Digital business automation or Business process automation (BPA) is the process of streamlining an organization’s business process through the use of technology such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Accounting Software Solutions, Payroll, etc. It can also be defined as an across the board implementation of software solutions to automate business processes from marketing, sales, HR, operations, and accounting. In other words, it is when you use technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks.
Business process automation accelerates how we get things done. Through user-defined rules, we can get routing information to the right person at the right time.
Implementing an ERP software systems is not an easy task. It requires rigid planning, design, team management, testing, and support to successfully implement one. Over the years, I witnessed and saw the best strategies in business process automation.
Here are the different strategies that I coined myself in implementing ERP systems.
The Arrow Strategy – People often use the metaphor arrowhead to represent sales or customers hence this strategy is all about automation of sales and marketing first, down to delivery fulfillment and back-end processes. One of the reasons for automating your business is to secure it for the future, or probably because you are preparing to scale your company. But it will not provide immediate ROI, or if not, no ROI at all if you have not established a sound digital customer experience.
This is exactly what happened during this pandemic. Many businesses scaled-down and many have closed shop because they have no digital presence for their customers.
There is no point in making your back-end processes efficient if your customer acquisition process is not.
DNA-Driven Strategy – Businesses have their DNAs based on their core ideology. These core ideologies according to Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, are the reason why their businesses go from good to great. Companies like Ford have a people-first mentality as their DNA. While Disney’s core values have to do with imagination and magic, thus their DNA is all about creativity and innovation. With that being said, an organization’s strategy can be based on its DNA. If you implement a people-first mentality, then you might want to prioritize HR business process automation. If you are a customer-driven company, then you can start with a helpdesk or support process automation.
Workflow Digitization Strategy – This strategy prioritizes digitization of transaction processing, the printing of forms, and the approval process. To me, this is the quickest way and quickest ROI when implementing an ERP system. This means that a company takes care of the transaction capturing first without regarding the ledgers and balances yet. Once transaction processing is live, then that’s the time you can set up balances and ledgers.
In any case, whatever strategy you will choose to implement, you still have to do the basic steps that I always talk about which is to prepare your team’s mindset, concretize business process, then agile phase-rollout.
In the meantime, if you wish to learn more about proper business process automation in more detail, please check out our Snap BPA Framework Workshop at oneboxcloud.com/bpacourse. It is a one-month virtual private workshop to help you learn and adopt digital transformation and business process automation.
Or if you’re interested to have a free ERP consulting, Book a Call HERE
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