Richard Knight
Dir Product Offerings, GW Apps
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, companies are constantly seeking innovative ways to enhance productivity, reduce costs, and increase profitability. Embracing digitization and process automation empowers organizations to achieve these goals and improve their market competitiveness. Let’s explore the significant advantages of using digitization and process automation to overhaul your business processes:
1. Higher Productivity
When you automate repetitive, manual actions within a business processes, you free your employees from such monotonous, busy-work and allow them to complete more work in less time. They can also focus on the higher value aspects of the process, further improving business function and efficiency.
2. Reliable Processes
With business process automation in place, not only are requests handled more quickly, they are also guaranteed to follow the proper process. Every time employees have to deal with a ‘one-off’ exception to the process, work slows down and errors become much more likely.
When a business process is automated, you can expect reliable and efficient outcomes every time. Just be sure that the automation design includes the flexibility to handle, likely, real-world situations.
3. Reduce Operational Costs
In virtually all offices, staff costs are the largest part of the operational budget. Having these expensive resources repeating pro-forma tasks is a waste of money and talent. Digitalization enables the most efficient and cost-effective use of your core resources: Your staff.
Even once you factor in all the costs associated with setting up and running a business process automation platform, and configuring it to automate a specific process, it is still far, far cheaper to have the platform create and send a notification email than having one of your staff create it manually. The same goes for all tasks that can be automated.
4. Data Driven Insights and Decision Making
Whenever a business process is digitized, a whole new trove of data becomes available to the organization. Whether the process is related to customers, orders, product returns or countless other aspects of the business, this data could empower data-driven decision making: Identify areas for improvement and innovation based on real, measured insights. Leveraging data analytics unlocks a competitive edge in understanding your target audience and market dynamics.
5. Quality and Consistency
One of the biggest advantages of digitization is that it guarantees that each task is carried out in a consistent way, resulting in highly dependable results. For example, if you automate your post-purchase follow-up process, every consumer will receive the same quality of support from your company.
Because of the assurance of quality and consistency, as well as the time and efficiency benefits, you may begin designing higher-quality, more feature-rich products with little or no increase in manufacturing time and costs.
6. Governance and Compliance
For businesses operating in highly regulated industries, automation becomes even more critical. Automated systems maintain meticulous records, simplify auditing processes, and ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. This not only reduces the risk of penalties but also enhances transparency and accountability within the organization.
7. Agility and Adaptability
Every year the competition seems to get stronger and the pace of change gets even faster. Hence, businesses must continually innovate, improve and grow in everything that they do. That applies to even the most internal of business processes.
Businesses must be able to swiftly respond to any market shift, upheaval, or opportunity. Tools that support such agility are vital. Business processes automation platforms allow organizations to change and refine their processes more easily and quickly because the platform always knows where a request goes next and what information is required to complete the current task. Staff clearly need to know about process changes, but the success of the process doesn’t rely on everyone remembering every detail of the changes for the process to complete successfully.
8. Improve Transparency & Operational Management
We already discussed how digitization gives businesses real-time access to valuable data about how their business is running. However, it also shows businesses how their processes are running. Monitor live data on request processing, or get automated notifications if Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are breached. Managers can step in before a process becomes a real problem and refine processes to run even better. Also, having it automatically collected and available, prevents operational staff and their managers having to stop working to collect and collate reporting data.
Conclusion
Embracing digitization and process automation brings numerous benefits that can help drive business success. From increased efficiency and lower costs, to data insights and improved decision-making, these technological advancements unlock new opportunities for growth and development. Organizations that proactively adopt these transformative tools position themselves for sustained success in the ever-evolving business landscape.