As organizations seek to realize business efficiencies, it is hardly surprising that they are turning toward process automation to gain a distinctive advantage over their competitors. COVID seems to have sped up the process further. A McKinsey global survey showed that 67% of companies increased their use of automation and AI in 2020, with 83% of decision-makers in the US and 70% in India reporting significant use of automation.
Automation involves a set of tools and processes that help businesses carry out tasks with little or no human intervention. The principal aim is to expedite routine work so that employees can focus more on value-added tasks that optimize business operations.
In a survey by Zapier, 88% of small businesses reported that automation helps them pit against larger firms, while 63% said automation helped them recover from the repercussions of the pandemic.
Given these figures, the message is unmistakable: include automation as part of your strategy to grow your business.
Why You Should Automate Your Business
While the benefits of automation are many, the top ten reasons for small businesses to adopt automation in 2022 are:
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Reduces Operating Costs
Analysts can make mistakes when doing manual data crunching. While these errors can be rectified, doing so may end up costing you more. An automated system is highly accurate and can notably cut your operating costs, increasing your gross profit. Automated software and bots work 24/7, 365 days a year, without the overhead costs of maintaining extra staff or paying overtime to get routine work done.
Business owners are always looking for ways to save time and simplify their business. If you’re the owner of a small- or medium-sized enterprise, you can automate your payroll process to save hours every week. Paystub generator download could be the easiest way to automate payroll in your business.
Businesses that have direct deposits are often required to provide employees with pay stubs or direct deposit slips. Downloading a paystub generator will allow you to print out pay stubs without the time, cost, and effort of working with an outside company. Pay Stubs are not only used by businesses, but also by individuals who work on commission for commission-based jobs.
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Reduce the Time Spent on Routine Tasks
How many hours in a day do you spend on routine administrative steps? According to the Zapier Work Resolution Report, knowledge workers waste about 3.8 hours/day doing busy work–work that automated tools can easily replace. Of them, 36% said busywork is stressing them out. Automating routine processes not only saves time but also leaves time for employees to engage in value-added functions that are more beneficial for the business.
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Improves Overall Productivity
On any day, an employee uses multiple tools to get their work done. But frequently switching between tools adversely affects employee productivity. If you want to improve the productivity of your organization, you have to start automating intelligently. By mapping out processes and adopting intelligent automation, your business can streamline the usage of tools and reduce inefficiencies.
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Delivers Better Customer Experience
In a PWC survey, 32% of customers said they would leave a brand after one bad experience, while around 48% said they would do so after a few unpleasant experiences. The stakes are high! You need to realize that when it comes to business, the customer is the king. But how do you ensure that with dated and clunky processes? Automation helps you fill the gaps and connect with customers at all levels to deliver a superior customer experience that makes them come back for more.
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Improved Insights
According to a Forbes article, analysts spend 80% of their time preparing data, leaving them with only 20% time for actual data analysis. Automation offers a faster way to collect data from diverse sources and collate them together for further analysis. In automating the data collection process, leaders get more time to look for improved insights in the collected data, leading to enhanced business outcomes.
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Improved Collaboration
In a business, teams gravitate toward working in silos, which leads to breaks in communication. An automation tool simplifies communications between teams by keeping everything under one system and provides visibility into workflows. By tracking progress and involving everyone in the loop, goal setting becomes more spontaneous and straightforward.
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Improved Visibility
With companies handling large volumes of data, data visibility is crucial to better business. Making sense of this voluminous data using outdated excel spreadsheets is not feasible. Through the use of automated dashboards, managers get real-time information on their business’s health. By doing so, bottlenecks can be identified quickly and addressed before they turn into full-blown issues.
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Boosts Accountability
In the absence of automation, it isn’t easy to keep track of multiple workflows. It’s an even greater challenge to understand who is in charge of what and who to hold accountable for when things are amiss. Automated workflows do away with ad hoc decision-making and provide accountability for the entire process. The software tracks who performed what step and when it was completed. With clear user expectations set, no one can shirk their responsibility, leading to more accountability and efficiency in the organization.
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Reduce Errors
Irrespective of how skilled a person is, manually feeding data into the system increases the possibility of errors. These errors might prove to be costly in the long run and hamper the growth of your organization. With an automated system, error-free calculations are the norm leading to massive savings.
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Enhances Business Governance
An absence of governance can put your business at risk. With proper governance measures in place, your business can succeed as well as remain on the right side of the law. Automation tools record activities of every business workflow, in the process, creating a weighty audit trail. Should the need arise, businesses can use this information to ensure regulatory compliance.
Concluding Thoughts
Whether you have a small business or are part of an established organization, automation can help streamline your processes and drive greater ROI. From enhancing the customer experience to making your employees more productive, embracing automation can enable your small business to stay competitive and reap substantial benefits.
