The Power of Automation: What Processes to Optimize First and Why

This is especially important if you're in the global professional services industry, which grew to $5.3 trillion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.8% since 2015, and is further expected to grow by 7% from 2020 onwards. In an industry driven by an increasing focus on customer satisfaction, you need to stay on top with business process automation.

What is business process automation (BPA)?

Essentially, BPA is the use of technology to automate repeatable tasks. It looks at overall business processes and workflows, codifies them and then integrates them into a connected set of software applications to automate these processes and workflows without the need for human manual intervention.

Business process automation uses software to automatically perform tasks repeatedly and in exactly the same way until they are modified or deleted. When BPA does this for your business, you and your people are then released to function at higher-level thinking and creative insights, which boosts not only your productivity but the overall quality of your work and contributes to increased customer satisfaction.

Why automate business processes?

Why hold yourself and your team back with routine when you can do so much better and more for your business every day?

Here are seven specific business process automation benefits:

1. Gain transparency and clarity across your organization

The first step in business process automation is always to identify tasks to be automated by looking at all business processes. Just the process of doing this helps clarify workflows and the value that each activity and process contributes to the entire organization. It also paves the way for more transparency for everyone involved in the organization.

2. Free up employees to focus on more important tasks

BPA releases employees to be more available more often for more important tasks instead of using up most of their attention, time and energies for repetitive manual tasks - especially if they are involved in customer-facing services. Employees can then be re-assigned to work that is better matched with their talents, thus contributing to more job satisfaction.

BPA also moves people into higher-thinking spaces and skills necessary for problem-solving, creative innovation and decision-making, which is vital for any organization to thrive and become more competitive and profitable.

3. Decrease the number of human errors

Repetitive, low-level work can numb the mind and make people prone to human errors. BPA can decrease these human errors with automation, increase efficiencies and reduce costs.

4. Improve workflows

BPA not only clarifies workflows but speeds up their processes, contributing to increased productivity and quality of work.

5. Streamline and standardize key operations

BPA enforces accountability and helps clarify your employees’ duties and responsibilities. It also improves quality compliance with industry standards and makes sure each step of the process adds value to the final product/service.

6. Leverage the benefits of digital transformation

Using BPA technology to transform your company ensures that your business grows and expands faster, keeping in pace with the speedy evolution of technology, than if you only used traditionally mechanical business process systems in your organization.

7. Increase employee and customer satisfaction

BPA speeds up processes for faster delivery to customers, lessens operational costs and minimizes human biases and prejudice, thus improving both employee and customer experiences with the company.

What business processes can be automated first?

A key decision to make in automating business processes is which ones to prioritize first, given limited resources.

It’s crucial to first identify your business' core and support functions. Core functions are the key activities that generate income for your business and help it grow and prosper. Support functions are all the other activities that support the core functions.

To increase efficiencies and reduce costs, support functions can be insourced, outsourced or near-sourced. Most insourced and near-sourced support functions can be automated. Some core functions that involve a lot of routines can also be automated.

Examples of business processes that can be automated are administrative duties, such as:

• Human resource administration: Payroll and withholding tax calculations to payments processing
• Marketing and sales: Automating marketing emails and sales proposals, as well as sales reports and tracking
• IT and technical services: Automated maintenance and status reports, problem ticketing and resolution
• Distribution and logistics: Automated shipment routing, labeling and tracking

In the professional services industry, here are 5 key business processes involving both core and support functions that you can begin automating:

1. Project resource allocation: Assigning and scheduling available resources in the most effective and economical way possible to achieve project goals can be greatly aided by business process automation. It can help you understand project scope and delivery constraints, identify needed roles and skills, map out timelines and deadlines and allocate people to the project faster and from a more comprehensive perspective.
2. Project management workflows: Once project resources have been allocated, BPA can be used for planning the sequence of tasks and activities for projects. It also helps project teams collaborate better, as BPA can track project processes, update the team, send out timely reminders and perform other functions to make collaboration more organized and easier. It can help relieve employee frustrations and free up their energies and time for more productive collaborations that speed up their work and improve the quality of their work.
3. Invoicing and billing: With BPA, you first identify the data sources that you want to collect data from for invoicing and billing. You can collect data from multiple sources, and once these are collected, you can present bills that are more comprehensive and meaningful to your customers. This, in turn, facilitates their easier reconciling of bills with purchase requests, which contributes to timely bill payment.
4. Time tracking and monitoring: Organizations are losing $140 billion every year in wasted time, duplication of efforts and lost opportunities. With time tracking and monitoring, BPA can cut expenditures, reduce costs and improve business competitiveness and profitability.
5. New talent onboarding: Recruiting and onboarding new employees can be a long-drawn-out and time-consuming process, especially with a huge and constantly changing workforce. However, many activities involved in this process — receiving applications, preparing documentation, the initial screening and interview processes and onboarding to HR and payroll systems, for example) can be automated and BPA can enable your business to focus on more important tasks and finer details.

What business process automation does for your company is to unleash your people's rich potentials to do more powerful work as it takes over the routine, repetitive tasks, so you, your enterprise and your people can do more and be more.