If your front and back office operations are made up of time-consuming, error-prone, and unpleasant manual processes, you’ll likely face critical business issues, disengaged employees, and, ultimately, losses in your bottom line. Office automation can help by streamlining these manual processes and—just as important—by allowing your team to reimagine its operations altogether.
We’ll explain the impact of automating front and back office workflows by sharing examples. But let’s start by defining office automation.
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What is meant by office automation?
Office automation refers to the integration of electronic equipment, computer software, and systems used to digitize repetitive day-to-day data collection, storage, processing, and transfer tasks in an organization. It involves using automation platforms that can listen to your applications and, once a specific event occurs, can trigger predefined actions that work across your applications, data, and employees.
Office automation replaces the more tedious office functions such as manually creating invoices and storing them in a filing cabinet with paperless technology. For instance, it provides a digital filing cabinet where you can organize and store information in a digital library, enabling seamless data access and transfer.
Related: What is a system integrator?
What are the different types of office automation?
There are two types of office automation:
- Back office automation: It includes automated processes for finance, IT, HR, among other back office teams.
- Front office automation: It includes automated processes for sales, marketing, customer support, call center and other front office departments.
How does office automation work
Office automation works by leveraging software and computer systems to simplify data storage, processing and information communication tasks. Below are the various activities of office automation systems.
- Data storage: This involves the recording and storing of office records in the form of texts, images, videos, and audio. For example, using Word to store graphical and textual data or spreadsheets to manipulate numerical data such as financial reports. cloud storage
- Data transfer: Automation systems allow the electronic transfer of information to different users. Geographically dispersed users can exchange information in real-time through fax, email, SMS, voicemail systems, etc. Users can access information stored in company servers from anywhere almost instantly, from any device with an internet connection.
- Real-time collaboration: Office automation tools enable individuals, teams, and departments within an organization to communicate in real time. With real-time collaboration in the office automation system, multiple users can update data simultaneously. This is critical when scheduling changes or collaboratively editing documents. It supports video conferencing, allowing virtual meetings.
- Data management: Office automation includes scheduling systems, reminder programs, and task management. Task management programs control and monitor projects within the office, such as expenditures, inventory purchases, and workforce allocation plans. Automation allows you to change data in real-time. For instance, if a meeting schedule changes, a team member can update the calendar in real-time, and the changes are available immediately to other team members. You can also create tasks and deadlines and distribute tasks.
Benefits of office automation
Here are just a few important reasons to implement office.
1. Saves employees time
By allowing employees to avoid reentering information, they’re able to save countless hours over time. Moreover, by preventing employees from app-hopping, they’re able to spend less time reorienting themselves to different apps, which, in and of itself, can provide them with hours of time savings in a given week.
2. Reduces costly human errors
Certain tasks in a given front or back-office process carry relatively high risk of human error if performed manually—such as data entry. Office automations can, by and large, streamline these error-prone activities, thereby reducing the number of issues that’d arise from performing them.
3. Enables employees to make intelligent decisions
Left to their own devices, your employees might not feel comfortable acting on certain insights, or worse, make poor decisions off of them.
You can address this head on by providing prescriptive guidance to the relevant stakeholders as part of your automations. Even better, your office automations can help these stakeholders take the prescriptive actions with ease (i.e. with the click of a button in your business communications platform).
4. Improves the employee experience
By avoiding time-consuming and tedious work, like reentering data across apps, your employees can dedicate more time and attention to business-critical, strategic tasks that they’re uniquely suited to perform. Over time, this should lead employees to not only be more productive but also more satisfied.
In addition, many office automations can directly impact the employee experience for the better, whether that’s onboarding employees more thoughtfully, empowering employees to access the applications, devices, and equipment they need, when they need it, simplifying the PTO request process—and so on.
Related: The top benefits of back office automation
5. Increases customer satisfaction
Office automations can directly benefit clients in various ways, from providing personalized onboarding experiences to escalating and resolving issues quickly and seamlessly. It can also benefit the customer experience indirectly, as more engaged employees are likely to take more actions that lead to happier clients.
Disadvantages of office automation
Office automation can also come with several drawbacks.
1. Difficult to scale
Many office automation tools require its users to write code, which naturally prevents the majority of employees from using it.
This means that as the number of automation requests increase over time, automation backlogs are likely to form, which leads to delays in delivery and frustration from both builders and requestors.
2. Presents risk to your business
Your office automations likely contain sensitive information, whether it’s related to your employees, customers, prospects, or company’s financial data.
And while all office automation software solutions provide certain features to help safeguard this data, many don’t provide the enterprise-grade controls that are often needed. When that’s the case, your organization can be vulnerable to costly security breaches as well as fail to comply with critical data protection regulations.
3. Falls short of your automation requirements
Many office automation tools merely streamline tasks that humans would otherwise perform manually.
This naturally offers up some improvements, such as time savings and error reduction, but it doesn’t account for the full set of benefits automation can bring, such as innovating your processes or providing your team with insights and situational awareness.
How to implement office automation
For an office automation system to work efficiently, you need to carefully plan and effectively manage change with a strong focus on training and employee engagement.
- Employee engagement: Asses the current state of the organization to determine which tasks and processes to automate. employees in different departments experience unique challenges. Engage them to identify potential areas to automate. Automation needs some human touch. When humans work alongside automated processes, automation produces the best results. human input is required in decision-making, oversight, and interventions.
- Change management: You need to manage change to minimize resistance and realize the full benefits of office automation. Employees need to understand the reason behind the automation to appreciate its value. Therefore, engage them through various methods so that they can understand the reason for the changes and how the new technology will help. It may be through training, use of documentation, or engaging subject matter experts. These provide guidance to employees, helping them adopt to the new technology easily. Also plan for workshops and coaching sessions can help in knowledge transfer.
Office automation examples
Here are just a few impactful office automations:
Streamline employee onboarding
To help your team onboard new hires successfully and empower them to hit the ground running, you can implement the following onboarding automation:
1. Once a candidate is marked as hired in your ATS, the workflow gets triggered.
2. The new hire gets added to your HRIS, identity access management system, and ITSM tool, where key details from their profile in your ATS are carried over to their newly-created profiles in each app.
3. Finally, an email gets delivered to the new hire on their first day, which welcomes them to your company and outlines all of the tasks they need to perform within their first few days.
Empower employees to procure equipment and devices
As many of your employees continue working from home, they’ll likely need to replace the equipment and devices they use for work every so often.
To help them do just that, you can build something like the following workflow automation example:
1. Once an employees accesses a customized application (“Assistant Bot”) in their business communications platform and selects “Equipment Provisioning”, the workflow gets triggered.
2. Assistant Bot then allows the employee to select the specific applications and equipment they need via a dropdown. Once the employee finishes making their selections, they can click “Request Approval”.
3. Assistant Bot goes on to create a ticket for the employee in your ITSM tool that includes all of the items that were requested along with details on each item.
4. The approver receives a message from Assistant Bot that notifies them of the request, includes key details around it (e.g. including the link to the ticket), and allows them to approve/reject the request with the click of a button.
5. Assuming the ticket gets approved, the items are provisioned and the requestor gets notified of the approver’s decision.
Provide reps with timely competitive enablement
Your sales reps will inevitably discover certain prospects who are also evaluating your competitors and have mentioned them by name on a call.
To help reps speak to your platform/product’s strengths over the competitor that was mentioned, you can use the following automation:
1. Once a prospect mentions a specific competitor on a call that’s recorded in an app like Gong, the workflow gets triggered.
2. A custom application in your business communications platform (e.g. Workbot) messages the sales rep the battle card for that competitor, along with specific reps who’ve won head-to-head deals with that rival—leading the rep to contact those colleagues and learn why they were successful.
Related: Examples of front office automation
Office automation technologies
As you look to reap the benefits of automation, while avoiding its drawbacks, you’ll need to pay close attention to the type of office automation solution you select.
Here are a few options you’ll likely come across:
1. Robotic process automation (RPA) software
This type of tool uses software scripts, or “bots”, to mimic day-to-day, repetitive tasks at the UI level (e.g. copy and pasting data from cells in a spreadsheet to specific fields in an application).
It captures some of the benefits of automation, but since it’s streamlining an existing process, its benefits are inherently limited. Moreover, the tool often requires technical expertise to use and can prove difficult to scale, as automating additional tasks necessitates implementing and maintaining more bots.
2. Business process management (BPM) tool
It’s a category of software that allows you to map out and automate processes that require human intervention.
Since it can automate more than basic tasks, it allows you to realize greater benefits than RPA software. However, it’s still limited to automating workflows that require human input, which represents just a small set of the automations you can build—especially now that AI can replace an increasing number of activities that employees would perform in the past (e.g. decision-making). In addition, the tool requires a fair amount of technical expertise to use, which, like RPA software, can quickly lead to bottlenecks.
3. Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
An iPaaS solution lets you integrate your cloud applications and on-prem systems and develop data flows across them.
It uses APIs to integrate applications, which leads to more reliable, high-performing integrations—as the established connectivity isn’t affected by changes to the applications’ UIs and data can move in, or near, real-time. That said, the majority of iPaaS solutions don’t let you build end-to-end automations, and many aren’t intuitive to use, ultimately leading your team to fall short on its digital transformation goals.
4. Enterprise automation platform
This type of solution neatly accounts for all of the other tools’ drawbacks.
It offers a low-code/no-code UX, all but ensuring that citizen integrators can use it; it provides enterprise-grade security and governance controls to keep your data, apps, and processes secure; it addresses a wide range of integration and automation use cases, including data integration, API management, app integration, and end-to-end workflow automations; and it offers Workbot®, a customizable platform bot for Slack or Teams that lets employees trigger or interact with workflow automations without leaving their business communications platform.
Final thoughts
Operating an office without automation technology is time-consuming and prone to costly human errors. Office automation addresses such challenges and helps improve customer satisfaction and employee experience. Automation allows you to create automated workflows for onboarding and offboarding employees, procurement, scheduling, incident management, etc.
Workato can help you implement these automations. Request a free demo to learn how we can help address your workflow automation needs.
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