It is hard to overestimate the importance of office automation tools. They offer every business an opportunity to save money and time, improve service quality and increase the level of customer satisfaction. Your business can leverage such well-known and holistic software systems as CRM development, ECM, and ERP. These solutions are designed to manage basic activities which often do not require any special knowledge or skills. Every business has to process huge data loads daily such as client information, various documentation, etc.
So why spend so much effort on doing things manually that can be done by software? Wouldn’t it be more effective to eliminate the execution of some routine tasks and unload your employees? Using automation tools is quite a progressive approach that should be applied by all companies of all sizes and industries which strive to boost their productivity.
Financial benefits of business automation software
The business process automation industry is expected to reach $6.6 billion globally by the end of 2021. What makes it so profitable? The answer is – all the advantages it offers to businesses, especially the financial ones. Money-saving is one of the core pros of automation. Every business owner will appreciate it. And speaking about savings it is necessary to distinguish the direct from indirect ones.
- The indirect savings of automation are a broad field of study. They come from optimization, smart allocation, and enhancement of existing resources. The first and foremost precious one is time, of course.
- Direct savings are associated with sparing on hiring additional staff, or time you and your employees spend on routine tasks. Finance, purchase, sales, and marketing departments have to deal with the most time-consuming tasks every day (e.g. processing orders, manually sending the same emails all over again, searching for contacts on the Internet). Not only this is exhausting, but also it is financially disadvantageous.
The bigger your company gets, the more routine tasks appear. Therefore, you either need to hire additional employees or invest in automation tools. Choosing between these options, the best one (that is helping to make your teamwork effective), is implementing automation systems like ERP, various parsers, autoreply tools, etc.
If you were wondering what industry gets the most profits from business automation, we would answer this is manufacturing. It is not about the management of all the company branches. It mostly deals with the implementation of order management systems to provide a great customer experience and automate the processes responsible for executing these orders.
True purpose of business automation
It must be acknowledged that every company lives off the unique services it can provide. Clients pay us for something that they can’t make by themselves. Your clients may lack expertise, connections, funds, resources, or time.
This is why they come to your door and hire your company. Many automated business products are tailored to serve just one purpose – increase the yield of unique services the company provides. For example, save time that marketing specialists on routine tasks.
About 75% of business owners delegate all or part of their marketing tasks to automation tools to benefit from their employees’ specialized expertise because this is what we pay for when hiring people. If something can be flawlessly done by a machine, there is no need to assign this task to a person (who can, however, get creative about it).
You can also consider optimizing running costs in order to free up additional funds to invest in production or vehicles to provide your customers with better products, logistics and cover new locations. The possibilities of automation are endless, you only need to choose and develop the right custom tool for your specific business needs.
We also would like to present to you the beneficial features of business automation by the latest business statistics:
- The lead management improved at 30%
- The inventory management and product distribution rose by 27%
- The time and organization management increased to 32%
- Data management rose to 38%.
Manufacturing automation trends 2021
Based on the advantageous features of manufacturing process automation, we would like to suggest which operations must be automated and optimized with software in 2021 to stay in business and impact its growth and development.
Internal activities management
Before starting to automate the manufacturing processes, initially, you should consider optimizing the company’s internal operations in order to make different branches of your organization completely synced. It means that before working with clients, you should configure your daily operation and tasks in the most optimized and profitable way.
It is not a surprise that businesses deal with huge amounts of information, documents, business applications, etc, and each company’s department has access to different information. Consequently, you should think of implementing a custom automation solution to connect all departments and ensure constant communication and information exchange as soon as possible.
Sales and order management
Now we are getting to the order automation. As we have already mentioned, order information can reach enormous amounts. It cannot be handled and tracked manually, as this would need a huge number of workers, which is not really profitable.
Automation tools will solve any problems and challenges that employees face with sales and order management. All business data will be recorded and collected in a single database that is accessible for all company departments that speeds up the responses for the customers.
Moreover, business automation software aims to collect all documentation and provide real-time data, sales, and order status updates. Additionally, an automation business app combines all existing internal systems and helps track payment processing, managing contact information, task creation, task assignments, etc. Available tools such as a user-oriented sales pipeline template can also be used to manage and track the success of each stage in your sales process.
Production management
The manufacturing process includes a lot of details at the pre-production, production, and post-production stages. Along with automating order creation and management, companies that deal with manufacturing should implement automation tools to be able to execute high-quality production processes. Such tools commonly include the following functions:
- Quality checklists to test if the order is executed properly;
- Inspection documentation where all order details are described;
- Communication and database access management.