Business automation can help save your company time and money. Here are 5 ideas for where to start.

To remain competitive and agile, your business needs to automate common tasks to:

• Increase efficiency.
• Reduce errors.
• Reduce wasted effort.

In doing so, your business will recognise cost savings that have a definite positive effect on your bottom line. Here are five areas ripe for business automation.

1. Waiting on figures

Your business needs reliable data to place stock orders or to produce accurate financial and production forecasts. Where a business relies on multiple systems, producing these reports takes time and often involves several people. Under this regime:

• Figures are often delayed as people fail to deliver their data on time.
• Figures can be “massaged” by staff to make their team performance look better than it really is.
• Data mismatches between different stores need to be manually resolved.

By centralising data into a single, authoritative ERP platform, business automation rules can be applied that will generate the required reports automatically. No more manual intervention means:

• Accurate, indisputable data.
• Access to data whenever required.
• Timely data to assist with making informed business decisions.
• A single source of knowledge.

“Companies can cut the cost of finance operations by 23%, if they replace disparate IT systems with a single Enterprise Resource Planning application” - Optimizing a Return on Business Complexity: Performance Metrics and Practices of World-Class Companies

2. Manual stock takes

For businesses relying on manual stock control, manual stock takes are a necessary evil. All businesses are legally required to make one physical stock check annually, but those who use business automation techniques to manage goods and materials will not normally need to perform interim checks.

Scanning goods and materials in and out of your warehouse will automatically update the ERP system, ensuring that stock levels are accurate and trustworthy. This in-out record provides the most reliable stock level status possible.

“As technology grows and businesses expand it is becoming more and more obvious that having manual processes to perform tasks are no longer to the company’s advantage” – Automated Inventory Systems – Lexi Hartman

3. Manual customer updates

Keeping clients informed of the progress of their order is essential to build brand confidence. However, sending an email at every stage of the sales process is time consuming and extremely inefficient where your business is dealing with dozens of customers at once.

Using ERP and business automation, customers can be emailed as part of the order processing pipeline. Automated, personalised messages can advise customers of:

• Order receipt
• Payment confirmation
• Dispatch of goods
• Delivery
• Self service portals

And more, depending on your business’ order pipeline. By allowing your ERP system to take control of these important messages, your team can concentrate on more revenue-focused activities.

“So you will see us continue to advance the state of the art or take information that we have in our response databases and have that drive automation or an automated response by some of our products.” – John W. Thompson, former CEO at Symantec.

4. Stock ordering

Where manual stock checking is in place, there is possibly a similar manual stock ordering process. Raw materials and components are ordered on an ad-hoc basis, often following a manual stock check.

Business automation can help streamline the ordering process, removing any guesswork or uncertainty. When an item reduces to a pre-defined level, an ERP system can generate the necessary order to replenish stocks automatically. Where businesses operate integrated supply chains, these orders could potentially be placed with suppliers automatically without requiring any manual intervention at all.

5. Certfified goods documentation

Where your goods are accompanied by test certificates or certificates of conformity, generating the additional paperwork adds time to the production cycle. A member of staff must type up the paperwork, print it and enclose them along with the goods – all of which delays dispatch.

Using business automation, the relevant certificates can be generated and printed automatically when the goods move along the production pipeline. Again, by reducing the manual intervention required, the entire process becomes more efficient. 

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