Process automation for enterprises can reap great benefits, especially since there are many small, administrative tasks in any department that are worth automating. Here’s a list of processes that could get you a quick win for your pilot automation project.
Why automation is worth the investment
Many treat small, administrative processes in any enterprise as ad hoc tasks. “Getting approval” for this or “maintaining up-to-date data” may seem unimportant, but these “small” things may add up to huge tasks often taking up a lot of time and attention.
Thankfully, these tasks, including onboarding and contract management system are some of the things automation can improve your work processes. If you’re part of an organization that’s considering the promise of artificial intelligence and robotic automation but haven’t implemented the technology for the last ten years, then a bit of back-office automation might be the introductory project your organization needs.
Generally, picking administrative processes that support your back-office might be the place to start because it will likely require less industry or business-specific customization. If you aren’t sure of which areas to look at for that first project, here are a couple of suggestions:
1. Employee Onboarding for Human Resources
The problem: Managing the checklist of 20+ things that need to be coordinated with three different departments before someone is officially on the job.
The solution: You can store the documents needed digitally and automate the checklist.
Employee onboarding can be a pain for HR, especially when there are different requirements for different roles. Often, these requirements need to be coordinated with their immediate manager, checked against current company policies and then tracked accordingly before an employee can even officially start their job. Automating things such as the issuance of devices, the creation of emails and the deployment of appropriate training materials is a great way to lighten the load of a critical department.
2. Simple Approval System
The problem: Approval processes aren’t efficiently managed or tracked and often cause important decisions to fall off your radar.
The solution: Automating a system to push approvals to the right people, for the right things.
A Simple Approval Process can be applied to a back-office process or even a process part of core operations. If you’re looking at something a bit simpler, deploying an approval process for managing leave applications might be a great way to start. If you’re looking at something more complex, you can automate for approvals for documents that need better tracking and archiving, such as client proposals. Ramping the automation up with proper reports might be even more valuable, as you can get some actionable insights on the effort and time spent on creating and approving specific documents.
3. An Enterprise Contract Management System
The problem: Managing multiple contracts and keeping track of their movement, often just for a single project.
The solution: Digitally storing and automating the movement of contracts including creation, renewals and termination.
Contract management is a great place to automate because there’s always a contract involved for all businesses. It’s great for financial tracking as well as managing multiple, big contracts mean something significant for either expense or revenue sheets. Levelling up from typical approval automation, keeping track of how much these contracts are worth when they’re due to end and also whether or not these contracts are renewable help with operational visibility in a big way and might be the solution to manage your core business better.
Whichever process you may choose to automate for your organization, it’s important to remember that just taking that first leap is what matters the most. So don’t try and bite off too much for your first project. You can always start more projects and dive into the wonderful world of automation all over again!
