By: Siddharth Wadehra, QuickReach Head of Research;
Katherine Ina Fuentes, QuickReach Digital Transformation Consulting Associate
Business process automation is one great way to make life at work easier and more efficient. There are hundreds if not thousands of possible processes to automate even within a small business. We at QuickReach have analyzed which processes companies need most automation support with and the most common of them are listed below. Check our list out and see which ones seem like a good place to start your automation journey with.
A recent visit to one of the offices of a leading utilities companies here in Manila, Philippines highlighted the pervasiveness of inefficiency within the workplace. Paper forms stacked for employees and partners to fill in and sign before submitting across a counter suggested that automation in companies is not just a requirement in small or medium businesses, but in larger entities as well.
PURCHASE ORDER
Arguably, the purchase order (PO) is the heartbeat of most businesses. But in a manual process, it can be painful and tedious to get the items you need while still going through approvals and providing data needs. When requests are pouring in from so many vendors, manual forms make the life of the finance team miserable.
Business process automation can drastically cut down the time taken to request and approve a purchase order. You can even create conditional tasks that only happen if an item is above a certain dollar amount.
PURCHASE REQUEST
Purchase Requests (PR) are the prequels to your PO story. Purchase requests can mean the start of something great. Why saddle the process with unnecessary paper forms that make it hard to get anything done?
With business process automation, you can not only streamline the purchase request process, but you can also link it to a purchase order so that as soon as the PR is approved, a new PO is automatically created.
LEAVE REQUEST
Nothing surprising here. Employees love to take time off especially when their leaves are due, but the process of actually asking for leave can make you wish you were at the beach already. Business process automation allows leave requestors, managers, and HR teams to work seamlessly together without paper forms or pesky emails. With built-in logic to understand remaining leave balances, everyone will get to know exactly how many days they have left to take for a leave. The mobile application ensures that your manager gets your leave notification instantly and would have the option to approve it on the go.
TRAVEL EXPENSE APPROVAL
Submitting travel expenses is very time-consuming for everyone involved. Manual forms and workflows make the whole process even harder, regardless whether the process uses paperclips and paper receipts or digital forms that have to be attached to emails.
In an automated process, such as the one you can access on the QuickReach suite, the requestor can attach digital files and then check on the status as the request smoothly funnels down the workflow. Using business process automation for travel expense approval process improves speed and efficiency that saves time and enables the employees to focus better on productive tasks.
EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING
You might probably agree that the employee onboarding process should be simple, comprehensive, and easy. However, the reality on the ground is slightly different. Truth be told, the employee onboarding in most companies is notoriously slow, generally misses some steps, and surely doesn’t give everyone the same feel. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. When you automate this process, you can get rid of repetitive form filling. Once a new employee fills in all of his details the first time, the same information can be electronically shared with all the departments that need it.
While automating, you can also seamlessly build steps into your workflow to give custom surprises and make sure that someone’s work station is ready to go on the day they arrive. Automating your onboarding process does not only mean that new employees become happier than ever to join the company, but also impressed with the digital culture you’ve been successfully creating.
PAYMENT APPROVAL
Manual payment approvals can be quite complex, especially when the approver doesn’t have all the information he/she needs every time. Everybody wants more information accessible at their fingertips, especially when they have to make an approval decision.
With an automated form, you can make sure that everyone sees exactly what they need while also reducing the chance for errors and increasing accountability by making fields read-only. You also have the option of building logic such that automated payment approvals can also be conditional based on the amount and most importantly can be automatically directed based on the purchaser’s department.
SALES ORDER
Just because you love to see lots of sales orders doesn’t mean you love to spend all day processing them. This is a customer-centric process and needs to be fast, efficient, and errorless. Processing the sales order manually makes it prone to mistakes and eats away at the time of your sales representatives.
Sales order process automation results in faster order fulfillment, reduced backlog, and more motivation to keep your sales team out on the field rather than handling the paperwork.
Acing business process automation with QuickReach
There are a lot of processes that you can start automating in your organization, be it in
HR, finance, office admin, or IT such as onboarding, leave requests, purchase requests, purchase orders, sales orders, payment approvals, and travel expense approval.
Automating these business processes should not be a hassle and will be as easy as one-two-three when done through QuickReach. QuickReach offers various workflow templates that match your existing processes within business areas. You may also automate the special processes that you have unique to your company through its Experience Studio.
Try out QuickReach here or book a meeting with us so we can discuss how we can create delightful experiences for your customers and employees together.
Related Articles: