Business automation makes processes very efficient while also reducing errors that may be introduced by human workers. It can also help your staff focus on more important things rather than routine and repetitive low-level tasks. This scenario has sparked concerns that in the future, businesses would no longer need to hire people because everything will be automated.
However, automation can be costly and not every business process can be automated. There are also strategies behind business automation that makes it not an attractive option for some organizations.
If you are juggling your budget to get the most out of various technologies and automation is in the pipeline for you, where should you focus? Here are the things that your IT should be automating right now.
Business Automation Should Be Part of Your Strategy
There are very compelling reasons why you should automate.
- First, you can move away from manual processes and make everything more efficient and less prone to errors. Your employees are able to focus on more pressing tasks so they’re happier and more able to manage their time.
- It also reduces costs while allowing your organization to scale up.
- But more importantly, automation sets the stage for other innovations such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- Automating your processes will also force your organization to take a hard look at the problems and inefficiencies that plague the processes. As such, it will increase productivity across the board.
However, what is happening right now is that teams often carry out business automation. One department will automate the services and processes they control. But it stops there. For instance, automation in HR will only benefit those in the department. Other employees won’t.
This is why you should make business automation a company-wide strategy so that everybody reaps its benefits.
What Areas of Your Business Should You Automate?
There are business processes where automation is a natural fit. For instance, service inquiries, training, help desk, operations, IT procurement, project administration, and reporting.
Automating these processes is very easy to do and can serve as the first step to proving your case for business automation. There are several processes that are the best candidates for automation, including:
1. Customer Service
Did you know that 80 percent of customer service heads say that a fifth of the support requests they get are repetitive but these are often very easy to resolve?
Given this statistic, if you automate customer service just for these repetitive tickets, you can save around 12 minutes an hour, or roughly 1 hour and 36 minutes in one workday. Assuming of course that you spend the same amount of time on every ticket.
What’s more, automating these customer service tasks will ensure faster replies to customers and as such can lead to higher satisfaction. Your agents will also have an easier time being free of repetitive tickets.
2. HR
When it comes to recruitment, HR is often bogged down by things they have to do to hire the right person for the job. Fortunately, you can automate some of these tasks such as interviewing by phone or scheduling interviews. You can also use business automation with artificial intelligence to help you assess candidates.
Outside of recruitment, other administrative tasks can also be automated. For example, computing leave benefits or seeing how much vacation time an employee has earned over the years.
3. Device provisioning
Jamf Pro allows you to automate the setup and management processes on a Mac computer. Or if you’re using Windows, you can do the same with the Autopilot feature on Windows 10.
These provisioning tools will help turn any work computer into a fully managed device. And these automation tools will help you avoid doing a lot of things, including creating, managing, and deploying images.
Another gizmo you can use includes tools that will test if an app is compatible with your system.
4. Payments
When it comes to automating payments, there’s an app for that. When we say payments we mean travel and expense systems that wastes a lot of your employees’ time.
Box, a cloud storage service, can scan receipts and scrape information from them.
Spend, an app that you can connect to your bank accounts and credit card, so that it can categorize your expenses automatically.
SAP Concur, which collects transactions from car rental and hotel bookings, handle foreign exchange, and make payments to your bank account or to your credit card provider.
According to McKinsey Digital, you can automate around 27 percent of your finance-related tasks. You can use artificial intelligence to automate your IT operations. What are the tasks that you can leave on their own now if you have the right systems?
- Software installation
- Hardware installation
- Folder and file management
- Server monitoring
- User onboarding
- Batch processing
- Active Directory management
For instance, if you are able to automate your IT, you will not have to deal with employees who ask for a password reset. They can just do it on their own.
6. Security
Automation in security comes in several forms. One way that you can automate security is by having a tool that will monitor suspicious activities on a machine, and then locking the device to prevent compromise and block the hacker.
7. DevOps and testing
Automation is a big part of DevOps, where too many humans can slow down app development. For instance, test automation can help you create test environments without getting any of your IT staff involved. You can use containers, which isolates your environments and allows for faster testing.
There is a lot of work involved with test automation, but done right, it is well worth the effort. A big part of the prep involves the creation of test cases.
Contact Four Cornerstone and Get Started with Business Automation Today
When it comes to automation, you will need to do it right, or else it won’t provide you with a lot of value. This is where Four Cornerstone comes in. We have worked with different companies from a variety of industries. We are up-to-date with technologies that you can directly or indirectly use in your automation journeys.
Do automation right the first time around. Contact us at +1 (817) 377-1144.
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