It’s Time You Automate Business Processes to Save Time and Money

By Rhonda Campbell
A key difference between small and large businesses is the business management process used by each. Not only do small businesses have fewer in-house computer analysts, they also generally have fewer in-house computer systems. This, in turn, leads small businesses to perform more boring manual work. It’s both time consuming and costly.

Manual business processes find workers relying on spreadsheets to store and track employee data like dates of hire, base salaries, bonuses, home addresses, titles and promotions. This can be costly. A company with 500 workers might need half a dozen human resources workers just to input, update, review and develop employee reports for managers.

That’s just one way manual business processes slow down a company’s overall operation. Inputting and recording customer details, including customer sales, and target audience data are other business processes that, if performed manually, can chew up hours of time. Manual processes also increase the chance that errors will be made. Even if workers check and re-check data (which often happens when implementing manual business process solutions), errors can still be made. Errors, in turn, can cause workers to become frustrated, perhaps even starting to doubt their abilities, not what good leaders want.

These are just a few reasons why small businesses should consider automating processes they regularly perform. To save money on process software over the long term, be open to building automated programs in-house. It eliminates the need to pay software companies monthly, quarterly or annual licensing fees. Also, if a small business’ automated software programs exceeds in-house expectations, saving a business weeks of manual work (not to mention thousands of dollars in overtime pay), the software could be packaged and sold for profit on the open market.

Before building an in-house software program, technologists should meet with supervisors and workers who perform manual processes. Steps used in the manual processes should be documented in detail. These steps hold clues as to how software should be coded. Also, instead of building several programs, software should be coded so a single program can be used to perform dozens of functions.

Going back to the human resources example, an in-house process software solution could store employee data, automate time off reports, process bi-weekly and year-end bonus payments and record and track performance reviews, all within a matter of minutes. Each part of the program can also communicate to another program so workers no longer have to input the same data into four or more systems, avoiding errors.