you to offer the level of timely and reliable communication that your customers and staff expect.
• Robotic process automation: Automation is perfect for those tasks that are repetitive and time-consuming. It could include transferring files, copying data or even performing mechanical tasks.

While not every level of automation will be right for your business, you should be aware of which options are currently available that can streamline your work processes and offer growth potential. For employees, it’s also important to understand how workload automation can offer huge benefits for professional development and opportunities in the future.

Here are just a few benefits of automation.

• Reduce Labor Costs: One of the most important reasons to consider automation is cost savings. You’re able to reduce the number of employees, which allows you to reduce your overhead and increase your profitability.
• Adapt to Demand: Automation allows you to scale up your business operations while allowing you to better handle repetitive tasks and streamline processes.
• Allocate Workforce: Since automation handles repetitive tasks, you can focus on innovative initiatives that will save you time and money. You can also make sure that each team member is working on the right projects with optimal resource allocation.
• Reduce Errors: Automation ensures greater accuracy than manual processes while saving time and money in the process.
• Improve Collaboration: With automation, you’re able to more easily monitor the flow of communication and information, without hands-on granularity.
• Leverage Remote Workers: Automation allows you to better support remote workers. This automation capability is particularly important right now, with the increase of remote workers and their need to work on different projects.
• Deliver a Consistent Experience: Instead of relying upon your workers to all deliver the same consistent experience, you can use automated services to ensure that every person’s experience is the same.
• Support Customer Services: As you offer customer service, you’re likely relying on one or more types of automated technology to support your 24/7 interactions with your customers. You could be using automated online help, chatbots or other functionality to best support the needs of your customers.
• Ensure Compliance: Government compliance requirements are making it more likely that you’ll use automation to make sure you keep on top of tax requirements for travel or other industry standards and regulations.

Automation is changing how we all interact and function in the current business landscape. Part of the process also requires that you continually analyze and improve your processes. With so many automation tools currently available, you need to select the tools that will best meet the evolving needs of you and your team.

At the same time, you need to make sure that you’re staying within your budget and leaving yourself some flexibility so that you can scale up for future growth and compliance requirements. If it’s not the right solution right now, it won’t meet your needs when your business becomes even more complicated and needy in the future.

Explore your options and find the solutions that will allow you to automate your processes, procedures, workflow and every other area of your business, as needed to streamline your business operations.

Katie Keough

Katie Keough is an Outreach Coordinator with Active Batch, a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring business-critical systems. She focuses on building connections with site owners to deliver valuable business and automation insights.