What is automation and how is it helping or becoming a problem to businesses?

Automation is becoming used more and more across businesses in order to give them advancements in various different areas – from recruitment and people management to finance and marketing. But what exactly is it that’s behind this buzzword and is it something that you are missing out on as a business (spoiler: probably!)

 

So what even is automation?

automation

/ɔːtəˈmeɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

the use or introduction of automatic equipment in a manufacturing or other process or facility.

As you can see from the definition above, automation is down to the use of equipment that completes tasks for you whether that be in manufacturing or in our particular example; business settings. From our perspective, automation is removing laborious manual processes by letting software do them for you, reducing manual error and vastly increasing the amount of time available to spend on more important tasks.

So how did automation start? Where did it come from? Well this largely depends on your outlook and position – as well as how far back you’re prepared to go. In a business context, the computer was the major automation component for businesses and this was originally used for finance, insurance and mathematical reasons to help with complex computations; speeding up the amount of work people could do in the same space of time.

How is it being utilised nowadays – what are the main benefits and what do experts say as a result of this? While a lot of talk around automation is that it is a risk to jobs, it shouldn’t necessarily be viewed in such a bad light thanks to the amount of time and money that it could save your business. As jobs evolve over time, there will be much more emphasis on automation management and discovering ways in which businesses can utilise it’s people in different ways.

 

How is this going to affect businesses in tech specifically?

For businesses in tech and software specifically, the challenge has always been innovation and improving processes to get more out of the time spent on tasks. It’s important to realise that automation, using Marketing as an example; is a way in which mundane processes can be taken away from the day-to-day lives of the marketing department allowing them more time to spend on complex analysis, coming up with new campaigns or working out how to reduce spend through (even more) automation. An example of this is client onboarding – businesses are now turning to automated processing that allows a client to be onboarded with a lot more ease; allowing account managers to monitor the process and deal with more complex cases with more care.

How can you be reactive or proactive – making technology and automation work for you is paramount to surviving as a business. What you are spending five to ten hours per week doing manually, your competitors could be doing through an automated piece of software. And never be afraid to go for it and make a positive change to automation. An extreme example is going from sending letters all the time, to email becoming the norm. What may seem strange now may be an investment for the future.

 

We work across a number of business sectors to provide effective bespoke software solutions in order to improve business efficiency through automation. To discover more of what we can do, get in touch with our team today.