6 Reasons Why You Should Automate Your Business

Posted on August 02, 2016 by Andreas Jones, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

Business process automation is the process where businesses use information technology to contain costs on their business operations. Business process automation consists of restructuring labor resources, integrating applications, and using software applications throughout the organization.

An example of basic business process automation is preparing a check for settling expenses or paying salaries. Earlier on typewriters were used in preparing checks, but nowadays this process in a business normally uses a software solution. This process can include the automatic printing of vouchers together with the checks and at the same time post this information on the ledger system that makes preparing financial reports very easy. Business process automation decreases the number of man hours invested in executing a single business process.

Business automation has many varied benefits. Below are the 6 most important business automation benefits.

Improved Decision Making and Strategy Support
A practical business automation strategy will enable your business to respond very quickly to its business environment, demands, and expectations. A natural response to this kind of strategy is to improve the supply chain management and the processes around this chain. As a result, your business will always be ahead of the competition, delivering better services while covering a larger market portion. A business automation strategy that is tailor-made to integrate with your business processes will be effective in increasing productivity, while lowering costs.

Lower Cost of Business Operations
Business automation has an immediate effect on the manpower cost incurred by your business. Together with this, a practical strategy will eliminate process redundancy that slows down response time and increases turnaround time. Lower manpower hours combined with faster delivery of services and products will immediately reduce your business overhead costs and increase the number of services or products being sold.

Profit Analysis
Every business struggles to understand which of its products or services sell faster than others. Market variables and dynamics also influence which products or services are sold regionally or seasonally. Gender, age and buying behavior also plays a significant role in the sale process.

Business process automation will help your business to gather and analyze this data and offer very practical solutions. You can recognize which goods or services to sell when, where and to whom. No longer will your business be weighed down by redundant or slow moving goods and services.

Every business owner who has a plan to see their enterprise grow and dominate its market must incorporate business process automation strategies. It is worth all the effort!

Minimizes Human Error
Before the widespread use of the computer and other hi-tech devices, businesses suffered huge losses as a result of human error. Although mundane tasks such as data entry may appear insignificant at first, a worker can tire quickly, thereby increasing the chances of making erroneous entries. The trickiest bit is that it is hard to appropriate corrections even if you sense wrong entries because you can’t precisely tell where you made a mistake. It is, however, easy to prevent such errors by automating data entry. In some sensitive sectors such as health care, human error can have fatal consequences.

Saves Time It is obvious that business automation saves time. Machines such as computers enter and compute data faster than a person doing it manually. In the same vein, hi-tech devices do not make mistakes if programmed properly and because of this, you do not have to spend time fixing errors. As digital devices take over boring and/or routine operations, people can do more important tasks that machines cannot do.

As such, organizations are able to accomplish significantly more within a short time. Organizations will then be able to attain their goals within a much shorter period of time.

Increase Profit Margins
Without automation, businesses would need to hire many employees to do every little task. However, the ability to automate allows the delegation of many tasks to machines or software, allowing the business owner to retain fewer employees. With fewer employees, businesses are able to reduce the amount of money they spend on salaries and benefits such as bonuses, health and life insurance, and investments.
With money saved on salaries and allowances, businesses can put these saved funds in other ventures such expanding the enterprise, ensuring less remuneration for the reduced number of employees.

Clearly, these are not the only reasons why you should automate your business processes. The three discussed above are only meant to give you a rough idea about the advantages of embracing business automation.