3 Business Processes You Should Automate

Advances in technology have increased productivity in almost every area of the business world. From communication to product research to paperwork, it’s hard to think of a process that can’t be automated at some level. While the decision to automate or not should be a careful one, here are three business processes that you should definitely consider automating.

New Employee Onboarding

Documents like the offer letter, confidentiality statements, and tax forms can be consolidated into a cloud-based workflow application. You can set up the proper approval routes and create drop-down menus, pre-populated fields, date ranges, and more customization options. Your new hire can use the system remotely at any time that is convenient for them instead of having to make and keep an appointment to fill out forms.

Purchasing and Travel Requests

If you’re still shuffling purchase orders and travel forms back and forth between employees, supervisors, and accounting staff, then automating these processes can save you time, money, and frustration. You can set up the workflow to route each request automatically to the right party for approval, and you can limit errors by pre-defining fields with data such as spending limits, date ranges, or budgeted amounts.

Project Collaboration

At one time, collaboration on a project required getting everyone in the same room with a flip chart and spending hours throwing out ideas and debating everyone’s comments. That evolved into emailing documents back and forth, and inevitably, communication would break down. Now, you can put everything into a cloud-based solution or a project management system so that everyone sees the same information all the time. Team members can make suggestions and changes in real-time.

The Harvard Business Review points out that any number of high volume, low complexity, and routine tasks are ripe for automation. Like most things though, automating your business processes is best done in partnership with someone who can walk you through step by step and help you avoid the pitfalls. Contact UNIM for custom solutions tailored to your company’s needs.