AUTOMATE YOUR BUSINESS PROCESSES

What is Business Process Automation?

All successful businesses have one thing in common and that is streamlined processes that all staff can follow to guarantee consistency of service and in turn provide quality customer service. Business processes are the steps to be completed to achieve a task, if these are written down somewhere in a document or shared verbally chances are staff might forget some of the steps and not everyone might follow the same steps, hence introducing inconsistency in the service provided and risking damaging company reputation. Business Process Automation plays a big part in running a business smoothly.

Automation is the process of taking these manual steps and either fully automating them or have minimal user input. To achieve this, it uses a Process Advisor capability which is an artificial intelligence. It analyses  processes and identifies areas that are repetitive plus time consuming that could be improved by automation.

Areas that can benefit from automation are.

  • Workflow – Data entry
  • Approval processes – Holiday/sickness request
  • Notification – Email/Teams message
  • Order processing
  • Marketing campaigns
  • Recruitment and onboarding process
  • Customer service

Why Automate?

These are the many benefits of business process automation.

  • It cuts down data entry errors and confusion.
  • Makes completing repetitive work seamless.
  • Consistency of processes, that in turn improve service delivery and quality.
  • Automation also reduces the business running costs as there is less room for errors that result in loss of revenue.
  • It frees up time for staff to engage in high level work that need user input, leading to increased productivity.
  • Helps to meet your auditing and compliance needs.
  • Improve productivity by using less time.
  • Connect to your existing apps.
  • Make management decisions faster and track status.

How to Automate

This is where Power Automate comes in handy to create automated processes like a visual business process flow that guides users on the steps to complete at each stage. It can be configured in a way that important steps are made mandatory so that key data is captured, or steps completed before one is able to move to the next stage of the process.

Out of the box power automate comes with a number of business process flows that can be used as is.

  • Lead to Opportunity Sales Process
  • Opportunity Sales Process
  • Phone to Case Process
Business process stages and steps

With Power automate you can create Cloud flows that can be setup to run in the background or at once. The cloud flows can be set up to operate as follows.

  • Scheduled to run at specific times.
  • Automated to run when an event happens.
  • Instant to run at a press of a button.

Like cloud flows you can also create desk flow using RPA (Robotic process automation), to automated repetitive desktop processes. This can be on your desktop and the Web. Power Automate for desktop records your actions or you drag and drop onto the designer to be automated.  Once created the flows can run either attended (user input required) or unattended (user input not required).

When preparing to start your automation journey, consider the following.

  • First identifying all the processes currently used in your business or future ones.
  • Second explore areas of the processes or repetitive tasks that would benefit from automation.
  • Partner with experts like risual to implement the solution.

Who can benefit?

In this day and age of digital transformation, any business or organisation of any size with repetitive mundane tasks, can benefit from automating their business processes.

What are the next Steps?

For more information on how we can support you transform your business with automation, you can contact us on 0300 303 2044

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