Your Complete Guide to Business Automation

Introduction

Former chief of research at Gartner, Peter Sondergaard, once said, “Everyone is a technology company.” In our increasingly digital world, this statement is more relevant than ever.

Digital disruption is well and truly underway in Australia. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, digitisation has the potential to contribute between A$140 billion and A$250 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2025. One key component of this ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ is automation.

Automation — that is, the use of technology to perform routine, repetitive tasks — is transforming almost every industry by helping businesses perform low-level work faster and more cheaply.

For example, according to research from the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), bottom quartile performers spend at least $12.67 per $1,000 in revenue on staff that perform basic accounting functions, while the top quartile performers spend just $3.66 or less. In other words, the top performers are reaping the benefits of automation by improving efficiencies, while low performers are falling behind due to their reliance on manual processes.

While automation alone will not necessarily result in increased profits, it is a fundamental stepping stone towards growth as it helps to reduce waste, inconsistencies, complexity and the number of processes in your business.

Part 1

5 Ways Business Automation Generates Value

Whichever route you decide to take, and whether it’s one or both, a total reliance on manual processes can be a hindrance as you’ll have to hire the labour you require to support that growth. Not only does this come at a high cost, but you’re also bound by your hiring rate and ability, as well as the skills of your employees. This limits your growth potential and speed, particularly when talent is in high demand.

But there is another option: investing in automation

By giving employees tools that automate previously manual processes, they can achieve more in the same amount of time. For example, your IT department can implement robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive and routine tasks, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value strategic and creative tasks.

RPA also leads to an overall reduction in errors, allowing your team to invest more time deploying applications that can help make other departments more efficient, rather than fixing mistakes.

You could, for example, use AI-powered automation to manage the increasing quantity of data that growing organisations generate. This will allow you to transform and scale your business operations to leverage new opportunities. For example, some law firms are already using AI-powered automation for secure digital archiving, data processing and retrieval. This allows these firms to respond to clients more rapidly, providing an advantage over other firms with more manual processes.

Benefit #2: Increasing sophistication and innovation

It’s no longer enough to offer an excellent but highly standardised service. To keep customers satisfied (and stay a step ahead of competitors), you must constantly look at ways to expand and improve your offerings. In fact, according to Gartner, one of the biggest reasons why businesses implement new technologies is to pioneer customer engagement and accelerate response times. While this is a positive thing, the reality is that you’re adding something new to your existing business model, and this will often result in more complex internal systems and processes to accommodate the new offering.

Automation can help you cope with these greater complexities by taking manual routine processes off employees’ plates and giving them more time to focus on value-driven tasks. This allows your business to take on more complexity without necessarily having to take on more employees.

Deploying automation can also lead to greater innovation, as employees can spend more of their time focusing on high-value tasks such as strategy and analysis, rather than low-value tasks such as data input.

For example, instead of finance teams spending time manually inputting data to process invoices, the business could deploy an automated accounts payable solution. According to the ATO, organisations that automate accounts payable reduce their invoicing costs to less than $10 per invoice. In fact, research shows that the best performing businesses spend less than $2 USD (approximately $2.70 AUD) per invoice. With their accounts payable processes taken care of, your finance team can direct its energy towards other priorities, such as improving vendor engagements, or finding areas to reduce costs.

A busy open-plan office with some workers sitting and others walking.

Benefit #3: Improving accuracy & efficiency

Even the most diligent employees make occasional mistakes – it’s part and parcel of being human. Multiply the number of errors an employee makes in a given year by the number of people in your team or organisation, and it’s easy to see that these mistakes are costing your business time and money. Unfortunately, as your business grows in size and complexity, so too does the propensity for errors. And in complex information environments, finding errors is more time-consuming and costly.

Automation greatly reduces the risk of human error – after all, a machine’s concentration and energy never wavers. There are many tasks, such as data transference, that can be performed by automated technology at much greater speeds and accuracy than by humans.

In fact, as much of 33%-40% of employees’ daily tasks are considered manual and repetitive, making them a good fit for automation. If even half of these tasks were automated, organisations would see a noticeable uptick in staff performance and productivity.

Benefit #4: Preparing you for the future

Automation can deliver many short-term benefits, however, it is also key to preparing your business for the future. As the World Economic Forum reports that automation will play a pivotal role in the future of work, businesses that adopt these technologies will be in good stead to navigate the business environment ahead.

At the beginning of your automation journey, you’ll likely start by automating some of the simpler and more repetitive tasks. This experience makes any future automation attempts far easier, as you’ll have set up the necessary infrastructure, workflows and cultural changes required.

Once you’ve mastered implementing automation at these basic levels, you can then build on this foundation, adding layers of increasing complexity and making the system capable of more difficult tasks. This means you can be prepared for new technologies and disruptors that come your way.

For example, if your IT infrastructure has been automated in order to facilitate the creation and deployment of applications, you’ll be able to quickly adapt to new public and private cloud infrastructures that don’t exist today.

Benefit #5: Attracting and retaining higher-quality employees

By freeing employees from routine and repetitive tasks, automation has the potential to redefine the very nature of work, shifting the focus from purely transactional tasks to tasks that require more ‘human’ skills, such as analysis, strategy, creativity and empathy. This leads to more engaged and value-driven employees, who are able to demonstrate flexibility, independent decision-making, and exemplary customer service.

Giving employees more opportunities to exercise these types of skills will not only lead to more engaged employees but also higher job satisfaction. This in turn leads to a greater ability to attract and retain top-level talent, which will drastically reduce costs associated with hiring and training.

Working from home

With increased connectivity and changing expectations in the workforce, working from home is easier and in higher demand than ever. While employers may have traditionally assumed that workers are less productive at home, the pandemic has proven that employees can be up to 48% more productive in their own homes. Allowing employees the flexibility to work from home not only improves workplace productivity but also cultivates staff loyalty and reduces sick days and absenteeism. The key is to employ technologies that enable staff to work productively from anywhere. Content Services solutions allow employees to create, edit and share documents efficiently and securely, ensuring they always have access to the right information to do their jobs well. Enabling remote collaboration also encourages more diverse, strategic and innovative thinking as opposed to working in siloed, isolated teams. Plus, it gives employers critical visibility over every single process, and it’s easier for businesses to assess how they can improve operational efficiency.

Part 2

Paving the Way to Automation Success

As you can see, automation can have significant benefits – but these can only be realised if the systems are deployed mindfully and strategically. A successful implementation is especially critical if your organisation is unfamiliar with automated processes, as taking on too much at once can be disruptive to your business.

It’s best to automate one process or system at a time, and then use this experience as a case study for the rest of your business. This will, in turn, provide justification for company-wide upgrades.

Once you’re ready to implement your first automated system or process, here are our three top tips for success.

1. Identify business processes with high automation potential

In order to determine where automation can be applied most profitably, start by conducting a thorough inventory of your business’s activities and assessing the automation potential of these activities.

To get the full worth of your automation efforts, be sure to consider how entire processes could be transformed by automation, rather than isolating individual tasks within those processes.

Once you’ve identified processes with high automation potential, weigh up the benefits and feasibility of applying automation to these processes in order to determine the best place to start.

Close-up of an Asian woman in a yellow shirt writing in a notebook while she looks at a laptop screen.

2. Don’t forget the human side of automation

Successful automation requires huge adjustments on the part of your employees, including adopting new workflows, adapting to a new workplace culture and taking on more difficult tasks. It is crucial to ensure employees feel supported to take on these new challenges through leadership buy-in and regular communication.

Ensure employees are clear on the strategic objectives behind your business’ automation efforts – whether it’s to shorten the sales cycle, improve customer response time or increase efficiencies across the board. If your employees understand the value of the automated process, they can help make sure the goals are achieved.

3. Monitor and improve your performance

To reap the long-term benefits of automation, it is important to monitor your performance continuously. Establish key metrics, such as ROI, to help build a framework for success. This will allow you to measure your investment in automation against previously manual processes, and help you to determine other ways to improve system performance.

Six business people sitting around a board table in a light-filled office.

Conclusion

Automation on its own is not a silver bullet. However, when implemented strategically and thoughtfully, it has the potential to not only reduce inefficiencies and costs, but also support growth, encourage innovation and prepare your business for the future.

The business automation story is entering the next phase as it expands its role in our tech stacks and transforms the way we work. Download our whitepaper, An Automated Future, to learn how business automation will shape Australian and New Zealand organisations in 2023–25.