Why automate Business Processes? The Starter Guide

Many SaaS (Software as a Solution) companies provide business process automation, but finding the right area of focus, the right solution and budget are KEY success factors!

SaaS vendors aim to provide businesses with technology based tools that offer the latest and greatest business process automation. But you must first identify the right areas to focus on, and then find the right solution.

Why automate business processes?

It doesn’t matter if you are a tech savy healthcare provider group or a brick and mortar bike-shop, businesses should look at process automation through the lens of: “By automating the busy work my staff can focus on the parts of the job that are more important to have the human element, the parts they generally find more satisfaction in, the parts that allow my team to focus on our mission.”

A key driving force behind automating business processes is to ensure efficient, and consistent results in repeatable tasks. If you are repeating tasks that take staff a great deal of time (time is money) and or you have a certain % of variance you will accept from the ideal outcome – automated SaaS is going to change your life.

Decide what to automate

Management teams may attempt to automate every possible aspect of their business. Almost every aspect of business operations could potentially have some level of automation. However, you may get overwhelmed by the number of areas that could potential be automated, and number of SaaS automation solutions available. Just because you could buy an automation tool, doesn’t mean you have the budget for automation, or even the need to automate the task!

You should remember that implementing business process automation is time intense challenge in itself, involving complicated requirements and involvement from many stakeholders. By putting too much time and effort into too many projects at once, you risk slowing down operations and lose market advantages to competitors while trying to implement too many changes.

Start by collecting feedback from the staff working in the back office about the processes that are the most labor intense, require the greatest attention to detail, tend to have the most variance in outcomes.

Reasons to possibly automate business processes:

• Tasks that have to be done on schedules

• Identified bottlenecks

• Consistently varied results and inaccuracies based on who is doing it

• Time consuming tasks

• Reduce labor costs

• Cluttered workflows / departments

• Free up staff for other areas of business

Start doing research on areas you have identified for possible automation or SaaS solutions and evaluate if there is a solution that is right for you. Do not settle! Just because there is an app for that doesn’t mean you must implement it. Also, don’t settle for a solution just because there is only one SaaS offered for your use case. Regardless of automation options in the market, you may want to engage a professional services SaaS team to determine if a custom solution could be crafted to fit your need, in your budget.

Change Management

In most cases, you are implementing a third-party business process or tool rather than developing your own custom solution. It is quite common to encounter resistance to change. Team members may have resistance to new processes because they like the way you do it now. They might avoid new technology. Most commonly there is just a fear of job replacement.

A great way to help your team get on-board is to engage them in being stakeholder in choosing what to automate and being a part of the conversation. Pick a few simple solutions to automate first. Things like setting up email filters to deliver emails with keywords to specific folders for efficient processing, or auto response that will reply useful info based on the issue or contact type the customer picked. By automating processes one-by-one, your team will gradually improve business processes and start looking for other ways to improve operations that can free them up to focus on areas of operation that truly make a difference.

Automation is an advantage

If done well, business process automation can eliminate time and budget consuming, manual, redundant, tasks and free up staff to focus on your mission – providing customers with better, more efficient, accurate services.