Top 5 reasons why your business should automate its business process!

If you’re like any small or startup business you receive a lot of emails requesting approval, paper forms to track processes and tasks?  Do you know where these bottlenecks are within the business, but don’t know how to go about improving the process?

What if you could get rid of the repeat emails? What if you could digitize the paper forms forever?  What if you could analyze any business process to know how long it takes, where the hang-ups and truly know if you have adequate staffing?

This is very common in the SMB market and if you’re like many business owners / managers you may think that’s just the way it is?! Right?  Wrong!  The Small business community needs to demand more from their applications, their IT infrastructure and of course their employees, but typically they don’t know where to begin.

1. Streamline all communication in your business process:
   • Sticky notes, emails and verbal comments by the water cooler are nearly impossible to organize much less repeat the process.  An automated workflow can mean a streamlined and simplified communication process with a centralized dashboard with any open requests.  Manage your workflow, don’t allow your workflow to manage you!
2. Enforce employee accountability:
   • With an automated process flow, you can bypass the expensive costs associated with user errors and other inefficiencies.  The automated business process can show you the current state of all projects while potentially removing any careless mistakes before they take place.   With a management dashboard you’ll have the 10,000-foot-high view of every process of your business!
3. Minimize employee costs by limiting manual errors and inefficiency:
   • When automating your business workflow, it’s important to create ownership at each step of your process.  By enabling this level of transparency you enforce accountability in both yourself and your colleagues.  A great workflow management system will give you and your business tremendous insight into who is getting the job done and which team members can help handle the additional load.
4. Learn from the insights through data analysis:
   • Since the mode of communication in your business is streamlined and data is accumulating at a rapid rate within the workflow / dashboard, you get new insights in the business that you never had before.  You’ll now be able to recognize bottlenecks way before they become a bigger problem or are there elements within your process that are making things more complicated for your employee base.
5. Develop a clear approval hierarchy within your company:
   • Developing a company hierarchy and subsequent approval process could do wonders for your business process.  A well-implemented workflow process could not only be codified within your system, but will ensure that each of your processes has its own approval process by the designated lead for that section.  This potentially could alleviate ownership / management time so you don’t have to be a part of every step (unless you want to of course).

Automation in IT has a pivotal role to play in the days to come. If you’d like to find out more about how Shield Watch IT & Web Services can help automate your business contact a customer advocate today to schedule a free no risk onsite evaluation of your business process.