There is a lot of scary business terms flying around right now and ‘workflow automation for small business’ is one of them. However, it shouldn’t be, because it could be one of your best business decisions of all time.
In a recent survey by the US Council of Economic Advisors, it is estimated that 83% of jobs paying less than about £15.00 per hour could be automated in the near future. Further to that, the McKinsey Global Insitute predicts 20% of all jobs could be automated.
Those are pretty powerful figures. As an SMB owner or director how do you prepare your business to embrace automation and technology. Whilst also having a thriving workforce.
Like it or not, automation is in every walk of life and the sooner your business embraces it the better you will be prepared for future challenges. The first step to automation is to understand what automation is. This means looking at all the manual processes within your business. Unleased will help you to simplify this process. Our advice is to look at one time-consuming task and work on that. Once that is complete the rest will be easier to identify and therefore automate.
Automation is about removing the paper from your business. You have to think logically by removing the paper you are removing the manual transfer of data. For every piece of paper in your business is a piece of manual data that you cannot see or report on.
By automating you instantly get five massive benefits:
- Time savings
- Improve error rates
- Reduced costs
- Better tracking
- Data gathering, reporting and analysis
Is your business ready for automation?
To know if your business is ready for automation there are five questions to be asked:
- Is the process standard?
- Is there an existing form?
- Do you have regular errors on the forms or is it simply hard to read?
- What do you do with these forms when they are processed?
- How do you use the data from each manual form?
What processes can I automate?
That is the beauty of automation, you can automate any form or checklist within the business. In addition, if you think there are other processes that you don’t currently use, then you can create a new form or workflow (as we call them). The form creation is a ‘no-code’ system which means anybody with a bit of training can create an automated form.
Is Workflow Automation for Small Business expensive?
Again the beauty of automating workflow processes is cost. For around £12.00 per user per month, you can automate any number of forms and not pay anymore.
How do I get started?
To keep things really simple, we have a five-part process.
- Pick your process
- Ensure this is clearly defined
- Choose Kissflow as your platform – there are others but this is the only ‘no-code’ solution on the marketplace
- Create your automated form add workflow and most importantly define an authorisation process
- Go live, collect data and optimise each process
If you like what you hear, and you like the idea of Workflow Automation for Small Business, the next steps are simple. Give us a call on 0333 240 0565 or visit our website and leave your contact details and we will get back to you
