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Watching your business grow is thrilling. Seeing all that hard work and creativity come together and your innovative ideas coming to fruition is incredibly motivating. However, as a business develops, frequent evaluations are crucial to ensure the company’s growth is not constrained. Perhaps you’ve even found yourself wondering if it might be time to switch to an automated system.
High productivity is key to running a successful business. Moreover, using easy process automation software to track workflows is one of the best investments you can make to keep productivity and development on the rise.
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Long-Term Planning Is Paramount
Perhaps you are thinking, “Everything seems to be running okay now on a manual system. Why rock the boat?” While your business may be getting along okay now, think down the road a bit. In five years, how much growth do you project? How many more products, employees, and systems will be in place? Will your current system withstand the growth while remaining efficient?
As your company expands, your team will likely spend more time on day-to-day functions. Additionally, the company’s output will probably decline if you continue using manual systems. However, you could choose to switch to easy process automation early in your company’s life. Thereafter, productivity can continue to increase along with the company’s expansion as routine processes run smoothly. In turn, the speed of workflow execution will positively affect customer service. That’s because response time is cut down. Moreover, you’ll be able to deliver accurate information and consistent experiences to your customers.
Workplace Productivity Has Room for Improvement
American workers are speaking out about productivity issues in the workplace. According to Workfront’s 2018 State of Work survey, conducted by Regina Corso Consulting, American workers admit that only 40% of their workday is spent on primary tasks. About 10% of the day is spent in productive meetings. Meanwhile, the rest of the day—50%—goes to email, administrative tasks, wasteful meetings, interruptions for unimportant tasks, and other duties. Imagine what these workers could accomplish if their company had tools to automate their workflows and recapture that big chunk of time. Consider these examples:
Employee Management
Process automation gets each new employee on a streamlined entry and training process. Therefore, no one slips through the cracks during the crucial training period. In short, companies can eliminate much of the manual labor that goes into new hires, including documentation, through human resource process automation.
Finance Processing
Sometimes miscommunication or lost documents can lead to discrepancies and confusion. When this happens, team members waste valuable time hunting precise financial information. In contrast, companies can more efficiently mange budget approvals, asset purchases, travel and mileage reimbursements, and vendor payments using automated financial tools.
Administrative Tasks
Data collection and data entry require much attention to detail. Even the most experienced specialists are prone to human error. Not only can mistakes be avoided, but also the speed of entry will exponentially increase on an automated process. Approvals for things like budget line items and time off, as well as providing status updates to managers, are easily tracked using online tools. This frees up employees to put quality time into high-value work.
Do your team members’ email boxes overflow with requests? When an email inbox gets stacked up, it’s easy to miss critical emails. With process automation, your team will spend less time patrolling their email inboxes. That’s because requests and reports will be sent through the shared system.
A Transition Well Worth the Effort
Building an automated company culture is the first step toward consolidating all these tools. Rather than using email, messaging, product management, and an endless number of other tools, you can look for a platform that lets you do it all and collaborate in the same environment. In other words, you can avoid having lots of tabs permanently open.
Will it take some time to help your team understand the value of investing energy into learning a new process? Maybe, but if your team truly cares about your company’s future and success, they will take the necessary steps to transition to an automated system. Workfront’s study revealed that 82% of workers are excited to learn new things as automation becomes more present in the workforce. Therefore, chances are most of your employees are ready to give it a try.
For those who have reservations concerning a new system, management will need to be patient, explaining reasons for change along the way. Communicating the current complications that will be eliminated by an automated process also helps. It won’t take long before they start seeing the benefits themselves. This will increase efforts to adapt.
Adopt a Simple Automated Solution
Selecting a no-code solution like KiSSFLOW avoids the inconvenience of hiring IT experts and writing code. All the necessary tools have already been created and are at your disposal, ready for use. Applications can be altered or custom-made according to your business’s specific needs. As your company grows, you can add applications and scale them as necessary. Any team member can easily learn to use the simple user-friendly interface. They can thereby be freed of time-consuming paperwork to pursue the heart of their profession.
Watch your business—and the people who make it happen—excel on easy process automation. It’s an investment that will continually reap benefits in every facet of your company.
About the Author
Neil Miller is the Creative Services Director at OrangeScape, makers of KiSSFLOW. He loves to hear new ways that organizations are streamlining their processes. Neil spends his free time thinking about the coming automation onslaught, self-driving cars, and the human-computer symbiosis.
