How to Improve Business Performance and Output

Imagine for a moment, that you are in a life-threatening situation. You're all on your own with no support, and it's up to you to survive. One of the things that'll improve your chances of seeing another day, are your survival skills - the things that you already know, or have learned through experience that will get you through this challenge.

Another important factor in your survival are the tools you have available, and how well you leverage them. In a situation like what we just mentioned, your knowledge alone won't be enough to help you live. In order to survive, you'll need to use every tool you have at your disposal. It's this combination of skill sets and the right tools that will get you through the challenge.

Survival in the world of business is no different than survival in the wild.

You'll certainly need to be a good business leader with better than average business knowledge in order to succeed. However, no matter how great your business and leadership skills are, it won't be enough to get your organization to where it needs to be on its own. In order to succeed, you are going to need the right tools for the job at hand. This is where automation can really accelerate your efforts as a leader.

My name is Jenkins Ebiware Jr and I'm a Strategic Growth & Technology leader. By day, I work to ensure the overall quality execution of software engineering services for one of the world's greatest technology consulting organizations. By night, I mentor and teach early career technology professionals and aspiring leaders through my online academy.

In this article, we'll be looking at the benefits automation can bring to your business and how these benefits can improve the performance of your business and output of your teams.

What is Business Automation?

Business automation is simply a series of processes that are put in place to automate certain tasks and areas of your operations. While business automation is relatively simple to understand, in order to properly implement the right processes for your organization, we're going to have to take a closer look at what is involved.

Picture an average day at your particular business. Think about that day sequentially and in some detail. What are the things that you find yourself doing over and over again on a regular basis in order to complete certain tasks? Do these repetitive steps keep you from attending to more pressing and potentially more lucrative items on your agenda? Do you find that your employees are faced with similar routine tasks that prevent them from concentrating on more important matters?

If your answer to any of these questions was yes, then some sort of system to automate those particular processes is in order. That is exactly what business automation is and does.

It makes a business more efficient and more productive by automating routine tasks that often waste time and therefore, money. Because of this, an increasing number of enterprises and leaders are beginning to appreciate the significance of automation in executing the various business functions of their organization.

The term Business Process Automation (BPA) refers to the task of leveraging technology to automate business processes with the overall goal of reducing labor costs. In other words, it reduces complex processes by integrating your software applications.

According to Forrester Research, business automation has its origins in the need to bridge the gap between lead management and selling activities. In addition to that, it was used in order to establish a strong alignment between marketing and sales and study their interaction in an easier way. Businesses have been keen on making choices that are going to make the business attain optimal results.

Automation plays a critical role in ensuring that a business is able to cut down cost and produce optimal results. Unfortunately, some businesses are not aware about the process of automation, its relevance in the business and the impact it can have on long-term sustainable growth. So, let's take a look at some of the top benefits automation can bring to your business.?

Promotes Better Communication and Collaboration

One of the greatest challenges facing the modern day business is how to effectively handle communication and collaboration. For instance, many enterprises have to deal with the repetitive task of managing large correspondence. The internet is a jungle, the Wild West. What this means is that not all online users are responsible after all. For example, spamming is a common practice.

Those in management face the difficult task of sorting out spam emails from the more important ones. With automation, this is no longer a problem. A positive consequence is that it allows your team to concentrate on more important tasks.

Traditional enterprise environments have long been characterized by a lot of paperwork and processing. The higher the workload involved in this paperwork, the higher the probably of a breakdown in communication. So, it's not uncommon for businesses to have data that they couldn't truly account for.

Similarly, it's not easy to organize water cooler comments, sticky notes, and emails in a single repeated process. Business automation becomes a handy tool that can be used to cushion businesses from such challenges. Through the use of a single dashboard, a business can streamline its communication process.

Every initiated workflow can have a predetermined line of communication. As a consequence, leaders can account for and track any data and information. Another important item in the handling of communication is personalizing messages. People like to be recognized. Targeting to meet the preferences and needs of each of your clients or customers is going to promote engagement and loyalty.

Promotes Accuracy

Human beings by nature, perform tasks in a linear manner, which makes us vulnerable to errors. Steven Robenbush, writing for The Wall Street Journal, states that automation employs cognitive technology which does an approximate assessment of how people think and behave. Inefficiencies and errors can be expensive and time consuming.

For instance, let's say you were supposed to pay $100,000 on an invoice, and the employee enters $10,000. Your company has just recorded a loss of $90,000. Such repeated errors and inefficiencies can cripple a business over time. Similarly, careless mistakes such as inadvertently making payments late can drastically damage the overall reputation of a business.

In addition to that, such mistakes can lead to a disruption in the product life-cycle or supply chain. There are other errors that can be prevented through business automation as well. These include payment of goods that were never received and slow sales approvals. Let's face it, even the most careful employees still make mistakes.

One of the drivers of human error, is increased workload and working under pressure. Companies with insufficient number of employees may be at risk of overloading available employees with work, thereby increasing errors as well as the margin for those errors. What process automation does is provide a company with computer aided data entry.

The software application being used will perform a thorough check on logical errors, both of omission and commission. Reducing errors is an excellent way of staying competitive, as well as promoting the overall health of a business.

Saves Time

There are a number of business functions that can be automated in order to reduce the time that the employees spend performing routine duties. These include daily communication, appointment reminders and social media communication. Business automation also frees up time that employees spend on specific functions.

To make this a little more clear, let's look at an example. The original idea behind higher education was research and teaching. Routine and specific functions such as grading get in the way of these goals.

However, if grading becomes automated, the university's teaching staff can concentrate on teaching and research in order to contribute to knowledge in a more efficient manner. In addition, freeing up employee's time through automation also gives them an opportunity to be innovative and responsive to a customer or client's immediate needs. This type of flexibility is invaluable in establishing good relations with your business' client base.

Enhances Accountability

Managing people isn't easy. Especially when it involves delegating responsibilities and tracking the behavior of each employee. This is especially challenging when dealing with teams. It's not uncommon to find a leader placing blame on a certain employee for a mistake, or an individual making a blanket judgement about a team.

With automation, all work output and deliverable clearly identify the person who executed a particular task. This makes it much easier to identify errors in a particular work stream. Such information is very useful when it comes to making performance management decisions for your team.

Remember that accountability is not always about discipline. On the contrary, it helps in identifying the employees who have specific performance weaknesses and may need your help. Automating certain aspects of your operations can free up your time to provide that assistance to your team when they need it most.

Clarifies Roles and Properly Divides Responsibilities

With a very clear delegation of roles among employees in your organization, it also means that there is no overlapping of duties. Delays and issues are minimized as it's clear to every member of the team, what they're supposed to do. The creation of a clear delineation of responsibilities and hierarchy, means that there is more responsibility.

When you leverage automation and tools for managing responsibilities, you can define some tasks in your workflows, to only be performed by authorized team members. For example, access to sensitive information and privileged documents. However, it's important to note, that automation isn't intended to, and doesn't complete strategic business tasks.

Rather, it makes these aspects of your operations easier and more efficient.

Creates Confidence in Compliance

There are many industry rules and regulations that organizations have to abide by. Not operating by these rules and within these guidelines can lead to costly and time consuming litigation that can negatively impact the reputation of your business.

In addition, many organization should have their own internal rules and guidelines that are a required part of your operating model. Keeping your operations focused, efficient and compliant can be greatly accelerated with automation software. It can help ensure that all rules and regulations, both internal and external, are followed. This minimizes the above mentioned litigation risks, but more importantly, allows for efficient operations around quality control.

Final Words

Achieving sustainable growth in your business requires adopting strategies that are going to have minimal expenses, as little risk as possible, while providing the best output. By adopting an automated process or processes in your business, you're able to produce highly reliable and higher quality outcomes, more consistently.

As you look to explore ways of automating certain parts of your operations to improve the performance of your business and output of your teams, where should you begin? Connect with me on Linkedin, and let's chat.