Welcome to this post on The Concept of Business Process Automation, via Afrokonnect. Business Process Automation also known as BPA is a very critical aspect when it comes to increased revenue and productivity in businesses, but according to a study by Forrester titled “The Sorry State of Digital Transformation” – over 22% of business in our modern age still don’t have any form of automation in their business operation.
Having a good business is synonymous to having satisfied customers, hence the reason you must ensure that your organization’s process is seamless and Business process automation is a cheat code to attaining global reach in your business category.
What is Business Process Automation (BPA)?
This is the process of using technology to automate certain tasks which are recurring. Hence, ensuring that the human workforce are assigned to more critical and productive tasks. Automation of business tasks has its benefits namely:
- Reduces costs: i.e. lesser employment of human Labour.
- Increases efficiency of workers as they are designated to lesser and more productive tasks, etc.
Businesses have started rapid transition from manual processes to digital, and BPA is one of the key aspects to ensure that your organization’s operations are streamlined and more efficient. Artificial Intelligence is the foundation behind Business process automation as an automated system can receive inquiries and problems from customers and either direct to the right source or solve their problems without any human agent getting involved, i.e. BPA are mostly used by organization to start a process while the human workforce is used to complete the process.
Processes that can be automated within an organization
1) Employees Documentation:
A big organization with 10000+ staff may previously be struggling to have proper documentation of all their employees but presently software, such as Gusto and Collage have changed the game and made it easy to add new employees into the system with less hassle.
2) Creation of Invoices:
Creation of Software such as PayPal and Harvest have proven to address the issues of misplaced invoices as the software can help in the creation and sending of invoices; It can also help in monitoring late payments from clients and send reminders hence ensuring transparency.
3) Tracking of Work hours:
Struggling to track your work hour and how much time you send on other activities in a day? Well, there is a solution as MileIQ can be used to monitor one’s work hour and track the activities you engaged on while on your phone.
4) Accounting and Book-Keeping:
This process is one in which human error can be very fatal to the organization’s operation and you would not want to risk it. This is why automation is very essential and a software called Bench can aid a business in keeping their books up to date as it draws out transaction history from the company’s bank account and provides detailed books at the end of each month.
5) Storage of Receipts:
Anything stored in papers are 80% likely to be misplaced and when keeping receipts in paper form in a big organization – it is sure to leave such business in ruins.
The most painful part is the loss of receipts when the company is about to be audited as there is no proof of a transaction hence leading to a suspicion of fraud on the part of the auditor. To automate this process I recommend that you use Shoeboxed; it has an unusual name but it drives its purpose as tracks and log documents in an accessible dashboard.
6) Recruitment of Staff:
Needing new staff in your organization? ZipRecruiter is here for you as it uses its special technology to send the description of staff that’ll be needed to various recruitment sites, collects applications from various persons and aids in sifting the applications and providing the recruiter with the best candidates to choose from.
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7) Training of New staff:
Once the recruitment process is complete and you need them getting trained but due to the large amount of new employees and less amount of staff to train them, it is important to automate the process and the perfect application for your will be Trainual as it provides trainees with manuals, tracks their progress and ensures that they are ready to work.
8) Social Media Marketing:
This was extensively explained in my previous article which can be found here. A big organization with a large social media presence may struggle in engaging with their users so applications like Buffer and Hootsuite can help in scheduling posts on your social media channels.
Others include:
- E-Mail Marketing: MailChimp, Drip, and GetResponse.
- Customer Support: Tawk.
Benefits of Business Process Automation
1) Increased Efficiency and Productivity:
When automating your business it entails that more hands are removed from redundant operations and are assigned to more crucial processes hence improving efficiency and increasing the productivity of the organization. The addition of humans alongside the supervision of machines ensures that ideas being promulgated are data-driven hence ensuring less mistakes.
2) Improved Security:
The days of using paper-works in keeping important documents of your organization are over and the act of using that method ensures that your company’s operation is vulnerable to theft or any natural disaster. But automating that process ensures that those vices cant affect it and the addition of multiple layers of security on the software holding those documents ensure that are safe and ineligible to theft.
3) Better co-operation between departments:
When departments are bringing in conflicting data it causes mistrust between them and lack of cooperation begins to show forth and most times this is due to a human error, but automation of the business processes ensures that there are minimal mistakes hence ensuring greater co-operation between participating departments.
4) Saving cost:
Most people are complain that the introduction of automation will take their jobs but if you notice businesses aren’t complaining because they know that this will ensure more profit for them.
As automation reduces the staff needed it also reduces the amount to be paid to staff hence more profits for the organizations. Most organizations prefers automation to human Labour as Ai is immune to mistakes while human beings are prone to mistakes.
Others include:
- Lesser mistakes
- Accurate and data-driven insights
- Streamlined processes.
Conclusion about the Concept of Business Process Automation
There is a major misunderstanding when it comes to Business process automation;
The plan is not to eradicate the human Labour but make their presence in such businesses more valuable and efficient. Automation of businesses can help in bringing out the creative spark in humans that has been suppressed due to overload of work hence more productivity, efficiency and increased revenue. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you another time on Afrokonnect.ng.
