If you are running a business, there are a lot of tasks you need to manage each day. The worry of sustenance in the business world, providing salaries to your employees, solving day to day problems and all the issues take up a lot of your time. That’s why automation has spread through all the areas of the world. It makes human lives easy. People have started to automate their houses, their garages, and even their cars. Businesses are also running in the race of automation. It was found out that companies using cloud automation experience a 15% year-over-year revenue growth. This is why it is important for you to know how to automate your business and focus on the bigger picture.
In this blog, I have articulated the topics mentioned below. You can jump around, but we would suggest you read the “steps to automate” first.
- Steps to automate your business
- Research on small scale automation
- List down the tasks that you want to automate
- Select automation tools and dig deeper
- Create an actionable list
- Select a quantitative measure to analyze results
- Best practices to automate your business
- Create a culture that promotes automation
- Brainstorming new automation
- Keep track of your failures
Steps to automate your business
Here are the steps to automate your business that will help you to start from scratch.
1. Research on Small Scale Automation
Start your business automation journey by researching small scale automation that you can scale in the future. Here you need to think about smaller tasks that you can easily automate in your business. Salespeople say that 66% of their day is wasted on doing administrative tasks. When this wasted time is saved through automation, your sales team can achieve milestones.
For example, if your marketing team sends emails to a lot of people, you can think of email automation.
Or if your sales team has to manually take sales follow-ups from clients, you can research upon automating their efforts.
After enough introspection and research on the tasks of the company, you would be able to complete the first step, which brings us to the second step.
2. List Down the Tasks That You Want to Automate
In this step, you need to find out the list of the tasks that can be automated and pick the ones that you want to automate in your business. Here’s a not-so-secret hack that will help you find these processes effectively - “Look for repetition”.
There will be some processes that are repeated by you or your employees on a regular basis. Out of these repetitive processes, you will find the list of tasks that you want to automate.
For example, if your business regularly deals with freelancers, you will have a process to communicate with them. You can list down this process. Just for the example, let’s assume this is a freelance writer. The list might look something like this:
- Create an outline
- Explain them in brief
- Set deadlines for the task
- Take follow-ups of the task
- Review the task
- Take follow-ups after review
- Approve the final draft
Once you have the list, prioritize your processes. You must know the importance of each task and set time to it accordingly. Here all the highlighted tasks in the process can be automated in one or the other way. That’s how you create a list of tasks that you want to automate.
3. Select Automation Tools and Dig Deeper
Now that you have the list of tasks that you want to automate, move further deeper into it. Find out the solutions that you can use to automate these tasks. You need to identify your needs and pick automation tools that help you with that need. For example, you might want to go for marketing automation first. There are several resources that will help you automate your chosen department or process. If you are stuck, you can start reading about the best marketing automation software for different departments for an idea.
For example, if you want to automate and integrate your marketing with sales and you are using Mailchimp for email marketing, look for integrations in Mailchimp. You will find all the platforms that can be integrated with Mailchimp. Due to this, you can explore new tools as well.
Almost all the big players in the software market have started cloud integration. This also gave birth to a new category of tools called iPaaS. 94% of SaaS enthusiasts and founders find integration with other systems to be important in winning new customers. These statistics suggest that integration is becoming a utility and necessity for businesses.
4. Create an Actionable List
After finding out how you can automate your existing tasks, create an actionable list of tasks that you will automate. Involve all the stakeholders who are linked with this process while creating this actionable list. This list should include all the details on how you are going to automate this process.
For example, if you want to automate your sign up email through an email automation tool, involve the sales team and show them how this automation works. Discuss all the resources that you have used (like the tool, the email template, etc.).
This list will help you in the future when you automate this process further.
5. Select a Quantitative Measure to Analyze Results
Efficiency and productivity are qualitative measures that make it difficult for you to measure your business process automation and its efficiency. Select a few quantitative process performance metrics like time used in executing a process or quantity of units created. It can differ depending on your industry. Analyzing the results will give you an idea of how much growth you achieved due to the automation of your business.
Take feedback from the involved parties where you executed the automation to know whether the automation is actually making their jobs easier or not. If you receive a negative result or no result at all, optimize your process, and look for more details to overcome it. Once you learn exactly how automation is impacting your business, you will be able to further improve it.
Best Practices of Automation
While you are learning to automate your business, there are businesses that have already explored a high degree of automation. Here are some best practices that we have learned after experiences of automation:
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Create a Culture That Promotes Automation
If you want to automate your business from the core, you will have to add it as a value of your business. You must create a culture in your business that promotes automation at each step of their work. This will make it easier for your employees to take initiatives for the business. Once you have created a culture of automation, you will have a habit of finding and bringing in new ideas to the table. By doing so, they can focus on high cognitive tasks. As a result, their productivity increases, and it affects significantly on your business.
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Brainstorming New Automation
Keep it optional for employees to be present at the “monthly automation meeting”. These meetings will have people presenting their ideas of automation. Since they are directly involved with everyday activities, they will have a better idea of how processes work. Throughout the month, employees will face a lot of bottlenecks. They can make a note of these bottlenecks and collect automation ideas for the monthly meeting. These sessions will help you get more creative ideas as more brains are working on it.
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Keep Track of Your Failures
If you have implemented automation in one of your processes, there is no guarantee that you will always succeed. You might find a better solution than you were implementing. In these scenarios, keep track of these failures in the doc. You can call it the “Directory of Experiences”. You can also add what you learned from that mistake in this directory. Use this journal/directory to optimize your processes with automation in the future.
Conclusion
Automation supports your business and helps your employees focus on important things by freeing up their time. Make it your target to start at least one form of automation in your business this month. You can think of automating your employee onboarding for starters.
Contact the top Robotic Process Automation services for automating your crucial business processes and take it to the next level.
