There’s no shortage of things keeping business leaders up at the night – competition risks, regulatory risk, customer demands, and more. But one thing many are not taking advantage of is the chance to automatize processes within the firm as a means to cut down on turnaround time, eliminate errors and increase overall efficiency and profit.
The goal of automating a process is to shift a task from a tedious, manual step-by-step workflow to a simple, streamlined digital interface or function that is triggered by the entry of data or some other event. This allows workers to focus on more important tasks that enhance employee satisfaction, build stronger customer relationships and establish your firm as a trustworthy and reliable business.
For example attorneys may have a long workflow that requires the assembling and review of numerous documents, like agreements and court pleadings, or contracts. Creating automated workflows that route these documents to the correct person at the appropriate time can allow you to accomplish more billable work in one day, while minimizing the risk of compliance and providing customers with a quicker and personalized experience.
Understanding the existing workflow is the key to automating processes. A pragmatic and thorough approach allows businesses to avoid wasting time on complicated and non-critical processes, while also gaining confidence in automation technology. The first step is to determine whether the process has value and also to evaluate how easy it would be to move to an leveraging big data for informed management decisions automated workflow.