Over the years automation is an aspect that has touched almost every industry across the world. Whether it’s the ATMs, the assembly lines, or the healthcare systems, automation is everywhere. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are taking automation to a whole new level. Intelligent automation is changing the way people interact with machines, driving business efficiency upwards. The businesses are looking for technology partners to integrate these aspects into the application. The best software development company can effortlessly integrate these aspects into the software they build.
Business automation software helps businesses to drive revenue and thrive in challenging markets. Research by IBM suggests that AI-supported automation will generate billions of dollars worth of labor value in 2022 alone. In this article, we will delve into the benefits of business automation and its most commonly overlooked aspects.
What is Business Automation?
Business automation is concerned with the use of technology to perform repetitive and laborious tasks. Intelligent Business automation plays an important role in freeing up employees for higher-value work. While in the past a team of experts and costly mainframes were required to automate a task, today with the help of cloud-based automation platforms the process is much simpler and cost-effective.
Below are the most common types of business automation used today.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a technology that helps businesses grow by automating marketing processes, tracking customer engagement, and delivering personalized experiences to each customer across marketing, sales, and service. Marketing automation allows companies to deliver automated engagements to the customer based upon the insights gained through an analysis of customers’ engagements across various channels like social media and search queries on the web. Through marketing automation, the marketing team can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
One of the most widely embraced types of business automation, marketing automation has proven to be a game-changer for many businesses. One of the major reasons for the popularity of top marketing automation companies for business is that most of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, lead generation software and ERP software used today already have marketing automation tools integrated into them. Business marketing automation includes tasks such as:
- Lead generation, segmentation, and nurturing
- Advertisement management
- Email marketing
Some of the most famous marketing automation tools are Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, and Salesforce to name a few.
Accounting, Book-keeping, and Accounts payable Automation
While marketing automation is concerned with the external processes, the accounting, book-keeping, and accounts payable automation is more concerned with the internal processes of the business.
The automation of accounting accounts payable and book-keeping helps a business simplify the financial processes and remove needless manual labor in financial activities. Normally the financial automation deals with the following areas:
- Bank account management
- General ledger management
- Invoice management
The purpose of accounting, book-keeping and accounts payable automation is to simplify and streamline the various financial processes and reduce the potential for error in the process. Freshbooks, Intuit Quickbooks, Zohobooks, and MineralTree are popular accounting and accounts payable tools.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Automation (BPA)
BPA or Business Process Automation systems are concerned with using technology to streamline the business processes throughout the organization. BPA process has many benefits such as:
- BPA allows less technology-savvy users to design their own business processes.
- BPA provides better visibility of the processes to all the employees.
RPA or Robotic Process Automation seeks to further improve BPA automation by augmenting it with AI (Artificial Intelligence). Top RPA companies use robots to execute specific tasks such as:
- Trigger responses
- Manipulate data
- Capture and interpret data for processing a transaction
- Communicate with other systems
The cost of implementing Robotic Process Automation in business is significantly higher than a Business Process Automation. Often there is a conflict between the human capital and robots in an RPA system. An RPA requires a considerably more complex framework than a BPA. These are the reasons why RPA sees a lot less adoption than a BPA.
Pipefy, Nintex, Microsoft Power Automate, Inflectra rapise, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPat are examples of BPA as well as RPA automation tools.
HR Automation
HR automation enhances the efficiency of the HR department of an organization by freeing up the employees from tedious manual tasks using HRMS. HR automation allows the HR employees to focus on more productive tasks like preparing an effective HR strategy. HR automation allows organizations to reduce the cost and time that they spend on manual HR planning and processing activities.
HR automation solutions help companies automate repetitive HR processes such as:
- Payroll management
- Attendance management
- Processing leave requests
- Employee on-boarding and off-boarding
- Handling employee documentation
- Employee performance monitoring
By automating HR processes, the businesses can improve their efficiency and in turn, increase their profits.
BambooHR, BreatheHR, PulseHRM, and CavinHR are Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) that have a host of HR automation tools.
Benefits of Business Automation
Business automation presents many benefits for business organizations that adopt it. We have mentioned below some of the most important advantages of business automation.
Business automation increases productivity and helps standardize the processes
Business automation solutions allow a business to handle multiple processes simultaneously which ultimately leads to higher productivity. Apart from this, a good business process automation plan also helps the business organization improve the employee experience by allowing its employees to focus on more important activities such as revenue generation.
Continue reading: A foolproof way to business automaton
