The world market today is highly competitive and every company is on a constant lookout to improve the ways they business process. There are many tools on the web that lets you know your performance, ranking, revenue, and other such vital factors for running a business. Along with these metric calculation tools, implementing some basic software to assist your employees on a daily basis helps companies develop efficiency at all levels.
Business process automation tools help you provide this privilege to your employees all the while rendering an innovative edge to your company. Apart from automating your business processes, the software allows you to
- Track the average time taken to complete a task
- Oversee employee performance
- Gain insights on trends, and much more.
A business process automation software visualizes the way your teams work making it easy to spot the highs and lows of a process. This helps you identify the places where your business processes slow down or consume more time. You can also spot business processes that are very ad hoc, where approvals bypass the managers or the management. Once you get an idea of where the processes lack, you can always improve the flow in the automation platforms.
“Investing in a business process automation software is fine. But what processes can I automate?” – If you have a similar question in mind, this article helps you decide. Here is a list of 7 major business processes that every company must automate.
Employee onboarding
Onboarding new employees to the company is a never-ending business process for the HR team. Onboarding involves a series of steps like verifying the background of the employee, assigning physical assets to them, opening a bank account, processing their payroll, assigning insurance policies, and so on. For every new individual recruited, the HR team coordinates with other related teams to carry out all these processes. The HR team also tracks the progress of such business processes and updates the status to the employees.
Performing these business processes manually consumes a lot of time and effort. The shuttle between different teams reduces the efficiency of work too. To overcome this, we can automate the process of employee onboarding using business process automation software. It traverses the tasks back and forth between teams automatically and allows the HR to track the progress, no matter the stage in which the task is.
Timesheet approval
With companies trying to adapt to the new work from home culture, timesheet processes are on the hot seat now, more than ever. Timesheets are used within the company or sometimes sent over to the client for billing. Some organizations release timesheets every week while the others release it at the end of every month. Once an employee submits the timesheet, the manager or lead of the employee verifies the time logged, the work accomplished, hours billed, and other such information before approving it.
Timesheet approval is a recurring business process and is carried out periodically in every company. Since it is mundane and requires the manager to verify a given set of requirements over and over it is automated. On automating timesheet processes, multiple levels of approvals can be performed seamlessly in one go.
Leave approval
Every employee is allotted a specific number of leaves in each financial year. Every time an employee records absence, they apply the day off. This is further sent to the manager for approval. Managers verify factors like leave balance, reason for leave, compensation off dates, leave balance, and so on.
Leave approval processes are carried out every time an employee applies the day off. Since this is a recurring business process, it consumes a whole of the managers’ time to check all the entries and approve them. Sometimes, the manager might approve more leaves than the employee is entitled to, causing issues in the payroll. To avoid such problems, leave approval processes are automated using process automation software.
Purchase orders
When customers and vendors request a purchase quotation from your company, the finance team drafts an estimate manually and sends it over to the sales team. Similarly, when your customer company agrees to purchase goods from you, they generate a purchase order and send it over to your company for confirmation.
Both, purchase quotation and purchase order generation involves a series of steps and requires approval from multiple teams in the company. To make this whole process simpler and reduce manual intervention, business process automation software is used. With automation software, the PO is generated and sent automatically with just a few inputs like cost and estimate from the teams.
IT service requests
Today’s companies host an internal IT team who are responsible for maintaining the hardware devices used by the employees. From running periodical patch scans to repairing the map-functioning devices, the IT team has a wide range of operations to take care of. They are also responsible for maintaining the servers, storage devices, and other important hardware devices in the company.
While taking care of such a wide range of devices, it is easy to often overlook monthly maintenance or a yearly upgrade unless a detailed record is maintained for all of it. To overcome this challenge, IT service requests are automated using business process management platforms that create automatic tasks recurring on specified timelines.
Expense approvals
Reimbursements, LTA, medical allowances, travel allowances, and other such expenses must be approved by the manager and the finance teams. Since this business process involves more than one team, the back and forth communication can take up too much time and reduces the speed of the process. Oftentimes, after one approval the request might get lost under a pile of other things, resulting the employee applying the request again.
Approval might also require some persistence from the employee and multiple communications with the finance teams and managers. It makes much sense to automate such business processes using automation platforms. Once automated, the expense request can be filed online and it is assigned to the POC in the finance team before being sent to the manager. Multiple approvals can thus be carried out and completed efficiently using automation platforms.
Travel requests
Travel processes involve multiple steps like applying for a passport and visa, booking flight tickets and accommodation, approvals from the manager, approvals from on-site teams and clients, applying for travel insurance, and so on. The exact sequence of steps is to be followed here for optimal results. Any discrepancy in the steps will delay the whole process delaying the travel of the employee.
While traveling for conferences and meetings, delays cannot be entertained, Automating the travel process provides optimal results and ensures that the travel team does not miss the sequence of steps. The employee can also track the status of the request all along using the automation software.
Automate your business processes using Yoroflow!
Yoroflow is a low-code, intuitive business process automation software that helps companies automate their workflows at ease. Be it long and complex business processes or straight forward ones, Yoroflow is your one-stop destination to automate them. We discussed the most common business processes that are automated by most companies in this article. There are many more repetitive processes similar to these that can be automated for optimization.
If you are worried about setting up these business processes for automation, do relax now. Yoroflow provides initial setup support that assists you in setting up and automating your processes in the automation platform. Apart from the initial support, you can also contact our support team anytime you want. We are always available to help you with your automation needs!
