12 Key Benefits of Business Process Automation

Digital process automation brings innovative software and technologies together to improve manual tasks. Automation eliminates the manual effort needed to manage paper documents. 

Instead, digital process automation streamlines these tasks for greater efficiency and improved outcomes. While advances in automation might have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago, today, they have become standard practice for many organisations.

Businesses are starting to automate their processes to increase productivity levels, enhance the customer experience, and properly allocate their most valuable resources.

Why business automations important?

Automation is incredibly important for modern businesses, given that it significantly reduces time and resources, while also providing an opportunity to focus on more essential, value-added work. This is done by standardising common business processes, establishing greater security parameters, and supporting maximum operational efficiency.

 On top of completing manual tasks much faster and with fewer mistakes, automations trusted to deliver high-quality, consistent results that provide useful insights that might have been overlooked. Process automation is the gateway to a more efficient, well-rounded workplace, and one that prioritises the experience of its employees and customers alike.

12 benefits of automating processes within your business

The benefits of automating processes are wide-reaching, from more collaboration between teams to streamlined tasks. And the best part? All operational processes can be automated, which means your business has tons of room to improve and move beyond its manual processes.

1. Increased productivity

Whenever complex or cumbersome manual processes are reassigned to digital solutions, multiple tasks can be managed simultaneously. For example, instead of a 1) records request and 2) records retrieval process that could take weeks manually, digital forms with an automated records request and retrieval process are lightning-fast and can happen in tandem. Automating your most challenging and time-consuming tasks means work is completed quickly and with notably less mistakes.

2. Stronger security

If your business is still using physical paper for its recordkeeping, you may not realise the security risk this poses for your office. Paper documents are much more vulnerable to being stolen or corrupted, as well as being ruined in a flood, a fire, or other unforeseen occurrence. With that said, automating processes enables additional security measures that safeguard your most confidential information. Digital Process Automation (DPA) technology helps you store content digitally and protect data using multiple layers of security such as password-specific logins and verified user access.

3. Streamlined compliance

Compliance is a vital component of any successful organisation, as it ensures you’re in line with regulations mandated by your business’s governing body. If your business fails to comply with these regulations, the repercussions can prove both costly and inconvenient. Fortunately, process automation benefits also extend to compliance measures.

By digitalising and automating processes, you’re automatically creating a record of the details associated with the process. Having this information automatically stored is incredibly useful during potential records audit.

4. Greater operational efficiency

Because digital process automation is hands-off, there’s no need to continually check whether one task is progressing to the next (i.e., the system handles all of this for you). What’s more, DPA also has the capacity to identify and correct errors or bottlenecks within your operations, which contributes to greater efficiency and far less effort needed from your employees. And when your business is running more effectively — thanks to these automated, dependable processes — it translates to improved performance for the whole team.

5. Better collaboration

These days, the most productive offices are those who’ve made an intentional shift toward automation, thus simplifying their daily tasks and fostering better collaboration between teams. Another benefit of automating business processes is that you can schedule reminders and update teams on relevant tasks, which makes collaboration between employees so much easier and more organised.

6. Enhanced service delivery

Your employees are an invaluable asset to your business, and when you automate your processes via digital transformation, you’re indicating you care about their overall experience. Since digital automation eliminates tedious manual tasks from workloads, you can turn your attention toward activities that provide a better result for your customers.

7. Cost savings

Every business would likely jump at the chance to cut down on their overhead costs —and luckily, there are a number of financial gains to enjoy once you switch to DPA. That’s because when business processes are controlled manually, there’s a much greater chance for resources to be wasted. But with the efficiency of digital process automation, cost operations reduced (which then positively impacts your profit margins, as well). In other words, automation utilises your core resources in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

8. Reduced errors

Regardless of how skilled or seasoned your employees are, mistakes are bound to happen from time to time. Slip-ups, delays, and inefficiencies are all too common with manual record keeping, and yet, you shouldn’t underestimate the impact of these errors. That’s why it’s necessary to remove the risk of errors as much as possible, which is best achieved through process automation tools. Incorporating automation into your workflows can dramatically decrease the likelihood of any missteps and avoid redundancies at the same time.

9. Reliable insights

When managers can actively monitor the completion of a business process (and understand the required steps within that process), it’s considerably easier to make adjustments and secure better outcomes. By leveraging automation, business leaders can really dig into these processes to gain reliable insights and analyse data at a deeper level. How these insights evolve will be entirely up to you, but they present an opportunity to pivot within your current policies or procedures to then improve your office environment.

10. Standardised processes

Manual processes tend to get confusing, since there can be quite a few employees and stakeholders who are involved. Every person has their own habits and ways of handling things, not to mention additional tasks they’re attempting to oversee. This leaves room for discrepancies within your records, which few businesses can afford to deal with. The good news is, a benefit of automating processes is that it provides a shortcut to standardisation, meaning more consistency in your workplace and ensuring no critical steps are missed.

11. Increased transparency

Automation software is great at offering visibility into your processes through customisable dashboards. For example, you can easily track a range of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your current or continued processes, giving you a better sense of office performance and revealing which areas need improvement. When your team has access to this level of transparency, it will undoubtedly have a positive effect; employees can stay informed on their individual (or collective) assignments and have more accountability for their personal progress.

12. Heightened morale

Team morale is sometimes an overlooked advantage of business process automation, though its influence can be big. Automation relieves a lot of monotony from the workday and promotes a ‘friction-free’ office where employees feel more effective in their roles. Similarly, approvals happen faster with automation, so workers aren’t left waiting around (or reminding their managers about these loose ends). And research shows when teams have more time to spend on the most rewarding aspects of their jobs, morale and retention increase exponentially.

How to automate processes with Sharp

While there are certainly different approaches to automation, Sharp has a range of Software solutions that continue to be a smart choice. Whether you’re looking for finance automation, document automation or to automate repetitive business tasks, we can help.

 Talk to us today to find the right automation software and services that can increase the speed and scale of your business or check out our software range here.

*blog originally published here https://www.imageapi.com/blog/process-automation-benefits