Business Process Automation for Smaller Businesses
A managed service for your business
What is Business Process Automation?
We’ve had the Business Process Automation (BPA) bug for a while now. It’s a great antidote to the constant firefighting and general workload we all too often face in business.
By taking a fresh look at the ways in which work is done, we aim to find better, easier, more efficient ways to do things together. We then create custom software solutions to do as much as possible automatically.
Big corporations already love automation but don’t have an exclusive; it’s a solution for anyone. We know that smaller businesses will also benefit from the productivity and efficiency gains it can bring, and potentially, given the scale, reap even greater rewards. For a smaller business, it could bring a competitive edge and the organisational resilience needed to make a huge difference.
We believe in reducing the administrative load needed to run a business, freeing up your team to work on what they’re great at, and where they bring the most value both to your business and to your customers, now and with future possibilities.
Maybe you’ve been facing extra challenges with the need to work remotely, which have highlighted an urgent need to digitise your hands-on processes.
Some Practical Ways In Which BPA Can Help
Efficiency
It’s time to liberate the team from those predictable, repetitive tasks which drain both motivation and time from your business. These types of activities are straightforward to automate.
Imagine, for example, a designer with more time to design, or an engineer with more time to create ears for engines (maybe don’t think about that — or perhaps that could be your next great business idea!), just by creating automation services to support the way they work in as unobtrusive a way as possible, while still making sure that everything is done.
Maybe you have routine tasks you’ve wished, more than once, you could avoid. That wish could come true.
Consistency
If you give a paper process to two people, the likelihood is that they will perform the same task is two slightly different ways. While this creativity is the heart of many business activities and essential in others, it’s not valuable when you need things like a consistent message to be sent to your customers, or checks made to critical standards or financial thresholds.
By creating automation services to handle these types of activities, you can be confident that things are being done consistently to defined standards every time.
Documentation
Documentation is a necessary evil that most people hate. With well-designed automation services, documentation can be gathered automatically. Need to check the information related to a specific request? Easy. Need to see a summary of all requests for last year? Not even breaking a sweat.
Great documentation and information can bring valuable insights into how your business is running — from statuses and overviews, to preparing automatically for audits and even helping with planning.
Living Processes
Processes can all too often be written once and then the real meaning and intention lost in the dusty recesses of time.
By automating processes you make them a visible, active member of your business. They should evolve and grow as you do, and change to reflect what you’ve learnt, e.g. ways to simplify the steps involved, to include new procedures, or to provide new insights into how things are running through additional reporting.
How Does Business Process Automation Work?
Think of our BPA as web-based, custom software solutions. We like to call each solution a Service, but we’re not sticklers for names. You get your own environment and then we work together to populate it with as many, or as few, Services as you want. We want this to be as useful as possible for you, so there aren’t any limits on the number of Services or times they can be run.
Gather Information
Typically a process would be started with someone filling in details on a form and submitting.
It could also be started by automatically checking the status of something by connecting to data available elsewhere, for example temperature, a specific recurring time, inventory level, a financial threshold, etc.
Run Checks & Get Approvals
Once started, the process could then check the data submitted against rules (e.g. if value is A do this, if value is B do that), perhaps then going to different approvers, or having different outcomes.
Anything that requires approval or information or a decision that can’t be automated can be assigned to one of the team.
Take Action & Complete
Once all the information has been reviewed and approved, the request can be fulfilled. This might be done by someone in the team taking an action (e.g. creating an account, recording information), or ideally, would be done automatically by integrating with other systems.
Reports & Dashboards
The key information that has been gathered automatically as part of running the Services, can be used to create reports.
It could be in table form, or as a dashboard page, including things like graphs, pie charts, or key figures, summing up the details in whatever way would be most valuable to you.
Some Examples of Services
Inventory Maintenance
Maybe you have some promotional items for your customers or a cupboard for your stationery supplies. By creating a simple form to request items, which would be then fulfilled by the Guardian of The Shiny Things, you would allow the Guardian to schedule fulfillment times and not face constant interruptions, additionally benefiting from the current stock count being automatically updated.
Pair this with a simple stock count maintenance service to periodically check, update, or confirm stock levels, and you should never run low again. Plus you’ll be able to see from the history, the most popular items, the dust magnets, who is requesting, and lots more.
Holiday / Vacation Request
To request, approve, and record time off.
Details of start and end dates, leave type, etc. are filled in on a form and submitted. They then go for review and approval and are recorded in a database table. Reports, dashboards, or reminders could be created to make sure that everyone is planning and taking the time off they are entitled to. They could even automatically generate calendars to show who has time off now and coming up.
Software Account Access
A form to request access to software, approvals, and any checks made.
Once approved, a task would be assigned to someone to provide the access, or potentially, connecting to the software directly would provide automatic access.
Task Tracking
This could be anything from sales enquiries, to customer support, to project items.
A new item is created by form or from another source like an email received. This can then be assigned to a specific person or put into a shared inbox for someone to pick. They work on the item, perhaps multiple times, adding notes and details. Reminders and escalations can be set as needed. Once completed, any follow-up action can be assigned, perhaps to update documentation or customer details or to make adjustments to a product.
Weekly Status Report
Automatically gather information from various sources for a weekly report.
Every Monday at 8 am, information is automatically gathered from various sources, formatted, and emailed out. Key information is updated on a webpage dashboard.
Your Process Could Go Here
Every business has its own challenges and requirements. The majority of them could be helped by BPA. Perhaps you have something that, if addressed, would make a huge difference to your business. Feel free to contact us, and we’ll give you an honest assessment of our ability to help.
Your Partner for Business Process Automation
Our goal is to share our expertise and enthusiasm with you, and offer this as a managed service (we’ll do all the fun technical stuff) for a cost lower than that of doing it yourself. No additional staff costs or technical learning curve for you, plus you gain the experience of a partner committed to your use of the service being valuable and making a positive difference to your business.
Years Automation Experience
Services Created
Expertise
We’ve been challenged (and been successful) with helping solve numerous completely different problems across most areas of business. Combining our software and solution creation expertise and your knowledge of your industry and what you need to achieve, we are confident that we can help to iron out those wrinkles in your day.
Lower Costs
Using a powerful software platform to speed up development, we can greatly improve on development times compared with manual coding, and pass that on as lower costs to you.
Fast Development
We like to collaborate during the development process, by sharing versions at various levels of development to ensure that we are creating, and delivering, the solution that matches what you need. And we will work closely with you in the first weeks to ensure that any little tweaks are made to optimise things.
Flexible Approach
We’ve worked with all sorts of departments including Communications, HR, IT, Finance, Manufacturing, Engineering, and Sales. We see great potential for all sorts of businesses, though, from medical practices to retail, hospitality, accountants, architects, design studios, engineers, etc.
Our Services
Read more about our thoughts on working and working together on the page Working Together.
Technically our service breaks into two parts, Subscription and Services, as highlighted below.
Subscription
The environment to run Automation Services for smaller businesses.
The Subscription includes the software platform, internal user access, support, system health checks, regular meetings to ensure and check that everything is running smoothly, and any other items detailed in the specific subscription tier.
Think of this as being like a computer: in addition, to do anything, you will need at least one Service.
Services
The Automation Services you run.
These solve the specific challenges you are facing which are hampering you in achieving your goals. We will work together with you to understand the factors involved and what you envisage the ideal situation to be. If we can help, we will propose a solution; if we can’t, we’ll be honest. So far we have only said no one time. That’s a smorgasbord of over 99% yeses.
Once agreed, we will then create for you a bespoke Service, working closely together during development to share incremental versions for you to test and visualise how the final version will look and function.
Existing Services may need adjustments to allow the processes they support to grow, so naturally we will assist you with any changes required.