It’s Summertime! Baseball and Automation?
Yay! It’s nearly summer and that means we’re well into baseball season!
It’s that time of year…make a resolution to automate and integrate systems within your organization now.
Integrate and automate easily, reliably, and securely. Organizations can no longer put off using tools to manage productivity and increase efficiency. Kickstart the new year and check out some ways you can set your business up for success in 2023.
Integrate disparate systems
Many organizations have different systems or tools for each department. Accounting has financial systems, HR may have an employee management tool, Sales has a CRM, and upper management wants reporting and statistics out of each.
Many times, each department procures its own systems that don’t inherently “talk” to each other, which doesn’t provide an end-to-end organizational picture.
Using API’s (Application Programming Interface) to integrate will help “stitch” together these systems to do a variety of tasks like a CRM feeding forecast information into an accounting system.
This ensures all your systems have the same information and easily flow from one to another, saving time, and giving you a full picture of the health of your organization.
Automate error-prone activities
Many manual processes are inherently error-prone. Reduce errors, and get things done faster with automation. Many organizations depend on the manual entry of data or using tools like spreadsheets to move information from one system to another.
Generally, the biggest issue with this approach is the time it takes and redoing work. The other consideration is the risk of errors getting into your systems. A client we had coined a great term for it, “human frailty”. Remove this from happening in your organization, and make your resources more efficient by adding automation to your processes.
Remove the need for paper
If you still have paper forms in your organization, now is the time to get digitized! Filling in paper forms for employees and customers is incredibly cumbersome, and ripe for data errors. Both in the input of the information into other systems, and human error.
Power Apps makes form building easy, for both internal and external users, with data integrity to ensure you have the right information in your systems, across your organization.
Let’s use HR onboarding as an example. By creating a custom HR onboarding app, you can easily streamline the process of bringing in new employees onboard. This includes everything from gathering the necessary information to completing paperwork to assigning tasks. Another great example is creating approval forms. Whether you need to approve a new hire, a purchase order, or any other type of approval request, a tool that helps you create a custom approval form that fits your specific needs is a great asset for your business.
Phased approach
While it is strongly recommended for organizations to take action and integrate and automate their systems; it can be a daunting task. Use a phased approach to get quick wins within your organization and start showing the
advantages. This will help in increasing organizational support for these initiatives. Once your teams see the value, you’ll be able to empower teams to focus on important tasks and support rapidly changing business needs.
If you have any questions about automation and process improvements, Contact Artic and we can help!