Why you should automate your business processes

For smaller businesses, there are often more tasks than there is time to execute them. And with rising labour costs, SMEs are increasingly having trouble employing workers to manage daily operations, and as such, are unable to find ways to scale their businesses.

But with the push for Singapore towards becoming a Smart Nation, coupled with an immense pool of technological tools available, SMEs are well-poised to improve productivity and tackle manpower shortage problems with technology. Yet, most SMEs still harbor concerns of the automation process being too costly and disruptive to the business.

"Contrary to widely-held beliefs, over a longer-term, business automation requires minimal effort than if things were left to its status quo."

Let’s run through some of the benefits of Business Automation:

1. Simplifies tedious daily tasks, increasing efficiency and cost savings, thus improving business productivity

The unnecessarily long hours spent manually entering and reporting data can be easily replaced with automation.

In fact, a Harvard Business Review report also revealed that 25% of CEOs’ time is spent on tasks machines could do.

Using systems or tools that can save time, avoid double work and eliminate human errors in the process will allow your team to work on more challenging and critical business tasks. Additionally, tracking the team’s work progress has never been made easier.

To illustrate the benefits business automation confers, let’s take a human resource software HReasily as an example.

The system simplifies some of the most complicated, yet essential tasks in the business that will otherwise be done manually, such as payroll, employee records, as well as leave management. Consolidating and simplifying these manual processes into one easily navigable management platform has made HR information easily accessible to management, who are otherwise too busy to manually keep track of the data.

2. Instant access to real time information providing immediate actionable insights and collaboration anywhere, anytime

Most automation tools also come with dashboards providing an overall view of your data, actionable insights given can be acted upon immediately. Business reports can also be set up and be generated periodically allowing you to receive more detailed feedback on business operations for decision-making. This will definitely increase business productivity and engage employees to focus on value-creating tasks instead of filling up templated reports over and over again.

These tools also integrate with a number of systems and processes to ensure easy management and centralization of pertinent information on one cloud management platform. This not only eliminates the trouble of locating important manual records, but also the worry on losing records and data.

3. Data accuracy and quality improves, with reduced human errors and downtime

Having a system that constantly monitors updated business operations also ensures that reports generated will be at its finest accuracy at the point of generation.

Periodical reports generated will enable the easy collection of data and hence, freeing up resources that can be redirected into improving other business operations. Not only is real-time information centralized, it can be integrated with different types of operations information for even more critical business decisions to be made.

Some internet automation tools allow businesses to create functions that performs a specific action when something predefined is triggered. For example, your contact’s information can be automatically saved onto an Excel sheet when you receive an email, or your team gets an alert when your brand is featured in the news. This eliminates the need for admin personnel to manually record these details, and ensures that information is still up to date even during employee downtime.

"Workflows automation eliminates the need for admin personnel to manually record these details, and ensures that information is still up to date even during employee downtime."

Some other benefits include:

Streamlined communication can be ensured as well. With an automated workflow, assigning tasks with detailed briefs requires not more than a click. It is also easy to get an overall picture of who is doing what (and when they are doing it), and even the status of an entire project.

With responsibilities, progress and deadlines clearly laid out, productivity improves. This will also lead to higher levels of compliance and accountability as each step of the process is traceable, increasing the levels of transparency in the company.