Fast-moving businesses realize that automation is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Since cutting down on procedure time means higher efficiency as well as lowering operational costs, it becomes important for any company to smooth and automate different business processes. And Business Process Management software remains the core element of this effort, irrespective of the size of the business.
After the business processes and rules are captured, it will be like Business as usual (BAU), when it comes to day to day working, and it empowers employees to work autonomously, efficiently and confidently. They know what the business process is and what your business will accept, and hence it improves their job satisfaction. Simultaneously, it provides businesses with significant gains by slashing cost and saving lot of time.
Over on the Aproove blog, we have looked at 12 key business process workflows every company needs – and how they can be automated using BPM software.
Automation of document approval and review workflows, ensuring the documents flow through the organization without bottlenecks, delay and errors. BPM software helps create, route and track documents through the review cycle, enhancing compliance, by saving time.
Automating the carry-forward process allowed employees to submit expense reports more easily while making managers able to review and approve them without having to sift through ceaseless amounts of paperwork. Process Management software can enforce policies around spending and move reimbursements faster.
Reports based on business data and KPIs (Key performance indicators) are a crucial factor for a businesses failure and success: they give information about what is going wrong, they give insight about what can be improved and where there are any knowledge and opportunities. Software vendors, such as this one give Permission-based pre-built reusable reports that can be built and run at any time. Aproove also gives KPIs that help to follow the process's health and performances, including what can be reviewed and investigated, such as all the bottleneck and improvement of your process.
With BPM software, automate employee onboarding and offboarding – including account creation, access provisioning and ensuring compliance with company policies and legal requirements.
There’s lots of need to ask for leave for employees. Using Business Process Management software (like Aproove, for example), an employee can request leave online, and HR can approve or decline them. This helps to reduce manual paperwork and also allows for a record to be archived.
Online proofing has become a new element of business process workflows, revolutionizing how business activity flows. Through it, employees can create, review, and approve content more efficiently than ever before. For example, a company like Aproove Work Management provides an online proofing software for collaboration and feedback as part of their business process workflow. Online proofing is the next gen in BPW because it allows team members to work together in the cloud and achieve goals much faster, even if they are in different parts of the world, not to mention across different time zones. Online proofing has become a vital factor of success in a business process workflow thus improving productivity, reducing errors, and streamlining processes in ways that make companies run more effectively.
Automation can help you manage leads, track customer interactions and forecast your next sale – all through automation. This also ensures that leads are routed to the correct salespeople and customer data is updated on an automated basis.
Automate inventory management so as to avoid overstocking (eg foods going off, costing the firm money) and understocking (eg no cakes, not making sales). The software could be triggered, say, through Business Process Management software that triggers a reorder request on the achievement of a specified stock level.
Invoicing and Billing
The use of software can minimize the chances of invoicing mistakes, therefore reducing the amount of time it takes to get paid. Such examples of BPM software can even create and send invoices, send out reminders, and log payments, consequently keeping the finances of your business in a healthy state.
Automate quality control workflows to make sure that manufactured products have been produced to specification. Implement Business Process Management software to track the nature and quantity of a defect, take corrective action, and monitor the entire quality assurance process.
Automate project management workflows to keep projects on track. BPM software like Aproove helps to allocate resources, set milestones and provide a real time project status update to key stakeholders.
You can create or progress a project or even move into a particular workflow based on data collected by filling out specific forms. Data entered is in the format your organization requires to carry out its business operations. Users know exactly what information to input in an organized manner and use the custom form, enabling the project to move forward without delays due to lack of information.
Forms can capture data and store it as metadata, which will eventually be extracted by the business process management software, and re-used anywhere in the business process, driving the workflow paths and variables and results. By exposing simple forms to end-users, complex business process workflow driven by formfilling can be hidden from end-users.
BPM Software provides several key benefits for automating business processes:
Workflow Design and Modeling: Design, model, and optimize workflows visually making it easy to understand and refine your processes.
Process Automation: It streamlines repetitive tasks, eliminates manual inaccuracies, and standardizes process execution.
Task Routing: It routes tasks to the right people or teams so every task is clearly assigned and distinct.
Data Integration: Software is able to connect with other software systems and databases, and share information with them so that it could be reported back and forth.
Real-time Monitoring: It allows you to see how your processes are actually performing in real-time, so that you can make better business decisions based on this real-time visibility and insight into your bottlenecks.
Compliance/Security: It checks if processes comply with company policies and security standards, minimizing the risks of non-compliance and data breaches.
By automating the above 12 critical business process workflows, BPM software can increase efficiencies, reduce costing both capital and time, and improve your Return on Investment, ROI, and productivity. Small startups and large enterprises can benefit from adopting automation. This makes a lot of business sense and helps your business navigate through change.