What Is Enterprise Automation?
Enterprise automation is an innovation that improves accuracy, efficiency, and productivity and cuts costs. By reducing the need for human inputs and automating various routine tasks, it can be applied across a wide range of business processes. Enterprise automation can be enabled across departments and functions like finance, HR, customer service, SCM, and more.
Automation also implies that this technology can integrate AI and machine learning on a much deeper level to elevate the efficiency of day-to-day operations. AI can speed up your work, and leveraging this type of automation can help your business reduce allocations needed for manual inputs and optimize your operations.
Types of Enterprise Automation
There are varying degrees of enterprise automation that you can employ in your business. Depending on your needs, the depth of your enterprise automation may differ. You should evaluate each type closely against your enterprise and business model to determine which type is suitable for your enterprise. Let’s take a look at the different types of enterprise automation.
Basic Automation
Basic automation, as the name suggests, refers to automating simple or independent processes within an enterprise. Complex automation systems are composed of multiple basic automation working together.
Basic automation is usually simple enough to run on low-code or no-code since its level of complexity is low. Usually, departments develop basic automation processes to function for their own needs.
Here are a few examples of basic automation processes across various departments:
- Accounting and finance: use spreadsheet formulas to calculate various types of input.
- Marketing: You can set up alerts to monitor brand performance and competitors.
- Sales: Dashboards can be set up to help salespeople track their daily progress
- HR: They can use an automatic form system to capture employee feedback periodically
Business Process Automation (BPA)
BPA can be utilized to automate workflows and processes with multiple steps and inputs across teams. BPA is extremely useful for keeping teams on the same page. Automation at this level can be beneficial for documentation, managing tasks, and efficient communication.
When a business is starting to experience a need for expansion, BPA is the first step to supporting scalability.
Let's take a look at the differences between Basic Automation and Business Process Automation.
| Examples | Basic Automation | BPA |
|---|---|---|
Time tracking |
A spreadsheet with formulas that can be time tracked |
Enables Task management and timekeeping software that can sync across entire teams and departments. |
Lead Outreach |
Automated welcome email sent to leads who sign up for trials |
BPA allows for CRM that offers multiple outreach options for leads in different categories. |
Brand monitoring |
Email notifications can be automated to report on brand mentions |
A social media tool can be used to keep track of brand interactions across multiple social media platforms |
3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Process automation that relies on software “bots” is called robotic process automation. These bots perform rule-based, repetitive tasks and digital work in a way that mimics human input. Examples of RPA include address inputs in multiple forms, opening files and apps, copying and pasting, etc.
RPA is exceptionally useful during machine learning projects. Bots can be used to identify and label certain types of data in order to simplify the process. These bots can supplement human annotators by pre-tagging data for analysis.
4. Integration Automation
When software and applications run automated tasks based on shared data, it becomes known as integration automation. Working on shared data provides relief from data duplication and safety from security breaches.
No-code platforms like JIFFY.ai are powered by AI. JIFFY.ai has multiple functional HyperApps that are integrated with many third-party applications. You can integrate data alerts and notifications from automated processes directly into applications like Slack, Email, etc.
Benefits of Using Enterprise Automation
Enterprise automation can bridge your existing tech with new, innovative solutions that can propel your company forward.
Since enterprise automation is uniformly important across departments in an organization, it has tremendous potential for sustainable scalability. Here is a closer look at some of the key benefits of Enterprise Automation.
1. Increased accuracy, efficiency, and productivity
Manual inputs leave an enterprise prone to errors. These errors can drastically impact efficiency and productivity in the long run. Enterprise automation can eliminate process errors and reduce the time needed to complete tasks. With more free time on their hands, your employees can devote their attention to value-added tasks. Value addition can be essential to improving user experience, efficiency, and productivity.
2. Streamlined workflow
Integration automation is the ultimate form of enterprise automation. However, each type of enterprise automation complements one another. This interrelation allows companies that utilize enterprise automation to create seamless task processing across multiple departments.
Enterprise automation is an essential piece for any organization looking to improve coordination, improve decision-making, and reduce bottlenecks. At the end of the day, enterprise automation can enhance workflow and productivity using artificial intelligence.
3. Improved collaboration
Collaboration is the cornerstone of growth. A team needs to work effectively and efficiently in order to plan, organize, and execute their tasks within the required time.
Enterprise automation grants your organization the tools needed to improve collaboration and productivity. Using a centralized platform for communication, real-time updates, and document sharing, teams can manage their workloads easier.
4. Resource optimization
Traditional systems require a lot of effort to achieve resource optimization. The time available in traditional systems is also not sufficient to achieve resource optimization. Enterprise automation does away with traditional methods by reallocating resources efficiently to achieve optimum conditions.
By eliminating repetitive and needless tasks and reassigning human resources to neglected areas of the business, enterprise automation can help your business pursue better strategies and high-value activities.
5. Cost reduction
With the reduction of manual labor and error, enterprise automation can contribute effectively to cost reduction. Organizations can save time, effort, and resources by implementing clear-cut strategies for enterprise automation.
6. Greater Compliance
Automation is also important for regulatory compliance and maintaining industry standards. With automation in place, every business transaction and operation is recorded in real-time. Along with the transaction, names, time stamps, and other relevant details are recorded. With this information, compliance and regulations can be facilitated more easily using audit trails.
Another essential aspect of compliance is the elimination of bias. Whether intentional or not, bias can be a frequent factor that contributes to compliance issues. Automation can eliminate errors and mitigate financial risks and damage to reputation due to noncompliance.
How to build an enterprise automation strategy?
You now have a better idea about enterprise automation and its different types.
You’re probably wondering how you can implement enterprise automation and what this would look like at your company.
Here are the steps that you can follow to determine which type of enterprise automation is right for you and your team.
1. Determine the value and cost of automation
The first step will be to analyze and determine the processes in your company that would benefit the most from automation. Have a conversation with department managers and other senior executives to create a comprehensive list of manual tasks that are regularly and consistently needed. You can ask your leaders to consider:
- The importance of completing each task in each department
- The time taken for an employee to complete a task
- The cost incurred for an employee to complete that task
Using these insights, ask your managers and other leaders to rate each automation on a scale that ranges from “Low value” to “High value” for their respective departments.
This rating is crucial to helping you assess the cost of automation. Once you have identified the areas needed for automation, work on answering the following questions:
- What will be the annual cost of automation?
- What is the payroll cost for task completion per year?
If the tool costs more than the payroll cost, the cost of automation is too high. On the other hand, if the annual cost of automation is less than the payroll cost, then automation is a great option for your organization.
2. Invest in High-value Automation
Now that you have evaluated your automation options, take time to prioritize them using the matrix below.
| High-cost Automation | Low-cost Automation | |
|---|---|---|
| High-value Automation | Do the long-term benefits outweigh short-term costs? If yes, these may be a priority | Place these as the top priority |
| Low-value Automation | These automations are not worth implementing | These come either between or after projects of higher priority |
3. Integrate your automations
When determining the automation projects that are right for your investment, you will come across certain tools that require integration—for example, a CRM-ticketing software that relies on input from external applications. Using a modern integration automation platform like JIFFY.ai can help you connect these tools and ensure a seamless workflow.
Suppose you want to transfer your customer complaints from your CRM into an assigned task. You can connect this CRM to your project management software through integration. Here’s how that would work:
- Step One: The integration platform would extract the data of the complaint from the CRM
- Step Two: The relevant data is pushed to the project management software. The software is directed to assign tasks to the relevant personnel depending on the nature of the complaint.
This is only a simple example. The actual integration platform can continue to follow up and update on this process until it is resolved. The platform can even draft emails to be sent to unhappy customers to provide them with compensatory discount codes and coupons.
The integration platform can even push the data to a dashboard designed for centralized analytics. This whole process can enable your business to track each individual customer’s journey and their satisfaction with your product/service.
4. Encourage cross-departmental collaboration through integration
Your IT team is responsible for implementing the integration platform, but they will need input from all your team members and departments in order to build out the right implementation strategy. Create a space for all your departments to interact with the IT department to implement your integration strategy.
With no-code platforms like JIFFY.ai, complex integrations become easier to implement. With its drag-and-drop interface, JIFFY.ai makes it easier for civilian users to get more involved in the integration process. On top of that, JIFFY.ai also incorporates multiple pre-built HyperApps that seamlessly integrate multiple software together for smoother workflows for your enterprise.
JIFFY.ai: The Best Choice for Seamless Enterprise Automation
JIFFY.ai is an AI-powered no-code platform that is perfect for cutting-edge robotic process automation. With powerful cloud computing capabilities, this platform is capable of empowering your business even beyond its powerful RPA.
JIFFY.ai has pre-built components that make it easy for businesses to get their enterprise automation and integration projects up and running. With a dedicated support system, a robust ecosystem of integrations, and limitless scalability, JIFFY.ai is a top contender for enterprise automation in the market.
JIFFY.ai also works as a dedicated application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) initiative. If you are looking for the right platform to transform your business operations and modernize your competitive edge, then contact us to know more.
