The world is slowly transforming into a capitalist, hyper-competetive, and result-oriented place—at least for businesses. With rapid development in science, technology, business, and economics, industries and companies are under immense pressure to evolve and grow as swiftly as possible. 

To be able to have a fighting chance against competitors, industries are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and software, to perform tasks and processes for them, which would have taken a substantial amount of time, resources and manpower. Process Automation is one such technology, that has increasingly accelerated several business processes, and has thus made it easier for companies to carry out certain tasks.

What is Process Automation?

Process automation is the application of technology to various business processes, which involve repetitive, manual work, that requires a long time, manpower, and resources. The technology usually performs these mundane tasks efficiently via automated workflow systems. 

Typically, it requires processes to be automated, following which information is centralized, as a result of which there is less input from others required. Imagine making a cup of coffee, except a machine takes your order, adds the ingredients accordingly, and even heats it up to a perfect temperature, with just a couple of instructions provided by you. Process automation is the new foundation on which companies and businesses are building their fortresses.

How is Process Automation Useful?

Companies have various tasks, that involve massive amounts of data inputs and outputs, complicated business transactions, thousands of emails and employee information and millions of complicated business transactions. These jobs are repetitive, time-consuming, and are highly dependent on accuracy. 

A tiny human error can essentially derail the entire process, setting the company back several essential steps. Process automation provides transparency in management, helps improve productivity, increases employee compliance, and reduces costs. Thus, it is an essential element of any business company.

Business Process Automation versus Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation is a form of Business Process Automation that essentially uses robot technology(bots) or Artificial Intelligence to perform repetitive, menial, time consuming jobs that are normally performed by humans. Thus, it helps in doing a large volume of work, at a rapid pace, and prioritizes complex tasks. On the surface, it may seem that Business Process Automation, and Robotic Process Automation are similar, however, their base principle is very different. Business Process Automation tools, like Ipaas, help in streamlining processes, resulting in more accurate business decisions. 

On the other hand, Robotic Process Automation is more about completing work in bulk, by quickly completing time-consuming menial tasks.  Other examples of automation processes are digital process automation and IT process Automation.

7 Automating Tools

These are some examples of Automating tools that make process automation easy for companies:

• Hootsuite: A great automation tool, which has significantly helps businesses and companies with their social media outreach and consumer engagement. Social media is the primary tool through which companies can interact with their consumers, and gauge their complaints, demands, and other interests. 

Hootsuite allows companies to streamline social media advertising, by allowing you to access all your social media accounts, on every platform, at once, making it easy for you to juggle platforms. Rather than worrying about posting from individual accounts and spending way too much time, this allows you to increase your social media outreach easily.

• Quu: A tool that is great with content research, Quu helps you find the best material, the most relevant and engaging content, for a particular target audience. It sufficiently automates the process of relevant content research, but sending you alerts whenever a particular bit of content pops up, that is perfect for your target audience. Media like podcasts, videos, articles, memes,  journal entries, research papers, etc. 

• 99 Dollar Social:  This is a process automation tool that, for 99 dollars, takes over the entirety of your social media, for a month. It shares the exact sort of content that is needed to engage your target audience, times posts correctly, engages with social media user bases efficiently, and completely takes over the arduous process of managing social media.

• Breakout: Breakflow is a process automation tool that helps you control all menial, repetitive tasks. It basically automates all internalized processes, making workflow very streamlined and efficient. Simple things like emails, notifications, and approval requests can be easily controlled via this tool, across a variety of platforms at the same time. Managing and tracking processes across different platforms becomes a simple task. Offering Pre-designed templates for tracking data, for integration, uniting over a 1000 applications, this is a massively useful tool.

• Asana: In a company with thousands of employees, all assigned to different tasks, being a manager is aggravatingly difficult. Asana is one such tool, that helps in employee management, and assigning projects. It communicates with different teams and assigns them tasks with a few clicks, and you do not need to send a thousand emails back and forth, amongst a 100 people daily. Great for local and remote teams, it helps in keeping all parties informed, and up to date with current proceedings. Thus, smooth task management and effective employee communication help a company increase its productivity exponentially.

• Basecamp: Basecamp is an excellent integration software, which makes communication between employee teams or company communication extremely efficient, with the utilization of cloud software. Similar to Asana, it is however easier to use and thus preferred. Features like deadline, task announcement, discussion tracking, files, etc, make it a valuable tool that works as an excellent company hub. It is excellent for team management but is not as good as Asana, when it comes to starting projects.
• Slack: Companies receive a vast number of emails per day. Whether it is from employees, potential clients, consumers, or even other companies, sorting through thousands of emails can be a sysiphean task. In a sea of unread emails, it is easy to lose a lone important email, or lose track of a conversation. Slack helps you sort through these emails, by streamlining all-important conversations. It helps you keep track of conversations by keeping ongoing email threads like a chat window, and immediately archives old emails, making it easy for you to search up old emails, by simply typing in the topic. This streamlines communication effectively in a company.

Thus, we can see how important Process Automation is for the growth and development of a company. By streamlining management, communication, emails, tasks, projects, social media promotion, and outreach, it helps companies massively. Companies can now easily save time, reserve their resources and move ahead with projects swiftly. Employees have less of a workload, and this improves their efficiency, thus making the company work like a well-oiled machine.