You are all familiar with Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times, right? Here, we refer to the factory scene where laborers, including Charlie Chaplin, are seen carrying out manual fixing and nailing chains of items. And, you do remember how the process got disrupted because the laborers were too slow to keep up with the pace. Now, let’s overlap the same situation with the present-day workplace condition – find any semblance?
Needless to say, the world is moving at a faster pace, and competition is nothing short of a rat race. A minute of lapse, and you lost your game forever. That puts enterprises under tremendous pressure. They need to cater to changing customer needs right on time before their competitors remain ahead in the race. And there can be no room for errors or delays. But, relying heavily on the human workforce can never guarantee you the seamless workflow which has become the need of the hour.
Automation seems like the perfect answer to fit the needs of modern times. But making a dramatic transitional switch to automation is not devoid of challenges. One of them being, lack of prerequisite automation skills. In a recent survey, at least 50% of companies surveyed agreed that lack of automation skillsets deterred their enterprise automation adoption. The following two hindrances were – Technology Complexity and Lack of Budget. Approximately 42% of the respondents cited the first reason for not choosing automation, wherein 41% of them gave the second reason.
However, the same survey concluded that enterprise automation awarded them ”n” number of benefits. For example, 83% of respondents who already opted for automation in at least one of their business processes enjoyed improved efficiency and saved valuable time.
These figures are promising and call for serious consideration for companies to adopt automation as soon as possible. This article will give you enough reasons to elucidate the above point.
Let’s begin with –
Understanding The Problem Areas Requiring Immediate Remediation
Identifying the critical areas in your enterprise that call for your immediate attention is shared across all businesses. Traditionally, the human workforce was the key to catering tasks and solving operational problems. But was your resource competent enough to keep up with increasing demand? Kindly note, we are not undermining the value of the human workforce at all. Instead, we are trying to point out that there’s so much a human can do, or their brain can process at any given point in time. Expecting them to deliver responsibilities at lightning speed would be wrong. But the competitive market demands speed and accuracy. Handling ”n” number of clients, improving products and services to changing market demand, addressing ”n” number of customer queries in real-time and making data-driven decisions can be pretty taxing. On a granular level, these responsibilities might not sound humongous. But as your company expands into other verticals and the internal processes become more complicated, handling all these jobs becomes a back-breaking task. Yes, humans are capable of multitasking. Then again, humans are prone to making errors. One teeny tiny mistake and the entire process can fall apart. You need more helping hands to identify and solve the issue at hand. That can easily disrupt other operations. Not to mention the valuable time lost in-between.
So, the stories are familiar for every enterprise – every area has common pain points, and they revolve around outdated, time-consuming processes, including several human touchpoints. Hence, streamlining the whole system becomes imperative today. And, the answer to that is – automation.
This is an overview of the common problems most enterprises currently face, especially those who stay away from automation. Hence, big brains must come together and pinpoint problem areas and look for automated solutions. And, the first area of concern would be –
1. Costly Human Errors
As mentioned earlier, to err is human. That goes beyond missing deadlines and losing important files. Unfortunately, the outcome of such errors can become your company’s worst nightmare. The cost of rectifications can reach the sky, but the lost client due to the error will be irreplaceable. But, traditional methods of business entailed manual labor using human hands. Even coming to crucial business decisions required two or more human brains to mining data and fetch information. Handling piles of files or sorting through excel sheets of data sounds quite overwhelming. Forget about timely delivery – consider that one error in data analysis can cost the company billions of dollars in loss. One wrong piece of information results in many bad business decisions. And, before you have the time to rectify the errors, your business opportunity is long gone.
Is there any need to elucidate further how damaging it could be for your business when you rely heavily on the human workforce?
On the other hand, an automated system will be programmed so that every process will be completed on time minus errors. Replacing humans with automation makes business processes smoother and faster. That increases the overall productivity and efficiency of the company. And, it is usually less expensive compared to keeping three or more human resources for the same process. Also, no error rectification charges to consider.
2. Valuable Time Lost In Manual Tasks
Documentation, compilation and reporting sound pretty laborious – isn’t it? If your company is still dwelling in the ”Paper-Age”, you are wasting valuable time documenting and compiling bundles of data. And valuable time lost in actual work – data mining and analyzing. When you need specific data to make a crucial business decision, your deadline will be long gone in collating data and analyzing them. Also, these manual tasks reserve one or more human resources permanently. Not only are you eating away their valuable time, but you are also restricting their professional growth. When you can efficiently utilize them for something better, you make them work like manual laborers. And, obviously, there are costly human errors to consider.
Time to wake up and bring some profound changes in your organizational structure. You can start by automating these manual tasks and rid your employees of this unnecessary animal burden. Allow them the time and space to grow professionally and contribute better to your business apart from data filing.
Bring automation into the scene and witness the change. Your documentation and data filing will be done in no time, minus errors. And, when you need to refer back to specific files, you can have them with just a click of the button.
3. Poor Customer Service
If you are in the service sector, you should know that poor customer service can be highly costly for your business. Even if your business is focused on product development, the untimely address of customer inquiries can spread a bad word for your company.
Today, the entire world is connected digitally. Garnering a poor online reputation for your company can break your business forever. It doesn’t take a second for the word to spread on social media, and soon, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram will be busy talking about how poor your services are. So, undermining customer needs is the worst thing you can do for your business.
Customer is the king – always remember! But human customer executives cannot cater to thousands of customer inquiries at a time. Most of them are piled up with manual paperwork, so prompt and timely delivery of services becomes a luxury for them. On the other hand, most human executives lack the required knowledge or information to address customer queries in any shape and form. Needless to say, most customers are left pissed with such a display of inadequacy on customer executives. Without even realizing it, you are pushing them away from your business. Do you think your company can survive longer post this?
Hence, you need to gear up and bring profound change to your enterprise by automating the customer service section. Integrating business automation software into the existing interface can serve as an extra hand for the customer care executives. Automated calls and email options or auto-responses to general inquiries unburden the executives and allow them to handle more sensitive cases. Timely response to bulk customer queries gets sorted with an automated process, and customers are left with a big smile on their faces. Even if an executive forgets to inform a customer about delivery or pick up, the automated system will do that for them.
So, no more excuses of lapses or system glitch for poor service.
4. Security Issues
There are security risks associated with manual or outdated processes. Especially when most ventures have opted for remote working or hybrid working, security issues regarding sensitive company information have raised alarm bells. Manual processes with multiple human touchpoints also add additional risks such as communication breakdown and data loss. Furthermore, data sharing via shared or public networks remains vulnerable to cyber thefts. Hence, a robust and secured infrastructure has become the need of the hour. An automated system can warranty that safety and security -how? Let’s elucidate further – enabling automation cut down human touchpoints and ward off any risk of human error or sensitive data falling into the wrong hands. An automated system ensures data and documents to be shared with only designated employees. Moreover, your client and customer data remain secure, and only those people whom the company assigns can see that information. It will not be open for access by all and sundry.
5. Poor Decision-Making
Again, as mentioned earlier, managing multiple clients and projects consume valuable time. And, every single client project involves numerous stages, documenting being one of them. Relying on the human workforce means you employ at least one human head dedicated to filing, recording, and compiling client data. But you are dealing with just one client, right? Even small ventures handle two or more clients’ projects simultaneously. Then again, essential processes like collating company analytics, driving current client growth or prospecting new clients do not attract your immediate attention. The reason being, you are more preoccupied with delivering current clients’ projects and catering to their demands. These old-school approaches to business can easily divert your mind away from revenue-generating operations. Also, coming to data-driven decisions will become a challenge when you have to rely on human brains again to fetch data.
What if all these data were readily available just when you needed them? Report automation technology can help you with that without disrupting other workflows. You don’t need to shift two or more employees from their KRAs to collate data for you because you need them instantly to make some decisions. Just log in to the system, and you have everything sorted the way you need. Data collected in real-time with fewer human touchpoints will fetch accurate and relevant results. Hence, decision-making will become more prompt, data-driven, and effective.
6. Poor Maintenance Of Financial Reports
This is yet another area where relying on the human workforce can spell disaster for businesses in the long run. Proper maintenance of invoices and financial reports of the company is an arduous task. But, when you have piles of invoices to document and file, coming from clients, suppliers and distributors, the situation can go out of hand completely. And, one mistake in inputting any figures can reflect wrongly on the annual reports. That will have dire implications for strategy building, budget allocating, and decision-making. Automated systems like SAP can address these challenges quickly and make the entire process seamless and errorless. More importantly, you will get an accurate picture of where your business stands at the end of the Financial Year.
7. Hindrance In Business Growth
You have a proper vision plan in place when you launch your business. And, that is – business growth. However, a rapid growth rate will only add to the number of tasks and complexities. Unavailability of resources and inefficient staff can add to your never-ending worries. More importantly, if you are still accustomed to the historical approach to operating your business, you are likely to always stay behind in the competitive curve. Only proper business process automation can maximize your growth rate minus hindrances and improve your operational efficiency. When you automate most of the laborious processes, you leave yourself enough bandwidth to focus on more critical tasks like R&D. Even your workforce can contribute better to your business than just filing documents.
Conclusion
If you take an eagle-eye view of your company, you will find many processes that can be best handled with automation. The seven points are just the tip of the iceberg to open your eyes to the many benefits of an automated business process. There are other perks to enjoy. And, it has become imperative for companies to adapt to the changing technology to stay ahead in the market. Here, a manual or old-school approach will not help your enterprise ride the tides safely.