Automate your business processes to reduce time-to-market!

Business process automation can save your company a lot of money, improve customer service and reduce time-to-market. The opportunities for process automation are everywhere – in manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, distribution, finance, sales and marketing.

The automation revolution started in the 1970s with robots replacing humans for manual labour. Today, this is standard commodity. The next big thing was e-business, which saw its breakthrough in the 80s with the introduction of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). The automotive industry became the front runner of this new development and set a standard for other industries to follow.

When we talk about e-business today, everything revolves around the web. E-commerce started in the B2C sector but today it is essential for most industries. Another important trend right now is marketing automation. As the name suggests, it involves automation of marketing actions, often through a dedicated application. Marketing automation removes the time-consuming tasks associated with manual customer data management for list segmentation and campaign management. To truly reap the benefits of marketing automation, the MA application needs to be integrated with the company’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.

Five tips for successful business process automation

A common mistake many companies make when starting out with process automation is an excessive level of ambition. They start with a comprehensive analysis of all their processes, lay out a detailed plan for implementation and soon get discouraged when they run into organizational challenges and notice many of the disruptions that occur in their day-to-day operations.  

Instead, we recommend that you: 

• Start small – start with a single, well-defined process. 
• Define your goals – you should be able to easily measure and evaluate efficiency improvements (via KPIs) and ROI.  
• Choose the right tool – Choose an automation tool or integration platform which is scalable, user-friendly, and has monitoring and tracking capabilities.
• Involve the right people – Identify the process owner and other stakeholders. 
• Monitor, evaluate and optimize - Use KPIs to continually improve the efficiency of your process.