4 Ways Process Automation Helps Businesses

Effective processes can make or break a business. Plenty of businesses with great ideas have fallen prey to inefficient processes that end up increasing resource wastages. Whether you run a startup or a mid-sized business, process inefficiency should always be a major concern. But how do you make processes better once you have identified inefficiencies? Modern technology offers businesses a very powerful fix to address challenges within processes on a broad scale: automation. Automated processes are in use all around us, from the AI that routes your Spectrum number call to the right agent to ATM machines. And the reason they continue to grow in both scale and scope is because of 5 key business advantages. These include:

Reduced Employee Cost

Maintaining processes that require a lot of manpower can be expensive. Each worker involved in the process represents an addition to payroll and benefits costs, which are among the biggest expenditures any business has during a given period. There are also several other less immediate disadvantages. For example, there are costs and resources involved in hiring and retaining employees. There are also other expenses, such as the costs of employee attrition, inefficiency, dependability, and so forth.

Automated processes, however, tend to have none of these problems. An AI chatbot does not require a salary, benefits packages, 401k accounts, health insurance, and so forth. An AI also does not require paid vacations or emotional management. Therefore, AI-driven automated processes tend to be far most cost-effective to businesses than human-driven ones.

Improved Quality and Accuracy

Even the best workplaces cannot completely eliminate human error. There will always be some degree of mistakes involved, from typos to transpositional errors. If a worker is struggling with health issues or low motivation, the errors can be much more frequent than usual. Certain errors in a sensitive situation can quickly result in lost revenue and damaged business credibility. And even while small errors don’t necessarily threaten business continuity, they do involve extra time and effort in correcting them.

These are very common problems in business processes that depend heavily on human involvement. An automated business process, however, tends to have a much higher level of accuracy and quality in its output. AI and computers don’t make “mistakes” in the human sense. They don’t have issues with attention spans, retaining memory, or multitasking. They may run into hardware issues or bugs, so even automated processes aren’t foolproof. But you can generally depend on them to be reliable and accurate.

Faster Turnaround and Lower Downtime

Businesses always aim to maximize the output from each process involved in generating revenue. Process automation addresses two key challenges that businesses face when approaching this goal: turnaround time and downtime. With human-driven processes, the turnaround time can vary based on any number of factors. Similarly, many different variables can contribute to unnecessary downtime in business processes.

With automated processes, however, the turnaround time can increase substantially since machines handling certain aspects of the process ensures they are completed accurately and quickly. Similarly, with automated systems not requiring time off or vacation days, downtime can decrease quite dramatically.

Synergy with Human Workers

There is a lot of speculation and fear that automation will end up replacing humans altogether, contributing to mass unemployment and poverty. However, the realities in a business context are very different. For example, businesses may value the use of automation, but they also understand that AI cannot completely replace the human element in business processes. Nor are businesses ready to completely entrust AI with key business authorities like making decisions.

What AI really does in a business context is assist humans with their roles in a process. Therefore, an AI will support humans in taking on repetitive and time-consuming tasks, leaving them free to direct their energies to tasks that only humans can accomplish. Or, in the context of business decisions, an AI cannot make the decisions but can gather, sort, and analyze information that makes these decisions far more effective.

Takeaway

Business process automation is important for several reasons. It makes processes more cost-efficient, more accurate, and more productive. By extension, they can help the business outperform less-efficient competitors. But it is important to keep your expectations grounded in reality. AI is not a fix-all. It has value in a business context, but in very limited roles that typically synergize with human workers. Most importantly, it would be a significant mistake to think that AI can completely replace the need for human involvement at any level of business.