1. Streamline communication within the business process.
As a small company, I am sure you receive hundreds of emails a day. They’re all related to different topics, some are just scam messages, and some need to be prioritized. What’s your action plan? Who’s gonna be in charge? Are you storing this all on a sheet of paper or a couple of stickies, or holding separate files to see what you’ve got to do? Whatever method you choose, one thing is clear- it is impossible to retain all of the things you need to do in your head. You might need to sort internal and external communication, assign roles and tasks, check their statuses and organize time. Mistakes and overlaps are easy to occur if you are doing everything manually. By automating your workflow, you have one streamlined mode of communication. You create one common dashboard for everyone, and all your requests, assignments, details about which stage they are, and what needs to be done are kept there. No need to perform manual tasks and worry about what’s done and what’s missing. See it all clearly, as if on the palm of your hand.
2. Enforce accountability.
Automating the workflow in your small business gives you one clear asset over others: you get the chance to see roles and responsibilities. This helps you avoid the mess of “It’s not my fault”, because the distribution of your roles gives a clear insight of who’s in charge of what. Initiations, approvals, rejections are inputs are all bound to the person or group of people in charge.
By enabling that level of information transparency in your business process, you will automatically raise the level of accountability on yourself and your colleagues. You will never again have to hear “Sorry, I didn’t receive that mail”, “Oops, it went to my spambox” or “I’m sorry but you didn’t give me that piece of paper”!
3. Avoid manual errors and inefficiency.
We all have come across mistakes that caused financial losses and other inconveniences. How many times did you lose a cheque, or pay for the wrong items, or worse than that, paid for items you have never received? Automating your business processes will help you reduce these cases to the minimum. You see any transaction in its current state. And you are the only one to change or update its status. So if an order is pending and you haven’t received it, you will never make a payment. Imagine what a great lot of nerve and time this can save you.
4. Develop an insight into the evolution and repercussions of your business process.
Having an automated type of workflow in your business can also help to make things better. It gives you clear insight of how quickly you get things done, how your overall business works and what is there that still needs to be improved. Because the mode of communication is streamlined and accumulation of data is centralized in an automated workflow tool, you will easily access data on how well your business is performing. This is one of the very best inputs you can have for all your business process management needs.
5. Have a centralized, unified system of storage, presentation and communication.
How many programs do you operate in order to keep the communication at your office going? E-mail, chat, videocalls, hangouts. How many programs to process files? How many to present them? How many more to keep track of processes? Having an automated platform that will combine all these features, be user-friendly and easy to navigate will solve communication and storage issues, and hold all of your data easy at hand. Is there anything that can better suit office needs? I don’t think so.
These are several features you might want to consider when you make a decision of whether or not to automate your business processes. A lot of businesses have done it, and you can be the next.