Why to Automate Business Processes in Your Organization .......
Since the days of
the automaton, workers have been searching for ways to automate the manual
business processes that steal time from more important jobs. Communicating with
colleagues, manipulating spreadsheets, entering customer information into a
CRM... these are all examples of time-consuming manual processes that can be
done better and faster by someone other than you.
If your idea of fun
is copying and pasting text all day then by all means, continue doing what
you're doing. Your competitors will love that. But we've got some thoughts on
why you should at least consider automating business processes in your
organization. Here are a few.
In a compilation of
error rates by business task*, as reported by studies over the last 30 years or
so, error rates for medication prescriptions were found to exceed 1.6%. Data
entry error rates for expert typists ranged as high as 6%. In general, the
human mechanical (I.e. by hand) error rate for data entry tasks is 0.5%. Seems
small at first, but what if you're entering order data from 100 online
transactions into your CRM? Or, if you're compiling stock performance for 100
different mutual funds from an online investment website? What if you're
changing prescription doses for 100 patients? That's 5 errors that have the
potential to cost you money and maybe lives. You can expect to make 5 errors
per 100 records any time you're manually changing information. The fun part is:
You'll never know which records or pieces of data will be wrong. Get yourself
an automated solution that enters and changes data for you automatically, and
you'll never have to worry about data errors again.
Here's the great
thing about never making an error: You don't need to waste time fixing them. If
you're lucky enough to catch an error (see #1 above), and it's a critical one,
you'll need to go back and do the job again. In some industries like health insurance, where
the cost of a reprocessed claim is 4 times that of one that gets approved the
first time, that rework time can be a killer
Think of an
automation software solution like a "digital employee" - someone who
basically does the most unpleasant parts of your job for you so that you're
free to do other things. Digital Employees generally work faster than humans in
most web or Windows applications, so more gets done faster without rework. Even
if it DIDN'T work faster, you'd still be free to perform other tasks while your
software solution did all the typing, copying, and pasting. Automation basically
returns 100% of the time spent on manual business process back to you so that
you can go serve customers, win business, or take a vacation.
A good automation
software solution can be installed and put to work inside of a few hours. Sure,
there are some solutions out there that require coding or programming to
operate, but the kind you're looking for can be "taught" to perform
tasks simply by clicking and dragging your mouse to objects on the screen. The
software should then present you with a narrow list of actions that work with
the object you've targeted. You shouldn't have to scroll through 200 possible
choices when all you need to do is click a "Submit" button.
Automation software
solutions that actually work like "digital employees" use a series of
steps (called a script) to perform a task. They work off of those scripts
diligently because it's what you have told them to do. And they do it
flawlessly. If concerns over learning curves and installation times are preventing
you from automating your workflows and business processes, choose the right
solution and put those fears to rest.
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