Which Business Processes Need to be Automated?

Intelligent automation isn’t about the indiscriminate application of automation across the board. There are areas that will still require the input of uniquely human skills, while other tasks will require collaboration between human and digital workers.

In order to help you decide where to start on your automation journey, we’ve put together a list of eight business processes that can and should be automated. These are all processes that, when automated to produce quicker turnaround times and better accuracy, will boost productivity and build a platform to enable your human employees to flourish.

These are tasks common to most organizations. They all tend to be high in data volume, repetitive and rules-based. As such, when operated by human employees they can eat up time that might be better spent elsewhere. The list below isn’t exhaustive but should give you a good idea of the variety of ways intelligent automation can help accelerate your results.

1. Invoice processing

Every business must deal with invoices, whether you’re a small family business, ambitious start-up or global conglomerate. It’s a critical business process, essential to efficient cash flow. At the moment, it probably makes up the core of most financial department workloads.

This takes time, and there are other challenges inherent to invoice processing. Vendors often submit invoices in different formats (PDFs, emails, MS Word docs, paper copies) which require the manual transfer of information from multiple sources into a unified financial database.

Digital workers can be programmed to automatically process invoices on receipt. Data input, error reconciliation and even some decision-making tasks can be automated, minimizing the need for human input, saving time and reducing errors.

2. Sales orders

Sales operations often involve processes such as the entry of sales orders into CRM systems or ERP accounting updates. Making sure this data is consistent across systems isn’t easy, with sales reps spending significant amounts of time (on top of the important task of selling) entering information into different applications. Most of the time, this is then replicated by accounts and finance employees in even more systems. Data duplication on this level is a waste of time as it hinders staff productivity and increases the chance of errors.

Once again, digital workers can be used here to automate processes from end to end, delivering a reliable and consolidated database of information which will improve customer experience and increase the satisfaction of your sales staff, as they’ll spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on prospecting and generating business.

3. Account reconciliation

Account reconciliation is an essential function of any accounting team, involving the verification of records and balances by comparing documents from different sources and in different formats. It’s probably one of the most time-consuming and tedious of accounting tasks, which often comes with the risk of human fatigue and errors.

You can assist your accounting department by using digital workers to automate the data extraction process, with greater accuracy of output when finding or approving matching orders. They can also use delivery notes to reconcile purchase orders.

4. Systems queries

In today’s fragmented digital world, your team is likely making and receiving data queries across multiple portals or applications. It’s a common process when making specific transactions and, until now, has been a manual one. Many organizations have yet to integrate these disparate modules, making it an extremely time-consuming task.

A digital workforce can provide smooth, fluid data integration between systems, speeding up the process of systems queries and linking applications. They can also provide data from servers such as a SQL database, by executing queries to retrieve data and communicate it to an output panel.

5. Payroll

Payroll duties are the responsibility of HR departments. HR is an area in which employees deal with many manually intensive tasks. The problem with manual processing of payroll information is that success relies on standardization according to local statutory and regulation requirements. In addition, it’s a process prone to human error, leading to payment delays and employee dissatisfaction.

Digital workers are able to ensure data consistency, verify time records and calculate earnings and deductions automatically. It can also run batch extracts, benchmark market data and automate paycheck generation. In fact, digital workers can take care of almost all payroll related tasks.

6. Onboarding new employees

Another time-consuming HR task, getting new hires started is also labor-intensive for IT staff, with the creation of profiles, access permissions and IT equipment requests.

These tasks involve diverse systems and teams and it can be difficult to ensure smooth onboarding, with the risk of lower productivity and higher overhead expenses.

However, a lot of this process is repetitive and rules-based, which means RPA can help. Pre-programmed RPA systems can trigger established onboarding workflows to make the process much quicker and also send out documentation and notifications to new employees.

7. User exit management      

On the flipside, managing employee exits involves its own set of time-consuming tasks, from access removal to data trail organization. This again requires input from both IT and HR teams going through multiple systems.

Obviously, you want to ensure this process is quick, error free and prevents security leaks. Intelligent automation can be used to ensure orderly exit management, automating exit surveys, consolidating existing employee input and performing ERP user termination.

8. File transfers

The simple act of file transferal is one that often leads to fragmented document streams. It takes time and can lead to bloated databases and email inboxes.

A digital workforce, backed by intelligent automation, can incorporate these file transfers into broader workflow systems, consolidating document streams, removing duplicates and ensuring simple, reliable encryption (or decryption) of files as required.

Further reading:

• 5 Ways to Get Your Employees Excited About Digital Workers
• Which Business Processes Need to be Automated?
• Setting Up World-Class RPA Maintenance
• Coca-Cola Extends Business Services Capacity and Improves Performance with RPA