Today’s business environment demands the highest level of efficiency possible. One of the best ways to effectively achieve this is to leverage your business software to automate labour-intensive processes.
By utilising your system’s alerts or workflows you can automate a series of tasks as soon as a condition is met. This is where you can really make your system work for you; empowering you to keep on top of critical business issues as they occur or pre-empt them before they need your attention.
Business process automation helps to take the noise out of your business enabling you and your team to focus only on those areas in need of action rather than wasting time sifting through data, reports or emails to find the critical information you need to know.
In addition a huge amount of time and effort is saved that would have historically been spent compiling reports, excel sheets etc. This frees up precious time for your team to work on more strategic business tasks or issues.
For your management team it will enable them to simply & effectively enforce the important business rules and processes that impact your bottom line and customer satisfaction levels 365 days a year.
Many of our customers use these system-wide automation tools to fully protect and maintain margins, maintain adequate stock levels, manage costs prices and credit limits and/or improve customer service.
The options are vast as these automation tools can be completely tailored to your business rules. This is where our consultant team add huge value to our customers as they kick off any ERP project with a full business process review determining what business processes, tasks, reports, rules etc. can and should be automated.
But more importantly, we also give our customers (or rather, their system administrators) in-built customisation tools to enable them to continuously adapt their business rules to meet changing conditions.
6 easy ways to use the business process automation tools in your ERP system to boost productivity and increase operational efficiency
- Automated Scheduled Reports – Why spend time running reports when you can have your key performance measurements and tailored reports automatically sent to your team’s email account, printer or on-screen?
- Automated Control Desk – An even easier way to keep an eye on your KPIs. Set up your on-screen control desk to automatically show individual users’/department/role KPIs upon opening their system. Updated in real-time, this is an unquestionable time saver.
- Automated Suggested Orders – Poor stock management could be costing your business thousands. By employing order point recalculations and replenishment rules to your business you can better utilise your suppliers lead times and aim for optimal stock holding based on analysed, historical data. This in turn can increase your cashflow and greatly improve your customer service.
- Automated Workflows – Using the tech principle of if this then that you can easily create a number of automated workflows. They work to the premise that one action will automatically derive a subsequent action, as determined by your business rules. In simple terms, you define a set of conditions (if this) and if and when these conditions occur it automatically triggers a subsequent action (then that). For example, if a customer account is new they automatically go on credit hold until their credit worthiness has been evaluated. As you can imagine, the possibilities here are endless.
- Automated Business Rules – Process documents are one thing but, more often than not, processes and new business rules fail to get embedded within an organisation as the system isn’t equipped to handle or enforce them. Automation enables you to ensure your core business rules are being adhered to 24/7 and if new business processes arise you have the control to enforce these via your system on an ongoing basis.
- Automated Alerts – This works to the same premise that if a specified action occurs, a related alert is shown to that the user. For example, if a customer hasn’t paid you, you might like to highlight them in red making them highly visible to your counter staff or sales team.
The majority of modern business management software or ERP systems include the automated processes outlined above as standard. In addition, these controls can be set up for certain individuals (customers, suppliers or employees), roles or departments or the entire organisation.
Other automated features include prompts at the trade counter, back-to-back re-ordering, margin protection, integration with credit card terminals, alerts etc. If your current system is not capable of delivering this level of automation, it is failing your business and it could be time to review if your current system is really fit for purpose in today’s digital age.
Unsure what to look for in a merchant ERP software system? Read ‘The Definitive Guide to Merchant Software’. It has all you need to know.
