What You Could (and Should) Automate in Your Business, and Why
It’s no secret that businesses must operate with a lean structure to be efficient, stay competitive, and enhance profitability. Additionally, in recent times the pandemic forced business owners into multitasking and being more creative to deal with the daily challenges of managing the company’s operations.
While technology and automation are top of mind for efficiency and growth, it’s still a scary journey for managers and entrepreneurs that decide to do it on their own.
An intelligent automation strategy should help simplify the business and free time so you can work on your business and not just in the business.
What's in it for you?
Implementing an automation plan requires the right partner to ensure you start strong and capture value. Selecting where and how to approach automation can bring benefits such as:
Decrease in operational costs
Improve speed and quality of outputs when compared to manual processing
Reduced risk of human error — and therefore reduced financial, reputational, and regulatory risk
Fast and measurable returns
At hbp we’ve seen increased demand and results from clients leveraging automation. Below are some examples of projects where cost-efficient automation brought tangible and promising results:
Examples of processes that could (and should) be automated today:
Data manipulation in excel, including reporting and analysis
Data-sharing between different systems
Manual, repetitive and rule-based processes
Document management, signatures, approvals, and controls
Sales/CRM processes and Invoicing
Payroll, leave management and employee onboarding
Expense tracking and reconciliation
How to get started?
Automation plans can start in small, simple tasks that are time-consuming and steal precious time from the team. Tasks such as document approvals, downloading reports, and reconciliation and consolidation between different systems are low hanging fruits for automation technology.
You don’t need to dive into the deep-end and automate everything at once — start small and build from there. What are the processes in your company you’d like to see automated, so you can invest time in more worthy projects?
The ROI of your automation projects will become visible once you realise your time is better spent at activities that can never be automated such as building company culture, increasing brand value, or improving employee engagement.
How can hbp help?
The halkin technology team can provide you with insights about what should be in your ecosystem, what to automate and how to do it best so you can produce tangible results. Our specialists can leverage existing integrations from pools such as the Xero Marketplace and Shopify Apps, or build something customised using powerful tools such as API integrations and the Microsoft Power Platform.
hbp can help with process mapping, configuration, implementation, training, and support - keeping you in the loop every step of the way.
We’ve worked with many companies on automation and cloud-integration projects to improve productivity, profitability and help businesses mitigate risk.
See below some examples of clients that are profiting from automated solutions:
Case Study 1
Using a customised app to reduce costly errors and save time
The client is a membership-based government agency, using a custom app built using the Power Apps platform to compare information from three different platforms (memberships, registrations, and payments) and highlight errors in the reconciliation process. This app not only saved time in the reconciliation process but also increased consistency, reduced costly errors, and improved the members experience with the agency’s team (who can now spend more time leveraging information about members behaviour and the agency’s performance).
Case Study 2
Using a dashboard + app combination to automate financial analysis and prepare financial/non-financial data
A childcare centre client used a combination of tools from the Microsoft Power Platform to automate the comparison of financial and operational performance between business units. The automated solution helped the owner review the financial strategy, using a combination of app + dashboard to compare financial and non-financial information for the business units.
The solution reduced the financial processing time from 8 hours down to 30min per fortnight and surfaced several inconsistencies that couldn’t be found before with the manual processes in place.
Case Study 3
Using an app to streamline tasks' handover and visibility
At hbp, our technology team developed a customised app using a few tools from Microsoft’s Power Platform to streamline the quality control for financial statements involving multiple teams and checkpoints.
The solution was adapted to hbp’s routine and integrates reports, email, approvals, and delegation in one simple and automated interface. Managers can easily send work requests to staff onshore and offshore, when tasks are completed, users push a button on the message and that records the timestamp of the completion of the task. The automation saved lots of messages, reduced the time for quality control and increased the quality of the outputs with transparency and speed.
Contact us today to harness the automation possibilities and implement a solid plan for your business.
