For any modern business, being able to speed up processes and boost efficiency can be the difference between succeeding past your competitors and falling behind. Automation is a key modern technology that offers exactly that: a way to remove the need for human input in key business processes.
With 80% of businesses utilising automation in some form, now is an ideal time to consider incorporating it into your business to gain a competitive edge. From data entry to document management and even more human-oriented processes, such as the onboarding of new employees, automation can help your business in numerous ways.
In this article, we’re going to go over everything you need to know about process automation, so you can get started with using it to its fullest extent to take your business to the next level. We’ll also take a look at one of the best automation platforms in the world right now, and how you can get started with it.
What is Business Process Automation?
Business Process Automation is the use of automation technology to be able to automate repeatable, multi-step business processes and functions. This essentially helps you streamline operations and bolster your business’s efficiency and consistency all around.
Business Process Automation has several benefits for your business:
- Repetitive Tasks: The automation of repetitive tasks allows you to free up wasted resources and move them to other, more relevant tasks where they’ll be more effective.
- Efficiency and Productivity: Similarly, employees no longer have to spend time on dull and monotonous tasks and can instead work on tasks that require more creativity.
- Consistency: Automation allows you to be more consistent, removing the possibility of human error and ensuring tasks are completed in the exact same manner, every time.
- Wider Integration: Business Process Automation integrates widely with other technologies and tools, letting you take advantage of other technologies and how they work with the automated parts of your organisation.
Altogether, automation is simply an unmissable part of modern business. Failing to invest in it can result in you missing out on key benefits that only make your business stronger, more efficient, and more productive all around.
How Microsoft Power Platform Can Be Used for Automation
Microsoft’s Power Platform is the pinnacle of automation technology for business. It allows you to take advantage of automation through a low-code interface, meaning you don’t need to wait for a developer to code an automation from scratch. The suite of tools offers flexible ways to take advantage of automation technologies for different aspects of your business, making it easier than ever to streamline your business to its fullest efficiency.
Here’s how every aspect of the Power Platform benefits your business:
- Power Automate: Power Automate is the basis of automation within the Power Platform. It lets you create workflows (or ‘flows’) that you can use to connect hundreds of applications and services, both between Microsoft applications and external applications.
- Power Apps: Power Apps is for building applications, which is vital for integrating applications to integrate within your flows. Most importantly, Power Apps helps you create a robust user interface to be able to trigger flows much more easily and efficiently.
- Power BI: While Power BI isn’t directly involved in automation, it can be used within your automation strategies to trigger flows based on specific data alerts, as well as automatically make data reports and insights.
- Copilot Studio: Copilot Studio can automate service and support using artificial intelligence, freeing up resources while being able to give helpful support and solutions to your customers and even your employees.
Areas Where Automation Delivers the Most Value
Manual Data Entry and Duplication
Manual data entry and duplication are monotonous and aren’t a great use of human resources. In the past, this was a necessity as there was no way to make the process of data entry automatic, but with AI and automation tools and workflows, it’s just no longer a necessity.
It also removes the chance of human error and the lack of scalability of manual data entry, while keeping morale high and allowing resources to be used productively.
Slow, Email-based Approvals
Email-based approvals are a bottleneck for any business, as they reduce efficiency by often taking time to resolve, while also making it difficult to be able to keep track of everything due to everything being within inboxes.
With automation, you can easily make centralised approval portals for things like reimbursements, time-off requests, and everything else that’d require approval, meaning it’s easier to track and complete than having to rely on emails.
Employee and Customer Onboarding
Employee and customer onboarding is prone to delays and unnecessary manual work, due to the ease of miscommunication and having to track everything manually. Automation removes these problems as you can automate every step of the process, making it easier to ensure every box is checked.
On top of this, automation increases scalability, whereas having to do everything manually while experiencing growth would lead to employees being spread thin to try to ensure onboarding is done correctly for everyone, making it unfeasible.
Notifications, Reminders, and Status Updates
Notifications, reminders, and updates can be helpful to improve the productivity and efficiency of your business overall, as they help remind employees about outstanding tasks and things they would’ve otherwise forgotten about.
Altogether, this will help reduce delays by reminding people of tasks and updates to keep things moving, and ensure that your employees are able to be reminded of what they need to do at all times.
Document Management
Document management can be difficult to do correctly manually. It’s easy for employees to save documents in places that may be difficult to locate, or for version control to be difficult to keep track of due to multiple copies floating around.
Automation counters all of this by making every process automatic and standardised. This makes it much easier to be able to keep track of files within your organisation as they’ll always be where you expect them to be, as well as tagged and filed appropriately without any chance for error.
How We Can Help
Automation is a key technology for ensuring that you’re able to easily push your business to its full potential. Bolstering efficiency, creativity, and enabling consistency and standardisation only bodes well for your organisation’s future and makes finding success much easier in the long term.
If you’re looking to get started with automation and the Microsoft Power Platform, reach out to us today. We’re here to help and will make sure that everything is set up to meet your business’s needs. Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.