Automation is no longer a luxury reserved for large businesses. Now, it’s becoming an essential tool for businesses of all sizes to ensure continued success. Thanks to innovations such as AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, and Cloud, everything can now be automated.
Automation tools such as Power BI are transforming businesses and increasingly contributing to economic growth via contributions to productivity. You can leverage Power BI automation to create workflows that automate manual tasks and processes across applications and services.
This article will look at what automation means, what processes can be automated, various automation technologies, and how these automation capabilities will advance business. Read on.
What Is Automation (From An IT Perspective?)
In general terms, automation refers to the application of technologies to produce and distribute goods and services with minimal human input. From an IT perspective, automation is using software to create repeatable instructions and processes that replace an IT professional’s manual work in data centers and cloud deployments.
Automation is critical to customer satisfaction and growing revenue, which is why it’s so crucial for the future of IT businesses. Automation minimizes costs, increases efficiency, and streamlines operations. If you wish to have a growing roster of happy customers, you need to start focusing on automating processes.
What Processes Can Be Automated?
Identifying the right process to automate can take time and effort. Many business leaders are often uncertain about what can be automated to make life easier for themselves and their teams. So what processes can be automated?
As a general rule of thumb, any repeatable and action-based process can be automated. Here are a few examples of tasks you can automate in your business:
Customer Support
Automating customer support empowers customers to handle simple tasks on their own. When automating customer service, focus on simple, repeated tasks that consume most of your support staff’s time such as: gathering customer data, verifying user accounts, and answering customer queries.
Employee Onboarding
The onboarding process can involve many tasks. HR staff have to fill out employee information forms, set up induction sessions, arrange training sessions, set up bank accounts, et cetera. Automating the onboarding process ensures smooth transitions from one task to the next and provides visibility into the hiring process.
Invoice Processing
Invoice processing is a recurring process in most organizations. Luckily, the vast majority of manual tasks that go into invoice processing can be automated to make life easier for your employees. Automating invoice processing will help you speed up invoice approvals, minimize errors, and reduce processing costs.
Social Media Management
Managing your business’s social media accounts can require a lot of manual labor. Fortunately, businesses can streamline and optimize social interactions using automated tools. These automation tools allow you to automate mundane and repetitive social media tasks and focus instead on strategic goals.
Sales/CRM Process
Businesses can automate tedious, time-consuming tasks that are key to building simple and profitable customer journeys. Your CRM tool is a vital piece of your sales automation efforts. CRM can help set the foundation for a successful sales automation process by keeping track of essential details.
What Are Automated Technologies?
Automation involves a broad range of technologies that enable business processes to run automatically. The application of these automated technologies improves the efficiency, reliability, and speed of many tasks that, until now, were performed by humans.
Some examples of popular automated technologies include: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Robotic Processes, and Cloud.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
For many people, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most obvious example that comes to mind when someone mentions intelligent automation technologies. AI combines digital input with algorithms, remote inputs, and other elements to mimic how humans learn. AI-powered computers can perform tasks on their own.
Machine Learning (ML)
Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to learn automatically from past data. Like AI, ML uses data and algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior. ML is a growing technology primarily used for making predictions based on historical data analysis.
Robotic Processes
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a business process automation technology that mimics how humans interact with software to perform repeatable back-office tasks. RPA helps businesses across industries complete various tasks, including sales, scheduling, and call center operations.
Cloud
Cloud automation involves using cloud management tools to complete tasks without human intervention. Cloud automation enables IT admins and Cloud admins to reduce or eliminate manual efforts and expedite the delivery of infrastructure resources on a self-serve basis, depending on business or user demand.
How Will These Capabilities Advance Business?
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Robotic Processes, and Cloud Computing are ushering in a new age of automation. The implementation of these automation capabilities will improve your business in the following ways:
Helps Identify Options Otherwise Hidden in Extremely Large Data Sets
Automation tools such as AI and machine learning make it easier to find hidden data patterns in big data sets. Machine learning algorithms can learn from data and make predictions.
Helps Make Better Day-to-Day Decisions
As a business, automation can help you improve your decision-making process, making it quicker, more streamlined, and less prone to error. Automating business processes will also increase the consistency of decisions.
Cost Comparisons
Automating cost comparisons can help businesses quickly calculate, analyze, and maintain detailed, accurate, and actionable product costs. Without automation, monitoring competitors’ costs takes too much time and effort.
Customer Responses
Many businesses struggle to collect customer feedback because it takes too much time and effort. However, with automation, your customers can self-serve and submit feedback at their convenience without involving your customer-facing teams.
Industry Variables
In a cutthroat business environment, studying all the variables influencing business performance and success is necessary. Automation enables the use of analytics to identify the appropriate variables in the dynamics of the industry and map out the trends of its market.
Whether you’re running a small business or a large organization, automation is a great way to streamline operations and drive business growth. As the business gains efficiency through automation, we can create new opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
