The business world is constantly evolving and with it the ways in which we conduct business. One of the most exciting developments in business today is business process automation (BPA).

BPA refers to the use of technology to automate manual business processes. This can include automating entire processes or just individual stages within a larger process. By doing this, businesses can streamline and standardize workflows, resulting in efficiency gains and cost savings.

Business Process Automation

The recession has forced many businesses to look for ways to reduce their operational costs, and business process automation is the ideal solution. Companies are now more focused on efficiency, which means they are turning to business process automation solutions to save money.

By automating business processes, companies can reduce manual labor costs, optimize operations, and better manage customer requests.

5 Top Business Processes Every Business Should Automate

There’s no right time to start business process automation but there are certain business processes that every business should look to automate as soon as possible. Here’s a list of five business processes that can greatly benefit from automation:

1. Employee Onboarding and Offboarding

In large companies, this is a continuous process. Current employees might move on to greener pastures, while new workers come in, either as replacements or as workers who address new tasks for the company. The revolving door of employees represents a lot of work for the HR department, but the fact is that a significant portion of the processes involved can be automated. 

Integrating the Workday function with Active Directory is a good solution that can help automate the whole process. It automates the uploading of employee data from Workday and the managing of employee access and provisioning. 

This is done simply by creating tickets in ServiceNow to perform a particular action. This can be tasks such as removing an employee record, adding a new employee in the system, setting up user rights, and many others. 

Automating these processes minimizes the chances of human error and duplicated data, resulting in smoother and more efficient employee lifecycle management. 

2. Order to Cash (Inventory Fulfillment)

This is one of the more complicated business processes as it involves many different steps. It involves tasks such as managing customer orders, processing invoices, updating compliance documents, order shipment, and receipt of payment. 

But just because it’s more complicated doesn’t mean it can’t be automated. And with automation, it reduces the errors that invariably come up with all that complexity. 

Automation can deal with the various activities involved, including starting with generating a sales order in CRM down to updating the final payment. And it can include inventory management in ERP as well. You can track the whole process, without having to switch continuously between documents, emails, and Excel sheets. This automation can allow on-time order fulfillment, boost customer experience, and maximize the cash flow. 

This can be done by integrating NetSuite with Salesforce, allowing the automation of crucial processes of the order to cash cycle. You can also automate the recording of opportunities, invoices, account details, and revenue collection, resulting in more accurate financial reporting and forecasting of future customer needs. 

3. Customer Service Management

Automation in this area can also vastly improve its efficiency. Automation can be applied for such tasks as generating incidents, recording conversations and escalating issues, and many other activities in the customer resolution cycle. 

The benefit is that the company can manage the whole customer support process even in real-time, improving customer service management and basically enhancing customer satisfaction. 

You can start by integrating Salesforce with ServiceNow so that both the sales and service teams can access customer information and interactions in real time. Every time Salesforce logs a new issue, ServiceNow can automatically generate a service ticket to alert the service team tasks to address customer questions. 

4. Monitoring Finances and Expenses

Financial reconciliation is one of the key tasks in any business. Even a seemingly small mistake in the calculation and interpretation of financial reports can result in wrong conclusions, and ultimately wrong business decisions. But with automation, such mistakes can be avoided. Budgets and transactions can be monitored properly, and expenses can be more efficiently controlled. 

You can do this by integrating QuickBooks and Smartsheet. Smartsheet can automatically update the financial reports even as QuickBooks records the expenses, credits, and budget. You can even use Outlook to notify particular team members so they can track the finance updates in real-time, eliminating errors and duplications. 

5. Order and Supply Chain Process

Automating this process enables a company to better monitor the movement of goods and speed up order fulfillment. This can be done by getting tools such as Magento, Dynamics 365, and ServiceNow to work together. 

When a new order is created in the Magento e-commerce platform, Dynamics 365 can automatically record the order. This integration can then automatically cause the start of the proper actions from the receipt of the order, the recording of order details, and the payment, until the final shipment. This improves the whole order and supply chain management process. 

Start with automating the processes on this list, and you’re off to a great start.