Every business is unique in its offering, niche, supply chain, verticals, and business model. However, what is common between all businesses is that they all have operations. There are processes that need to take place for business to be conducted so customers receive their products and suppliers – their payment, on time and accurately. All of a sudden running a business sounds easy, and so straightforward … if only.
The context we set out below provides interesting insights but if you’re in a rush, dive straight into the processes you should prioritise for automation here.
Business operations and the team that make it all possible have a lot of stakeholders to manage. As such, there are a lot of processes that need to be performed accurately but also time and cost-efficiently for great business results to be achieved for both investors and customers. That’s often the key challenge of COOs and Ops Directors. How to run everything quickly, efficiently, correctly, and still keep customers, employees, and investors happy?
And that’s where business process automation comes in a big way!
What does company automation mean in the Ops world
The last 18 months and specifically the operations disruptions caused by Covid all around the world, were golden proof of the power and need for company automation regardless of location, company size, and industry.
73% of organisations worldwide are using automation technologies – such as robots, machine learning, and natural language processing. This was a response to the pandemic, the accompanying disruptions in demand, supply shortages, and increasing sick leaves and resignations.
McKinsey reports that companies’ digitisation of customer and supply-chain interactions as well as internal operations has accelerated by three to four years solely due to the disruptions caused by Covid. This was in response to new demands and the need to respond rapidly to changing circumstances.
These, according to executives, have accelerated the investment into digital initiatives and in particular company automation. What is fundamentally different in the post-Covid business environment is that a digital transformation is no longer just “nice to have” in order for business operations to be cost-efficient.
Business leaders are now recognising the importance of automation and digitalisation as mission-critical factors to achieving the overall business strategy.
This is why we put together a list of the key operations processes that leaders should prioritise for automation to achieve fastest ROI and save the most resources to invest in more valuable projects. So, let’s dive right into it.
Keys Operations processes to prioritise for company automation
Unquestionably, there are a lot of business processes that will come up in the conversations about where to start with automation. However, at present, the following 6 processes are bound to require the highest investment in terms of time, staff resources, and cost and be characterised by the largest need for manual intervention, high repetitiveness, and predictability of the steps required to complete the process.
1. Document Generation
One of the key challenges that most businesses face daily is the generation of documents, for example client contracts, NDAs, employment, and other legal documents, purchase-order agreements, etc. The process usually requires a few predetermined steps, a series of manual actions, and a lot of concentration on the side of the staff who prepares the documents to make sure all information is transferred across from all key systems into the newly generated document completely and accurately. Clearly, the scope for error and time required are excessive.
However, automation comes in to auto-pull all required information from your companies’ internal systems, databases, and any relevant external sources. A robot designed specifically for the task can generate all documents required. This is done by first selecting the correct template from your company depository, then filling in the correct information, finalising the document, and even sending it for your review via email. Ready for your review and any follow-up adjustments.
Automation quickly transforms a long, dull and costly process into a standard task performed quickly, and efficiently by a robot. And with significantly reduced scope for error and no staff frustration or exhaustion.
2. ERP Automation
Nowadays it’s hard to imagine running a business without an effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Used to manage processes such as resource allocation, price changes, demand forecasting, and so on, an ERP system gives a real-time carousel of the key metric critical for the smooth running of your business. However, that’s the case only if the right integrations are made between your ERP system and all the other systems, datasets, and Spreadsheets you use to capture all your company data.
In such cases, automation and the implementation of software robots are becoming increasingly valuable. They quickly ensure that no information is missed out, transferred across incorrectly, or data is delayed even by a single day.
Automating the interconnectivity between your ERP system and your local desktops and external systems ensures that your ”information carousel” is efficient, real-time, accurate, and stress-free at all times whilst improving the quality of your analysis. This is made possible by designing an intelligent robot that automates all data flows going to and out of your ERP system, thus increasing the available insights, and reducing the scope for data omission, delays, or sick days.
To find out even more about ERP automation also check out: How RPA helps maximize your ERP investment
3. Purchase Order processing
Essential to any business is the ability to place purchase orders with the most suited supplier, at the best available price, and with all other required parameters in an efficient way to ensure the supply chain cycle is quick, smooth, and meeting quality standards. Similar to the automation of the Document Generation, the purchase order process can be easily automated to instruct a robot to place all required orders. This is achieved by intelligently taking all order details from a sheet, system, or database and processing dozens of transactions in mere seconds.
What’s important to note here is that a robot can not only do the manual repetitive task spotlessly but it can also use pre-configured artificial intelligence to ”learn” from the previous orders placed. This way it makes educated predictions about which item should be ordered from which supplier and in what quantities depending on the expected demand, for example. This speaks for the fascinating power of automation and the extent to which it can streamline, improve and boost the purchase order process irrespective of the volumes.
4. Demand and Supply planning
This requires an effective real-time gathering, making a lot of computations and analysing of a lot of different data, often stored in different places which make it even harder to execute the process. Performing all these tasks manually requires a significant amount of time, concentration, and exposes the final analysis to error in the calculations, omission, or inaccurate transfer of information.
The use of a software robot becomes very crucial in cases where you have multiple sources of data, complex operations, and volume of data that is otherwise unrealistic to analyse in its entirety by a human. A robot gathers all the information, performs the necessary calculations, and sends you the final results and forecast. This ensures that the only input required by a human is the final decision-making and judgment exercise, thus guaranteeing accurate forecasting and improved quality of the demand and supply planning.
5. Inventory Management
Keeping an accurate representation of your inventory is absolutely paramount for the smooth running of any business, especially within retail, supply chain, and logistics. This is why inventory management has been one of the key processes that businesses prioritise for automation.
In this particular process, software robots can monitor of the inventory, perform key computations and analysis, send notifications when stock levels fluctuate below and above certain levels, place orders automatically when triggers are met, and provide real-time reporting to management. Robots make it accurate, easy, and smooth to track manage the stock levels. They take actions automatically when certain events occur which increase the responsiveness of the business and improve the quality of the overall process as all actions are based on data-driven triggers.
6. Resource allocation & management
One of the key challenges of any business is how to utilise supplies, staff, and available funds in ways that ensure the smooth short-term operation of the business as well as its long-term sustainability and profitability. This is where proper management and smart allocation of resources becomes not only important but essential for the sustainability of the business. This is often contributed to all the disruptions that are frequently associated with the incorrect allocation of materials, budgets, and people to projects and tasks.
Software robots support this entire process by automatically integrating all required data and performing the necessary analysis to ensure resources are allocated strategically. Robots also assist by sending reminders, notifications, and inquiries to all relevant teams as needed and circulating the allocations report to all parties involved, thus saving a lot of manual tasks and back and forth between people and departments. Not only that but they save a significant amount of manual hours which is better invested into analysing and strategising based on the analysis prepared by the robots.
That's all well and good but how to automate all these processes
The short answer here is robotic process automation (RPA) or the design and implementation of intelligent hands-off robots that perform all manual tasks involved in the above processes, and much more! The idea of RPA is that a task or a whole process can be delegated to a digital worker, i.e. robot, that performs within seconds all that is required, with stellar accuracy, without exhaustion and tiredness, and 100% consistently (all dependent on the pre-configuration).
On top of that, however, it’s important to note that we don’t just talk about any RPA technology. We talk specifically about open-source RPA. The reason for that is that so far open-source RPA is the technology that we see time and time again to solve business problems quickest, most flexibly, and sustainably, whilst allowing for complete control over the process and scalability of the automation across departments and processes.
RPA and anything that mentions open-source are concepts that have been around for a long time already but they still carry ambiguity and uncertainty, hence a lot of businesses still fall short to understand and take full advantage of them.
Our team at Capto is here to help you answer any questions you have on RPA, open-source, or process automation more generally. Simply schedule a call with us and get your list of questions ready.
