Thank you for Subscribing to Business Management Review Weekly Brief
I agree We use cookies on this website to enhance your user experience. By clicking any link on this page you are giving your consent for us to set cookies. More info
Thank you for Subscribing to Business Management Review Weekly Brief
By
Business Management Review | Monday, September 12, 2022
Companies can apply business automation to myriad tasks, projects, and processes
FREMONT, CA: Business automation tools help companies and customers automate repetitive, day-to-day tasks. They free up employees to concentrate on more strategic projects and offer an auditable trail of data that teams can utilize to make more informed decisions and apply persistent controls.
Companies can apply business automation to myriad tasks, projects, and processes. The key advantages usually include time and cost savings, eliminating errors, and setting up controls to ensure policies are followed.
Stay ahead of the industry with exclusive feature stories on the top companies, expert insights and the latest news delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe today.
How Do Business Automation Tools Work?
Business automation tools utilize technology to take the manual labor out of day-to-day business processes. From human resources to sales to auditing, almost every corner of a business's operations can benefit from business automation.
Using business automation, companies can eliminate the need for manual labor while improving and simplifying the individual steps that make up different processes. For instance, by automating the preliminary job candidate selection process, companies can save substantial manhours that would have otherwise been spent giving all accepted applications an initial review.
Beyond replacing paper and PDFs with digitized data, business automation factors the key steps in a company's workflow and makes these processes cheaper, faster, and less error-prone. By bringing these procedures onto one or more technology platforms, companies also get finer reporting capabilities and the capacity to analyze data over time, then employ it for more enlightened decision-making.
Types of Business Automation
By making specific business processes "automatic," business automation eradicates repetitive tasks, decreases hours wasted on redundant tasks and helps enhance overall productivity. For these and other grounds, an increasing number of organizations are transfusing more and more business automation into their operations.
Following are four types of business automation, how they operate, and when they should be used.
Marketing Automation
Marketing is a significant business activity that can be laborious and costly, making it ripe for simplification through automation.
Through marketing automation tools (usually software), companies can generate highly qualified leads ready for sales engagement. These tools also offer a framework for teams to target, build, execute and measure the success of marketing campaigns—taking the difficulty out of lead qualification and conversion.
Some marketing automation software can automatize email marketing processes, enabling companies to better align these campaigns with the efforts of their sales teams. Companies can also employ marketing automation tools to track and measure a prospect's activity, identify when a lead fulfills known buyer-readiness conditions and deliver leads to sales as soon as they meet predefined criteria.
Marketing automation is beneficial for companies of all sizes. For instance, a smaller company may employ the software to develop, generate and send monthly emails to convey related content or offers to a client distribution list. This process can considerably decrease the number of hours spent on customer "touches" over a year.
A larger firm may want to take advantage of extended marketing automation features, like the dynamic segmenting of an extensive customer database, targeting customers with automated messages through social media and text, or custom-built workflows that adjust with the company's marketing processes.
By automating online marketing and guide generation campaigns, companies can decrease the cost of developing and running these campaigns. This, successively, helps create a higher measurable return on investment (ROI) for each campaign.
Accounting and Bookkeeping Automation
By automating their accounting & bookkeeping functions, companies can save substantial time on accounts receivable (AR), accounts payable (AP), credit card applications, data backup, billing, collections, and other financial processes that must be managed on a daily or weekly basis.
They can also implement automation to core processes such as closing the books, general ledger (GL) management, and bank account management. By eliminating manual elements from the accounting team's work—and handling the number-crunching and transactional work—automation makes a complicated process more manageable.
Take accounts payable management, for instance. About 55% of companies still manage their AP processes manually. Utilizing an automated system for this area of business finance management saves money and time: Data capture is automated, invoices are automatically matched to documents, and approvals are electronically routed. It also decreases data errors and helps prevent fraud using a system of "touchless" controls that happen behind the scenes.
Combined, these functionalities translate into important benefits. AP automation software lowers manual tasks and frees up cash flow. Teams can present invoices, manage approvals, and process payments using a single platform with quick approvals and better visibility and control over crucial financial processes and data.
Accounting is time-consuming for companies of all sizes and includes numerous manual steps. By automating a few or all of those steps, companies can liberate time for major tasks such as analysis, strategy, and collaboration among team members.
Process Automation
Business process automation (BPA) goes above basic automation and integrates applications to support companies' better value and efficiency. A subset of Robotic process automation (RPA) concentrates on automating routine tasks, while BPA helps companies get more out of their automation investments. BPA does this by aggregating data across several sources to develop a manual analysis that would be difficult to attain.
Companies are utilizing BPA for functions like:
• Automated order entry
• Email automation
• Automated batch processing
• Automated file transfers
• Automated report generation and distribution
From hiring to email management to accounting, about every corner of a business's operations would advantage from BPA, which replaces manual labor and simplifies and improves the workflow steps that make up the process. When a business process is automated, total steps in the existing workflow—email chains and document transfers, for example—are eradicated.
HR Automation
Hiring fresh employees is a multi-step process that begins with an online job ad or recruitment effort and closes when the employee is officially onboarded. Several steps in this process can be automated.
An HRMS(human resources management system) is a helpful tool. These systems automate the candidate management process as part of broader functionalities. This relates especially to automated employment offers sent straight to candidates, which helps share roles to fill with the outside world and current employees who may wish to apply for internal jobs or make referrals.
An HRMS is valuable to companies where candidate experience is a primary concern—from applying to resume management to interview scheduling to making offers through onboarding. This automation allows HR teams to process job applications, handle payroll, manage current and past employee data, improve user provisioning, and administer benefits.
Since HRMS automates all facets of human resources management, including onboarding and payroll, it offers complete analytics across these processes. It also automates core HR processes such as managing employee time off, benefits, and other fundamentals. Employing analytics, these systems also offer critical insights into a company's workforce productivity and efficiency.
Other HR tasks that software can manage incorporate:
• Employee record retention and retrieval.
• Reviews of job applications submitted online.
• Employee tax form management.
• Distribution & signing of work contracts, confidentiality agreements, waivers, and other fresh-employee documentation.
• Advantage enrollment eligibility.
• Training needs (e.g., when an employee moves into a new position).
Charged with evaluating employees' work, HR departments can employ the system's data to track all tasks of each employee and produce ready-to-use reports for managers and leaders. If, for instance, employee turnover in the warehouse has become a serious problem over the last 90 days, the company can employ an HR tool to pinpoint the particular problem and make better hiring decisions.
More in News