How Automating Business Processes Can Reduce Costs in an Enterprise

Automation involves using software to perform duties previously held by humans. Automated solutions reduce task complexity and cost while simultaneously increasing speed. This means that new technologies can perform daily routine tasks better, faster, and cheaper than humans.

But this doesn’t mean implementing automated systems in a company will result in mass layoffs. Employees will be replaced in performing unprofitable and repetitive tasks while gaining more time and energy for activities that will boost the company’s profits.

The post-pandemic period and challenging geopolitical situation have slowed the steady growth that most businesses have been experiencing in recent years. Now is the perfect time to introduce automated processes that help companies survive and thrive despite unfavorable conditions.

The best decisions are made in difficult times. The choice to automate existing processes will allow your company to remain competitive, especially among customers looking for low and stable prices.

Shareholders are constantly looking for new ways to reduce costs and maximize profits. Implementing an automation strategy will allow you to achieve significant cost savings without reducing productivity. Companies that invested a minimum of 20% of their IT budget in automation reduced the costs by 17% compared to performing manual processes.

Growing a company involves constant team expansion. Unfortunately, rising labor costs inhibit growth and overload current employees with excess tasks. Automation enables your staff to cooperate with systems that perform their tasks faster and reduce human error. As many as 47% of respondents surveyed by Bain identify freeing up the staff to do higher-value work as the most significant benefit of digital transformation.

If you’re thinking about automation only to reduce operating costs, the following paragraphs will show you the other advantages of introducing custom software development solutions to your company.

Investing in automated process optimization may scare off many companies, but implementing automation as part of a long-term business strategy returns on average within ten months. One of the sharp business cases is Procter&Gamble, which decided to use AI and automation to monitor and plan its product inventory. Now, P&G saves $60 million a year.

Robotic tools never tire; adding more duties to them is never protested. Therefore, automating these processes, which require the most manual labor, lets your company scale up. Your customers will appreciate this change, as they will receive real-time responses or have their orders completed in less time.

People make mistakes. Most often, they are due to exhaustion or overtasking. Automating critical tasks like credit analysis or security monitoring can reduce the risk of human mistakes. As a result, strategic decisions are more accurate, and suspicious behavior with specific patterns is effectively eliminated.

Using robotics to automation can have different facets. Among the most popular types of automation are:

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – bots that mimic human behavior in interactions with people. RPAs work well for initial customer contact and invoice or data entering.
• Business Process Automation (BPA) – automating entire business processes and optimizing complex workflows between company departments. BPA minimizes the appearance of bottlenecks during interconnected projects and processes.
• Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) – combining RPA and AI to process data, deal with different circumstances, and make real-time decisions.
• Cognitive Automation – an advanced AI model for discovering valuable insights from diverse data. It finds nuances that humans cannot detect.

If you want your company to be competitive, you can’t run automation half-heartedly. Learn how to deal with employee concerns and transformation of extensive processes.

People don’t want to be displaced by machines. Your mission is to show them that automation is there to support them in mundane tasks. They will do the work that gives them more satisfaction and helps them grow in their careers. Train them on how software systems will allow them to focus on customer relations and develop profitable concepts they didn’t have time for.

Moreover, don’t transform workflow and other processes too abruptly so that everyone can adjust to the improvements and express their suggestions for the next steps in automation.

A good automation practice is to divide complex processes into smaller parts and gradually introduce automation where it is most cost-effective. However, don’t stop at isolated elements. As you make changes to a single activity, keep in mind that you should successively transform the whole process. This way, your company will effectively increase productivity, cut costs, and maximize the Return on Investment (ROI). If you don’t know how to start a digital transformation in your company, you can consider consulting with experienced business analytics.

Center of Excellence is the department where dedicated staff members coordinate all the robotic processes in your company. Through their work, you’ll learn where to include new automated systems and how your current processes work. The CoE department also develops automation software and trains employees.

Automated software will help you reduce labor costs and stay competitive in tough times. When the economy rebounds, you will maximize profits and gain recognition among your employees and customers. Don’t hesitate to contact Scalo and discuss your business’s automation strategy!