Five Benefits Digital Process Automation Brings to Your Organization

By: V. Balakrishnan

COVID-19 suddenly ended peoples’ reliance on manual and traditional processes, forcing them to rethink business strategies and win this battle. As physical movements got restricted to homes, Digital Process Automation (DPA) has become all the more important for businesses to ensure continuity in operations.Not only does it optimize the existing functions of a company but also helps in capitalizing on new opportunities to ensure business efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

Simply put, DPA is a process that automates business functions and data management, giving employees access to information in real-time for making informed business decisions and serving customers seamlessly. Using DPA, an organization can basically achieve three key objectives:

• Maintain transparency across processes.
• Automate repetitive chores and focus more on core tasks.
• Create a collaborative work atmosphere, where people from different departments can work together and learn from each other.

Given the current COVID-19 situation, followed by indefinite lockdowns and restricted physical movements, it has become essential for organizations to adopt DPA in order to ensure business continuity and adjust smoothly to the new world order. Now let’s find out how DPA is beneficial to organizations and adds efficiency to them, especially at a crisis hour like this:

Efficiency and Productivity

DPA optimises business processes and automates mundane and time-consuming tasks, thus enabling employees to focus on core and strategic activities. This not only improves business efficiency but also enhances employee productivity within organisation.

Customer and employee satisfaction 

Since multiple repetitive tasks get automated, it allows employees to move from low-value jobs to high-value assignments. On top of that, DPA defines employees’ roles and responsibilities so that there is no confusion between employees, and they know their goals. Following this approach, not only do employees get to learn new things by focusing on strategic tasks, but they also become confident in assisting customers.DPA offers enhanced customer experience and engagement by providing live visibility into the process through digital customer touchpoints.

Lower operational cost 

By digitising business processes / information, and automating manual, time-consuming tasks, DPA optimizes an organization’s existing resources and puts them to better use. This not only speeds up business processes but also reduces the cost of business operations significantly.

Collaboration 

Digital and automation tools give employees the power to share information at the click of a button, enhancing the overall communication process. Eventually, these tools serve as a platform for collaboration as employees can interact better and discuss subjects more seamlessly at all times. With DPA, employees coming from different domains can work together, make better decisions, and bring faster outcomes to the table. By collaborating with each other, they also get to build and strengthen their professional relationship while leveraging better learning opportunities.

Competitive advantage 

Today, almost every business or organization uses automated tools to run its operations more effectively and bring more profitability to the fore. Investing in various technologies has become a mainstream activity. However, only those can excel in their domains who equip themselves with the right set of tools and understand their usage to deliver better outcomes and customer experiences. This could be a real advantage a business can achieve over its competitors and cement its stance as a unique player in the market.

What lies ahead?

With DPA in place, any business can achieve its true potential and serve customers seamlessly by automating redundant tasks. It helps an organization streamline its existing work structure and efficiently address various loopholes that impede its growth pace and scale. Although COVID-19 has presented multiple challenges, it has also pushed companies to go digital, understand their customers better, and serve them more seamlessly than ever before. DPA is not just a temporary solution to the on-going challenge, but a permanent way of life for businesses to tackle challenging times now and beyond.

(The author is Executive General Manager, Marketing at Konica Minolta Business Solutions India Pvt Ltd and the views expressed in the article are his own)