You’ve likely heard terms like “workplace automation” more and more over the last few years. As technology develops, and as more business is conducted online, the opportunity to reduce tedious and repetitive tasks through automation is growing constantly.
But what exactly is business process automation?
Simply put, it’s integrating various systems to work together, triggering actions that would traditionally be carried out by a human being. While the implementation can get pretty technical, the purpose is quite straightforward!
The applications of such integrations are far too numerous to list out, and each specific business will have unique challenges, goals, and platforms to contend with.
Here’s a broad example:
You may have a form on your website that people can fill out to contact your company. Normally, this form would just send you an email with the entered information. With automation, this form could also:
- Populate your CRM
- Tag the email address as a prospective lead
- Create a calendar event to follow up
- Auto-reply with a thank you message or follow up questions
All of this happens without any additional action on your part, saving you time, payroll hours, and the stress of keeping track of the manual steps it would take to achieve the same results.
The point is to reduce the amount of human effort expended on tasks that can be easily completed by computers.
You don’t need to manually type the same customer information into five different platforms if a few lines of code can get it done for you.
This same basic idea extends across industries and into all kinds of different tasks. Most of our clientele comes to us with a specific problem to solve, and we’re typically able to find solutions to even the most complicated challenges. Through an iterative process of continuous improvement, the practice of business process automation also uncovers – or creates – new opportunities to save time and money.
So many of the repetitive tasks we perform don’t actually require a human touch. Instead of using our minds to solve problems, think creatively, communicate with others, and drive innovation, we spend our time and energy filling out spreadsheets and retyping the same emails… Driving up overhead in the process.
Of course, not EVERY element of a process should be automated.
Humanity is still important to doing business, but even simple steps like email templates that auto-populate with a customer’s info, ready for you to customize and send along, build efficiency into your daily operations that stacks up over time. Expand this same idea into other areas, and you’ll begin to see just how much time and effort could be saved through relatively simple automations.
We’ll dig deeper into how to achieve such efficiency in later posts, and explore more of the types of processes that could benefit from automation. The main point here is that business process automation has two primary goals: freeing up people to do what they do best, and making your business more profitable through efficiency.
Humans are creative and dynamic, and their talents are often underutilized – especially in small businesses with limited staff – on tasks that machines can perform not just “better,” but in more quantity and at greater speeds.
All of this happens without any additional action on your part, saving you time, payroll hours, and the stress of keeping track of the manual steps it would take to achieve the same results.
The point is to reduce the amount of human effort expended on tasks that can be easily completed by computers.
When you lean on automation for “low-thought” kinds of actions, you unshackle people’s minds and allow them to thrive.
Ultimately, business process automation is a way to give people their skills back, and a path to scaling operations to handle more clients, make more sales, and generate more revenue.
If you have any questions about how parts of your business can be automated, how it all works, or how we can help, contact Metagrate today!