How much could duplication of effort be costing your business?

How many times do you or your employees say things like, “it’s only a five-minute job?”

And five minutes isn’t a lot. It wouldn’t be worth the time, effort or money to automate something that only takes five minutes, would it?

But what if an employee was doing that five-minute job twelve times a day? That five-minute job now takes up an hour a day, which equates to five hours a week.

And what if you had eight employees doing that five-minute job twelve times a day? That five-minute job is now costing you 40 hours a week – that’s the equivalent of a full-time employee.

If you think about how many of those five-minute jobs you and your teams are doing, it would probably be quite frightening how much they were costing your business.

To put it into perspective, the average salary in the UK in 2021 was around £38,000. If you have five of those five-minute tasks taking up 40 hours a week, you could say you’re losing an average of £190K a year, and that’s not an insignificant amount of money.

So reducing those duplicate and repetitive tasks would make sense, right?

Absolutely. And that’s why automation is so beneficial. Automation helps you remove those repetitive tasks and minimise duplication of work.

Is automation just for big businesses?

Not at all. Hundreds of SMEs use various forms of automation software already.

How many times have you bought something online and received an order confirmation almost immediately? There isn’t a physical person sitting there manually sending out those emails every time an order comes in – it’s simple automation. We see automation in action every day.

And wherever there’s a process with repeatable steps, there’s potential for automation.

How can automation prevent duplication of work?

Duplication of work can occur for several reasons. For example:

• Information was incomplete or filed in the wrong place, so it has to be collected again
• Systems aren’t integrated, so data has to be inputted into several databases
• Miscommunication resulted in multiple colleagues completing the same piece of work
• Work was lost and had to be redone
• An approval request got overlooked, so it had to be resubmitted

These are just a few examples, and many more could be added. But how does automation prevent this from happening?

When you automate a business process, you can add triggers at each step so tasks are all delegated to the relevant people. If a task is not completed on time, a reminder can be sent and (when appropriate) tasks can be escalated or delegated to somebody else.

So, for example, if an employee needs approval from their line manager, but their line manager is on annual leave, the approval would bounce to the person they have delegated their workflows to in their absence.

Automation software can also be used to integrate your systems so if data is added to one database, it is automatically pulled through to all the relevant places rather than having to be inputted several times. This makes reporting much easier.

How can automation help with repetitive tasks?

Let’s say your customer onboarding process requires a customer to complete three separate forms.

It’s pretty straightforward for you to type out a quick email to your new customer and attach the three documents to the email. It’s a five-minute job.

But we’ve already looked at how much those five-minute jobs can cost. So what if you automated the process? When a customer agrees to your terms, they are sent a pre-written email containing a link to the three documents.

Once the documents are completed, a notification is sent to the relevant team member, and a new workflow is triggered. Plus, the data from the forms can be automatically imported or exported to the relevant places.

If the customer doesn’t complete the documents within a specified time, an automated reminder is sent out (another five-minute job eliminated from someone’s day). If the documents are still not completed, a notification can then be sent to an employee advising them to call and follow up.

As we said earlier, any process with multiple steps that can be repeated has the potential to be automated.

Isn’t automation software expensive?

Automation software doesn’t have to be expensive. And with the amount of money it could save you, you could see a return on investment within a year.

If we go back to our earlier example, where a single ‘five-minute’ task equates to 40 hours a week, you can see how easy it is to recoup your money.

Plus, saving time isn’t the only benefit of automation. Automation helps you improve efficiency, delivering a faster, better service, meaning happier customers, fewer complaints, more repeat business and more referrals.

Your employees will also be happier as they’ll spend less time completing mundane and repetitive tasks or duplicating work. Happier staff means better staff retention and higher productivity.

How to get started

Automation is all well and good, but how do you know where to start? Which workflows can be streamlined, and where do you find the right software for the job?

That’s where :Automate comes in. We take a modular, pay-as-you-grow approach to business process automation, building bespoke workflows designed around your business’s operations.

You might think custom-built workflows sound expensive, but :Automate can actually work out far more cost-effective than off-the-shelf products or having bespoke software built to meet your requirements. That’s because you aren’t paying for features you don’t need, you aren’t paying per user and you’re not reliant on a single developer to hand-craft the code for you.

And because the solutions are built on a platform that is customised to your business, it’s more efficient than generic software, which means the cost benefits are usually higher.

We know it can be difficult to figure out where to start with automation which is why we offer a no-obligation discovery meeting to explore opportunities. This will help you identify where automation can deliver the biggest return for your business.

Some of the processes we can automate include the following:

• Sales
• Finance
• Customer Service
• Work delivery
• Communication
• H&S
• Asset Management
• Administration
• Reporting