A downturn economic environment presents its share of challenges but it is not without opportunities. Whether the slowdown is giving you time to work ON the business, or rationalizations and reorganizations are on the agenda, now is as good if not better than any time to launch an initiative to automate business processes. Here are 5 motivations to embark on such a project
1. Do as much with less
Maintain outpout levels while reducing costs
- Reduction of operational costs
- Rationalization
2. Do more with as much
Increase output levels without increasing costs
- Reduced opportunity costs (for example, a strategic can be freed to work on more value-add tasks)
- Increase capacity
3. Do more with more
Fuel and support growth
- Enable the replication of the performance of your best practicians by capturing their expertise and embed it into a system; this will allow less experienced resources to achieve comparable performance levels
4. Do it faster
Reduce delays
- Reduce the time it take to complete a task
5. Avoid errors
Increase quality
- Avoid costly and/or ambarassing mistakes
- Standardize outputs
- Facilitate validation and verification
Automation is not the only nor the always the best way to improve a business process. It does however provide significant opportunities for qualitative and quantitative benefits like:
- Elimination of repetitive tasks, which can in turn bolster morale and facilite retention
- Reduce training costs and delays
The production of proposals is a good example of a business process that can benefit from being at least partly automated:
- Reduction of the effort required to produce a proposal
- Ability to produces and submit more proposals
- Allow multiple resources to produce high-quality proposals
- Reduction of the delays between a discussion with a client and the submission of the proposal
- Avoid leaving the name of the previous client and arithmetic errors
- Implement a self-service system (say: a web page) so that clients can receive their quotes in real time
Francis Dion
Comments