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How Automation Can Help Your Business Cut Costs and Stay Afloat

In today’s environment, businesses must do everything they can to maintain a competitive cost structure. Cutting costs is critical for some businesses to remain afloat, and automation is one way that these costs savings can be achieved. Here are just some of the ways that automation can help your business cut costs and stay competitive in the current fickle economy.

Nimble Decisionmaking with Real-time Reporting

One of the ways that companies keep an eye on costs is through reporting and dashboards. Leadership can keep an eye on these dashboards to maintain the line of sight into expenses and capital costs. However, generating these reports takes time. Running and compiling these types of reports is also subject to occasional human errors and typos which can cause big problems when reporting on financial data. Thankfully automation can solve both of those issues.

Automation can be used to compile the appropriate data and create the necessary reports. No need to worry about typos when automation comes into the picture. Also, no need to worry about stale or outdated data in the reports. Automated dashboards can provide real-time updates and visibility, empowering leadership to react to trends quicker and keep costs in check before they go too far in the wrong direction. 

On top of this, times like these require innovation.  Transparent up-to-date reporting available to all employees may spark unexpected innovations from within the company, giving you an unplanned competitive advantage.  

Quicker Payment Processing

If cutting costs is not achievable in some cases, then getting pending revenue into your bank account quicker achieves the same net result. Automation can help get that revenue on your books faster by speeding up business processes. For example, suppose you have a business process that requires 4 weeks between the sale and the receipt of the customer’s first payment to go through all the approvals and documentation. What if automation could cut that time in half?

Imagine now that you are receiving those payments in half the time. The automation you implemented is now allowing your company to accelerate its revenue stream and keep expenses virtually flat. This will be a win in any CFO’s book!

Minimize Inefficiencies

Speaking of revenue streams, automation can help you uncover inefficiencies in business processes that drain your resources, and eliminate them to save money and time. For example, does someone on your team has to manually search through emails to find the latest information on a client or determine whether or not an order shipped? That person can spend time more productively if, thanks to automation, the data they seek is accessible with a click of a mouse, the order status is updated automatically, while the tracking number is created and the customer is notified all without this human lifting a finger. 

Discover New Revenue Streams

While you are brushing through and eradicating your business process inefficiencies, you just may uncover a dormant revenue stream that will be welcome. Maybe, as your recipes start being automatically uploaded into a secure data storage for easy access from anywhere, you realize you can offer these recipes to a new group of potential clients as a subscription service. Or perhaps, you would discover additional time to host video consultations. 

Automation can give you a different angle to evaluate how you make money and assess opportunities for new revenue streams. 

Eliminate Need for Seasonal Staffing

Many businesses have very seasonal volumes of work and often require additional staffing during peak seasons. However, when the peak season is over, this additional staff is often released. Hiring and releasing staff due to peaks and valleys in workload is a costly and time-consuming method of operation. It takes time and money to train the new staff. When that staff is released, all that knowledge and cost walk out the door with them.

Automation can help solve this problem by eliminating the need for additional staff during peak season. Automation through software allows you to easily scale up or down your “digital workforce” without needing to hire additional human workers. Automation also operates 24/7, so higher volumes of work can be processes than during a traditional 8-hour workday. This allows the company to maintain a relatively flat staffing curve year-round.

Free Human Workforce from Low-Value Activities

People often get stuck doing boring and mundane tasks because, well, somebody has to do them, right? Maybe not. Imagine using automation to have computer software perform these routine and mundane tasks while your human workforce focuses on higher-value activities like building relationships with your customers or performing an in-depth analysis of business metrics. This allows your business to get much more value from your higher-paid workforce and effectively cut costs by having cheap labor (computer software) perform the lower value activities.

Automation is a great tool that businesses can use to cut costs during the trying financial times.  In addition to reducing your manual labor needs, automation can provide cost savings in many other forms. Now is the time to begin exploring automation options and working with a trusted partner to help build a solution that will work for your business. Contact your dedicated 3nom expert today to find out what you can automate to get an edge for the future.