5 Benefits of Business Process Automation

When you started your business, you were likely just excited to get to the point where you were turning a profit. But now that you have all the kinks hammered out, it’s more about scaling and getting your business to a point where it runs like a machine. Getting to that point means increasing efficiency and documenting your processes.

Business process automation (BPA) allows you to manage your data and processes in such a way that reduces your costs, resources and investment. By automating key business processes with technology you can significantly increase efficiency and scalability.

How does this work and why should you include it in your business? Keep reading.

Eliminate Paper Administration

Not only is eliminating paper good for the environment, but it also supercharges efficiency. Consider the following statistics:

• Filing papers costs on average $20 per document.
• Every misfiled document costs a firm $125 in lost productivity

Those costs don’t include the cost to print the document and the loss of productivity as that paper travels around the office. By not having information readily available, a salesperson has to personally deliver information to an office administrator, who then has to translate that document into something digital. This holds up the proposal process and costs you time in increased employee costs while increasing the risk of losing that business to a competitor with a speedier process. However, with BPA you can completely eliminate the paper in the middle by making business information readily available. This means that a salesperson out on the road can take notes for clients or prospects that are immediately available to the assistant in the office for creating a proposal. Taking it a step further – all of this information is available to business executives and ownership.

Increased efficiency

Going paperless is just part of increasing the efficiency within your organization. You’ll also benefit from greater customer satisfaction and employee happiness. In a customer-centric world, businesses are under more and more pressure to perform and be efficient. If a Medical office user is struggling to access patient records because of a lacking central application, patients have to wait longer. And when patients wait longer, they become unhappy. But when BPA kicks in via customized applications – things can change significantly. All of a sudden that patient has access to their information via an online portal and rather than calling to get her records, she is already informed of all the information she needs. What would have been a 10-minute phone call decreases to a 2-minute scheduling call – which frees up an employee’s time to better serve other patients.  This same concept can be applied across industries in numerous other scenarios and the results are pretty significant.

All aboard

Once you have automated your business processes, you’ll need to integrate the technology with your existing applications. You didn’t go through all that trouble to create an application that doesn’t also take the data from your other technology, right? Otherwise, you’re just creating more data entry for your employees and making technology adoption frustrating rather than simple. From Quickbooks and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software integrations, customized software can be built so that all your databases and applications speak to one another. So often we hear about revolutionary SaaS applications, but the integrations are typically lacking. With a customized solution, business owners can close the gap and truly empower their users with integrated data, but also have all that data in a central location for simple analytics and assessment.

Scalability

By automating workflows and centralizing data, company ownership can make intelligent decisions based on the data that is available to them via reports and analytics. But BPA is even more than efficiency and bottom line. When you have eliminated paper and automated your standard workflows, your data becomes a valuable resource that you can use in order to make your future growth plans into reality even faster. This means that opening a new location becomes much simpler since every process is automated into an integrated software solution. Rather than setting up file systems at new locations and wondering how workflows will happen – it all goes into central software and information is available across locations and centrally for the corporate office.

Business Intelligence

By introducing information and data focus into your business, you can step back and analyze the health of each business sector. Taking the time to do this empowers owners to see what the current strengths and weaknesses are with a simple glance at a dashboard:

• Accountability for approval processes and other job functions
• KPI (key performance indicator) statistics like sales and conversions
• Understanding where you can go from here…

Business intelligence is something that many organizations talk about, but very few actually leverage. Once data like this is available to you, it empowers you to make the tweaks that matter and understand how to approach making further improvements.

Very few organizations have a concrete understanding of what BPA can do for their organization. But once you understand how it can revolutionize your business, it becomes an exciting prospect.

If you’re wondering what a proprietary software application could do for your organizational health and growth, make sure that you have a clear picture of the future of your company and consider how an experienced, innovative partner can help you achieve those goals and support your vision.