3 business processes to automate to thrive in the new business landscape

The business landscape has changed forever, with many organizations being forced to reinvent their business processes to survive and thrive in a new competitive and digitally enhanced environment. To be successful in the future, companies must consider automating their workflows to increase efficiency and increase overall productivity.

Automation in business eliminates the need for people to manually perform repetitive and mundane tasks. Also known as business process automation (BPA), this approach automates business processes and document workflows by leveraging predefined business rules, metadata, and artificial intelligence (AI). When companies deploy a BPA strategy, they can optimize return on investment (ROI), improve employee satisfaction, delight stakeholders, and inspire customer confidence. Without BPA, businesses tend to stick to manual processes that are time-consuming, expensive, monotonous, and error-prone.

In today’s business environment, organizations of all sizes have easy access to innovative platforms that can automate and streamline core processes end-to-end. There are three key business workflows every business needs to automate to thrive in the “new normal” landscape:

1. Document management

Manual document processes are time-consuming, error-prone, and result in high operational costs that are still prevalent in too many core processes. Document management automation simplifies finding and controlling documents, reducing the time spent endlessly searching for documents. In fact, businesses can digitize all of their documents and go nearly 100% paperless while ensuring compliance with information security and regulatory guidelines. The right document management platform will ensure that the most recent version of the document is always secure and easily accessible for onsite and remote employees. It will also facilitate any conversion of paperless documents into searchable PDF files.

2. Financial management

Finance is one of the departments where a mistake can cost a company thousands of dollars, or even more. BPA document management platforms can perform routine and time-consuming financial management workflows such as account reconciliation, creating journal entries, preparing financial statements, and invoicing. This leaves employees more time to focus on higher-level tasks such as managing cash flow, budgeting and forecasting, and controlling income and expenses. It also makes it easy to electronically sign any type of document, allowing anyone to securely sign documents such as contracts, orders, and invoices from anywhere.

3. Human Resources (HR)

Burnout, higher wage demands and underappreciation are some of the reasons for Australia’s high job mobility. While BPA can’t cure the “big quit,” it can allow employees to focus on higher-value tasks and spend less time on manual, repetitive workflows. BPA can also play an important role in case management for HR departments; it can make information easily accessible while ensuring the required governance and compliance and allows HR managers to pursue higher value tasks. Finally, BPA helps HR managers create, modify, and distribute policies that comply with employment standards and regulations that can be signed, revoked, or safely deleted as needed.

Companies that implement BPA discover real, seamless process optimization for documents, projects, and other workflows. It can give companies the freedom to automatically assign specific higher-value tasks to employees, minimizing the need to manually complete time-consuming tasks and improving employee satisfaction. BPA can streamline and unify the document review, approval and signing processes. It can also automate visibility and edit permissions on each workflow state as items progress through their lifecycle.

With an innovative metadata-driven software platform, companies can prevent human error, eliminate mundane and repetitive tasks, and identify and resolve bottlenecks that impede business performance. There’s never been a better time for businesses to embark on a transformative journey towards workflow automation and gain competitive advantage, substantial ROI, better customer experience and better quality work.