Many companies retain business processes that rely on unnecessary levels of human input. Not only can this be frustrating for the individual they are also highly inefficient and can have an indirect – or in some cases direct - impact on costs. Manual interventions take time and time is money right? There are usually more impactful and productive actions that we could be doing and gone are the days when we need to put up with these highly manual business processes. We don’t need to suffer the ennui of repetitive inputs any more, we have software to do that for us!

We have worked with many clients to improve their business processes, here’s just a couple of examples of how we’ve collaborated to streamline business processes and drive efficiencies with automation.

Automation: Example 1

We were approached by a very well established and iconic ferry operator who wanted to ease the pressure on their staff in dealing with client bookings and check in processing. Having been in operation for so long they had some very well established processes which worked but were chewing up significant amounts of staff time and causing major headaches.

Our brief was to significantly reduce the need for human intervention and find creative ways to streamline the onboarding experience for their passengers.

Through a process of detailed scoping and on-site analysis the project team were able to gain a clear understanding of how the business was currently dealing with customers, where the bottlenecks were occurring and what interactions could realistically be replaced with technology within the clients budget constraints.

Automation: Example 2

One of Australia’s leading student accommodation providers wanted to make a significant and strategic change to the way they interacted with their resident customers. Central to their plans was a desire to engage with students in a more meaningful and timely way particularly when it came to organising events to foster on site communities of students with shared interests.

In addition, the business saw an opportunity to dovetail this with an improvement to its own internal communications and resident on boarding and management processes.

Our remit was to look at the existing workflows and determine where we could drive efficiencies and improve both internal and external communications and information management.

Given the major strategic nature of the project and the potential game changing impact of a successful deployment a lengthy scope phase was recommended and undertaken allowing us to thoroughly understand the problem we were trying to solve before proposing solutions.

Following on site interviews with management staff and group user feedback sessions we were able to create a multi platform solution encompassing mobile and desktop with integrations to major social networks, internal systems and third party partners. The solution enabled the client to create social events in a single screen and deploy to multiple feeds with the ability to control duration of the post as well as saving to a central repository for reuse across the business. A huge time saver.

On top of this we created an entirely new channel through which residents could communicate with on site staff to report issues and check the status of their tenancy agreements. This has reduced the need for manual inputs of information by frontline staff and resulted in a reduction in the number of face to face conversations freeing up their time to focus on other important tasks. The next phase of development will unlock more functionality and greater process improvements.

These are just two examples of what's possible with automation and every business will have its own opportunities to take the next step in the evolution of its processes. The crucial next step is ensuring that the quality of the software application enables automation without fear.

Change, even positive change, can be daunting but with the right technology partner and a clearly understood goal, the outcomes can be very much worth the investment.