How Process Automation Can Benefit Your Business

Many growing businesses often try so hard to get new clients and customers, that once they actually do, they are overwhelmed by their success. “Be careful what you wish for,” as the old adage goes. Nevertheless, getting more business than you can handle is a good problem to have, especially in this day and age. Rather than taking a reactive approach to your business problems, a targeted rollout will more effectively allow you to ramp up to satisfy your burgeoning demand. Specifically, utilizing emerging technologies such as robotics and automation will take the workload off your team, allowing you to ramp up your services. Utilizing robotic process automation will also reduce the amount of manual errors and human mistakes that are sure to occur when people are overworked, and even when they are functioning normally.

 

For example, graphics chip maker NVIDIA is known for being the industry standard in digital content creation for gaming and cinematic special effects. Their quarterly revenue tripled from 2016 to 2017, going from $1 billion to $3 billion, but they experienced significant growing pains as they didn’t increase their workforce to keep up with demand. This led to longer lead times and slower receipts of cash.

 

To alleviate these problems, they started by simply adding more people. They started outsourcing and hiring, but the results left room for improvement. Instead, the decided to improve order management automation: a low-value, repetitive task that took up an outsized amount of human capital. They ended up implementing a machine learning solution that not only streamlined order implementation, but is also able to capture and extract new customer data. This resulted in a tremendous efficiency improvement for the company. Orders can now be processed in 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes, many orders don’t need any human intervention at all, and their employees are now free to focus on higher value-add tasks for the company. An unexpected result, however, was that as NVIDIA was acquiring a new partner, the partner was “wowed” by the system, making the partnership with NVIDIA seem that much more appealing.

 

As it is now the beginning of a new year, this is a great time to take a look back on your previous year to decide what processes can be automated or made easier. Saving time doing monotonous tasks will not only free you up to focus on higher value activities such as creative thinking and strategy development, but it will improve employee morale as well. NVIDIA simply optimized one area of their order fulfillment, order processing, and it reaped benefits that were felt around the entire company. Other areas ripe for automation include billing, data entry, and client reporting, essentially any task that is repeated multiple times. With the onset of robotic automation and machine learning, many of these tasks will be obviated in the near future, allowing your business the freedom to serve more customers.