As fears of a worldwide slowdown grow stronger with each passing day, long-term implications for businesses that fail to quickly adapt to the new market continue to play on leaders’ minds. While there’s no surefire way to completely insulate your business from economic downturns, there are strategies you can use to minimize the impact on your business. The most effective at cutting costs while reducing risk, increasing productivity, and maintaining high levels of customer, supplier, and employee satisfaction, is automation.
Recession-proofing for many businesses means cutting costs, but this shouldn’t disadvantage your customer or supplier experience. You can ensure that every touchpoint provides a consistent, connected, personalized experience without breaking the bank with the right business process automation tools in place.
According to Roy Nicholson, Grant Thornton Digital Transformation and Management Principal and Leader, “Every industry is being transformed by the forces driving automation, and now it’s a matter of timing: How quickly can organizations begin to address these changes?”
Let’s take a quick dive into what an automation strategy is, its benefits, and how automation enables us to achieve more with less.
What Are The Benefits Of Developing An Automation Strategy?
1. Take care of time-consuming jobs.
In terms of time saved and increased productivity, automation provides a quick ROI that easily overcomes initial start-up costs when the correct automation tool is used. No-code automation enables firms to quickly and easily free up human resources, letting teams increase their focus on the more strategic projects required to pull a business through challenging economic times.
2. Automation makes accounting easier.
Accounting is a field that has been entirely transformed by automation. Here are a few examples of how automation technology has influenced many activities.
Within an automated process, you can quickly and easily organize data, generate critical paperwork, digitize your documents, get approvals and generate reports via Intelligent Document Processing.
Scheduled notifications can also be used to create automated invoicing and billing forms. Plus, innovative scanning apps allow users to quickly and accurately enter information, speeding up accounting procedures rapidly.
3. Automation reduces risk.
At any time, but particularly during a recession, mitigating risk is paramount. Since robots don’t fatigue or get sick and can perform rules-based tasks with higher accuracy than humans, processes can be sped up with automation — reducing human error by eliminating deviation. This means that risk is reduced on several parameters, and organizations can focus on what they do best, which is to say, the things that humans are uniquely good at.
How Does An Automation Strategy Reduce Costs?
Using automation, financial managers may go deeper into their source data to better predict company needs. They can also identify new cost-cutting opportunities for a particular business unit or department. Chief Procurement Officers and other professionals can analyze historical trends in order to find savings gaps between current spending and budgeted amounts with the data they have at their fingertips.
Employees now invest less time in tasks that used to take hours to accomplish before automation. This is significant because automation can perform these manual tasks in a fraction of a second, while reducing the possibility – and risk – of human error, minimizing costs on this front as well.
Human error is inevitable when completing tasks manually – we are human, after all! However, with an automation strategy in place, businesses can minimize this risk at the same time as reducing costs, boosting productivity and making the most of their opportunities.
How Does Automation Increase Productivity?
Every manager values productivity. Some managers measure productivity by analyzing the amount of time spent. At the same time, others believe the number of tasks is more important. However, we are all aware that there is much more to it. The essential productivity measures generally considered by all are economical quantity, timely work, quality output, and efficiency.
Process automation ticks all these boxes by enabling team members to achieve significantly more in the same amount of time, minimize risk of error by minimizing manual processing, and through this greater efficiency, enable significant business growth.
Process automation is a robust and modern recession technology within an industry experiencing rapid innovation and growth. With periods of economic turbulence certain to come in the months and years ahead, it’s becoming necessary for organizations and individuals to leverage automation and make the most of their opportunities.
Developing a Process Automation Strategy
A process automation strategy is critical for decreasing bottlenecks and human error, while boosting communication and promoting maximum workforce productivity.
Developing a process automation strategy involves several steps that can help organizations effectively implement and manage automated processes. Here are some critical steps to consider when developing a process automation strategy:
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- Identifying what processes to automate is the initial step. This selection should depend on the value automation will offer to the firm.
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- Make sure you understand why you’re employing process automation. Once you have established a precise aim, identify the measurements you will use to determine whether or not your goal has been met.
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- To select the best tools, conduct a study and consult with professionals.
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- The tools you choose should be compatible with the systems you currently use to manage your operations. If you use Microsoft Office, try out Power Automate. And if you use Google Workspace, zenphi can help you automate processes.
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- Keep an eye on your chosen evaluation criteria and re-evaluate which areas impact your customer service and efficiency.
By following these steps, organizations can develop a process automation strategy that helps them effectively implement and manage automated processes, improving efficiency, productivity, and business performance.
How Does An Automation Strategy Help Businesses To Do More With Less?
As we begin a new year, signs of economic trouble have gathered on the horizon. However, automation provides significant opportunity for any business achieve more with less to weather the storm. Plus, its gains will continue to prove even more valuable when economic conditions improve – and they will! By enabling teams to achieve more, automation provides a better chance to continue to challenge their growth goals and defy the odds despite not-so-perfect economic conditions.
One particular way automation creates efficiencies and allows companies to do more with less is with human labor. Investing in a flexible integration and automation infrastructure will free employees from monotonous, repetitive tasks to concentrate on more strategic and higher value projects. They’ll also enjoy an improved employee experience, lowering turnover, hiring and training expenses with greater employee satisfaction.
No business operates at its full potential, even in the best market conditions. However by building an automation culture now and instilling a high-performing team that can quickly adapt to future market needs, companies can multifold their ROI and be ready for whatever comes in the future.
The use of coding to realize automation goals makes it difficult for non-coders to automate and optimize their own processes, slowing down the implementation and reducing adoption of this technology business-wide. Using smooth functioning no-code automation tools like zenphi, companies of all sizes can quickly build and deploy sophisticated systems without any prior technical knowledge or training.
In our opinion, no-code automation tools are the best way for non-technical individuals to create end-to-end automations. If you’re ready to recession-proof your business with no code automation, start your free trial today!
