Automating your business

Automating Your Business Automating your business seems to be a popular catch phrase of the modern business world, but what exactly does it mean? And, perhaps more importantly for business owners, how do you accomplish automation in your business?

The definition of automating processes of the business is simple enough to understand but can be more difficult to implement into a company’s day to day operation. Automating aspects of the business means transferring manual processes performed by employees to automated methods that complete the same task.

Overly Simplified Automation An overly simplified example of automation in business that nearly all companies have already instituted can be seen through the use of email. In the past, companies and managers issued written or typed memos that would inform employees of important information, but now the days of handwritten memos or hard copy memos of any kind are long gone as business have adopted inner office email or instant messaging to accomplish the same task.

Again, the above example is perhaps too simple to point to the overall benefit that automation can have on a business, but nonetheless one can see how automating such routine tasks as inter-office memos can boost efficiency. But what are some other ways to implement additional automation into the office?

Organizing Automated Advancements First, it is vitally important to take the time to plan and organize automated advancements before launching them directly into the office. Taking the time to plan and think through automations to your workplace will help you to focus only on those services and technologies that will actually improve your business instead of simply automating the workplace for automations sake.

To do this you will need to consider thoroughly what aspects to your business could be improved through the implementation of an automated tool. Each business will be different, but to get you thinking consider your manufacture, order fulfillment, and billing processes and what aspects to those actions cause headaches and issues; then all that is left is to consider which automated process could be used as a substitute or aid in completing those processes more effectively.

There are specific areas of business that most small business need to have automated in order to achieve maximum efficiency and the most common of these is marketing. Every business owner knows how important marketing is to their total success, but few take the time to automate their marketing processes.

Marketing Tools There are several automated marketing tools available, but those that will work the best are those tools that offer a business owner or employee to manage all of their marketing campaigns within one interface. For example, social media marketing campaigns are increasingly important for small business, but often an owner or employee will have to jump from one social platform to another and manage each separately; with the help of one of the many online tools available, however, a company can manage all of their social media marketing campaigns under one dashboard and thereby instantly give their business process an improvement.

Automating a business can often sound like a good idea but at times it seems like it is an idea without a starting point for many business owners. By proper planning and an examination of what processes of the business could use improvement a business owner can find the areas of their operation that could be improved with the implementation of automated services.

Photo Credit: MEJones, svilen001