What the Heck is Business Automation?

Are you still wondering that Kewal keeps telling us about automating your business, however you are still lacking clarity on what actually is Business Automation?

Will things start happening on their own? Will I have to do nothing?

Is it feasible for me? It might be expensive to do it. What if my team does not follow or understands these tools?

In this article, I will educate you all about What is Business Automation? and clear out all your queries.

How I define Business Automation?

I like to define Business Automation as:

It is the use of technology to execute recurring tasks or processes in a business where manual efforts can be replaced.

Business automation helps in achieving:

• Cost minimization - reduce your operational cost
• Greater efficiency - improved team efficiency
• Streamlined processes - no firefighting on projects or orders
• Easy collaboration - easy data sharing on cloud

Let's take a simple example to understand it. How do most of us take notes or keep reminders? We generally note them down in a diary we carry with us. Now the diary is not going to remind us that you had to call a lead at 5 PM automatically.

In this case, if you would have been using Google Keep and/or Google Calendar to put in our notes and reminders then you would automatically get a notification at 4:50 PM that you have to call a new lead. Here we use technology (Google Keep/Calendar) to automatically remind us about an event.

Now, this was a very simple example which we automated using some mobile applications. Business automation can be as simple as this or more complex where there are multiple steps, multiple people, some approvals, and maybe some information that needs to be shared with everyone involved.

Some more examples of business automation:

• Customer Relation Management - Tool and Process to automate your lead conversion into a customer.
• Flow Management System - Tracking of orders/processes stage wise
• Project/Order Tracking System - Tracking progress of orders and projects
• Task Delegation System - Assign tasks and track team performance
• Intrasite (Company Portal) - Centralize all you company processes

To automate any business process, I take care of these four things:

• Data Collection - Collection of all the relevant information in a simple to use form. For example, Request a call back to gather leads/customer inquiries. Google forms are excellent tools to collect data without any errors.
• Data Management - Managing data at a place that is always accessible and easily shareable. For example, Leads Master a Google Sheet where we collect all our leads.
• Approvals - You may or may not have approvals in each business process. But they are helpful in some processes like, Leave approval process, Document verification, etc.
• Data Visualization - The most important part of automating any business process is analyzing the data and visualizing it in an easy to understand dashboard. For example Sales Dashboard, Team performance, CRM Report etc. We use Google Data Studio to make our business reports that are always up to date and we get a copy of the report at 8 AM in the morning in our inbox.

Want to learn more about Business Automation? Join me for a free live session where I educate Business owners about "How to 10X Your Business without hiring a big team?" 

I am sure now you have more knowledge about Business Automation. No Business Automation doesn't mean you will have to do nothing and everything will keep happening on their own. It will help you to keep doing things in a more organized and productive way to achieve 10X results for your business.

Join me in a live session to get started with Business Automation in your Business.