Most organizations have five main functions: marketing, admin and IT, finance, customer support, and human resources. These departments must work together to achieve company goals.
- HR looks for talents.
- Marketing markets products to increase business revenue
- Finance controls the income and expenditure to ensure the business runs effectively
- Admin and IT provide support to employees and other functions
- Customer support offers technical assistance to customers
All these business functions must work together for organizational success. Companies with siloed departments often experience lower levels of productivity and growth. They don’t operate efficiently and fail to realize their long-term objectives. While each business function has its own goals and targets, it must also support the company’s goals as a whole.
Workflow software makes an organization more efficient, productive, and agile. It drives efficient decision-making, improves the allocation of resources, and increases employee productivity.
How manual processes hurt your business
Manual processes have no place in a digital world as they are resource-intensive and require more time and money to complete. They also lower productivity by diverting employees from critical tasks that can drive business innovation and bring revenue.
But despite automation’s clear benefits, manual processes are prevalent in many organizations. These time-consuming processes cause companies to respond slowly to market needs. To survive in a competitive business environment, an organization must be speed-to-market and respond quickly to customer needs.
Inefficient manual processes impact business agility and scalability during times of economic change. When an organization doesn’t respond on time to customer and market demands, it loses customers and growth opportunities to competitors with automated business processes.
Here’s how manual processes are hurting your business.
High risk of error
Humans get tired, and when they get tired, they make mistakes. If employees do the majority of the work, mistakes are unavoidable. They may input the wrong inventory number or cause non-compliance with industry regulations.
Inaccurate data can be destructive and jeopardize compliance. It might open a company up to litigation or financial penalties and cause additional problems, such as dealing with irate customers. A business process management system can mitigate risk by putting sensitive processes in the competent hands of technology.
Time consuming
Repetitive tasks are time-consuming and take longer to complete than automated tasks. When processes are automated, employees don’t have to spend time extracting data from various programs or documenting them into spreadsheets. They can focus on developing innovative products or enhancing customer service.
Reduced visibility
If employees in one department complete tasks on paper, local hard drives, and other disconnected locations, it can be hard for other business units to access the data. Work may also be performed inconsistently. One employee might enter 0 if a field doesn’t apply, another might enter a N/A, while another might leave it blank. These inconsistencies can cause issues when the data is needed for critical business purposes. A reporting platform may interpret varying data differently and produce flawed reports and insights.
Lack of collaboration
Manual processes also cause data silos; departments work separately without collaborating. Data silos often lead to task redundancies and inefficient processes company-wide. For example, if someone from sales needs to access the inventory to close a deal, they may have to wait for the purchasing department to send over the information. But if the system is automated, they can simply log in and access the information immediately.
Compliance issues
Errors and delays can cause problems both internally and externally. Business operations may stall or slow down and the company may fail to fulfill its compliance requirements. Automation ensures a company always has the information it needs in the proper, accurate format.
Increased labor costs
All the extra time spent on manual processes hurts a company’s bottom line. Skilled professionals spend most of their time on manual processes that can be automated. If errors occur (which is inevitable where humans are involved), money has to be spent to fix them. Recounting products or rechecking documents can all eat into your labor budget.
Automation can significantly reduce labor requirements by eliminating or speeding up manual processes. By reducing the time needed for each task, automation allows employees to spend more time doing work that drives profits.
Process automation is ideal for companies of all sizes
Manual processes heavily depend on people, a dependence automation does away with. People are important, but they can only benefit an organization if they focus on high-priority work, not redundant manual processes.
Process automation can help business functions work together to achieve business goals and objectives—irrespective of an organization’s size and industry. It improves collaboration between teams, giving companies a competitive edge in an ever-changing marketplace. Business units work together and solve problems quickly. This leads to more efficient processes, higher productivity, more innovation, and increased revenue.
