Basics of Business Process Automation

Automating your repetitive tasks lets you work on high-priority items.

Leaving those huge excel sheets behind might sound scary or exciting depending on how easy it is for your workers to adapt to change. At The SilverLogic, we work with our clients to design, plan, and implement business automation and reporting software. Business process automation is similar to or can sometimes include “robotic process automation”, which is a software technology that makes it easy to streamline tedious, complicated, or repetitive tasks. Software “robots” emulate human actions by interacting with digital systems and software. If this sounds like something you need, let us know!

What is Business Process Automation

What does automation mean in business?

Automation can refer to something as conceptually simple as automatically generating and emailing a report to stakeholders to using OCR to analyze and sort documents and route them to the correct department. In short, business automation involves the use of automation to increase productivity. We have successfully collaborated with a variety of clients in a wide range of industries to improve their business processes with automation. With our expertise, we can assist you in identifying what processes are good candidates for automation and will work with your budget.

"Business Process Automation" (BPM), refers specifically to a system in which automated business processes are managed collectively to improve an organization’s overall workflow in terms of achieving greater efficiency, adapting to changing business needs, reducing human error, and clarifying job roles and responsibilities.

What can I automate in my business?

Good candidates for BPM are processes that can be improved via automation—report generation, scheduling, double-checking data, and in general many processes that are currently completed using very large spreadsheets. While the advantages of automation include speed and efficiency on the part of the machine, the importance of a human worker to supervise, review, and provide feedback on the work produced by the machine cannot be understated. Though the machine is much faster and more efficient than a human, an incorrect decision programmed into a machine can be disastrous. So, supervision by a human is necessary to catch, and correct, any errors made by the machine to prevent that error from adversely affecting the entirety of the process being automated.

Why is automation important in business?

Implemented humanely and with feedback from all levels of a business, automation can assist employees at all levels to maintain compliance with internal and external policies and regulations, improve reporting, and bring attention to inaccurate assumptions about how a business is actually being run. By automating your processes, you will save time, effort, and money, while reducing human error, allowing your business to focus on its primary goals. You can do repetitive tasks more quickly. With automation, all tasks are performed identically, without human error, ensuring high-quality results.

Should all companies automate their business?

Not necessarily. Whether automation should be considered for a business depends on the type of company you have, whether current essential business processes would benefit from automation, and if the company is ready to scale its capacity. The SilverLogic develops software that can help companies automate repetitive, boring tasks that are essential parts of running their business, such as inputting line items into a billing system, managing employee onboarding and certifications, maintaining version control for tasks that have multiple people working on them, or keeping a centralized record of all customer interactions.

Case Study: Beauty Services Retailer

A beauty services retailer, based in Boca Raton, Florida, approached The SilverLogic to help them find a way to automate many different business processes for them. One of the first processes to be addressed was automating the method by which a customer is matched to the store location closest to them and scheduling customer appointments.
Before these processes were automated, client onboarding/scheduling processes were done through call centers with a lot of human interaction to match a client to a location and to schedule consultations and treatments which put a lot of pressure on call center employees and limited their ability to do other tasks more important to the business. 

The SilverLogic, in close collaboration with this client, built software to mitigate these issues. Essentially, the potential client quickly fills out a form on the company's marketing site, a rep at company headquarters follows up the lead, and onboards the client directly into the scheduling/treatment software using a form recording client particulars including the services they are interested in. After onboarding, the client is able to sign in to a version of the software with customer-specific permissions where they are brought to their own profile page after logging in. 

From there, the client can navigate to a consultation/treatment schedule where they can select the store location that is most convenient for them, the day, date, and time of the appointment, and the items they are interested in discussing for consultations or to be treated. 

The automation of these two processes allows the call center employees to make better use of company time addressing issues that need direct human interaction like customer billing, customer retention, and other tasks which have a significantly higher return on investment (ROI) than customer onboarding and treatment/consultation location selection. Our customer has since automated many of their business processes over the course of our relationship with them and are very happy with their business management software.

Case Study: Training Compliance Management

Florida has well over a thousand assisted living facilities (ALFs), each one with its own nuances and internal rules and regulations. All of these facilities operate under a standard state license, and they can add any of three supplemental licenses for extended congregate care (ECC), limited nursing services (LNS), and limited mental health (LMH).

Each of these comes along with a dizzying array of training and certification requirements for employees that are governed by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). An assisted living facility, in order to operate safely and legally, needs to make sure that 100% of its employees are obtaining and maintaining the appropriate certifications and trainings 100% of the time.

Without a centralized way to track trainings and certifications, ALF administrators can find themselves in a mess. Trainings can be online or in-person, they last for different durations of time and often need to be completed in sequential order. Without centralized automation solutions in place, this tends to take place across mountains of emails and multiple spreadsheets with multiple owners - it’s a situation ripe for oversights and human errors, and organizations found to be out of compliance with AHCA (even accidentally) face heavy fines and possible closure.

One assisted living facility needed a solution that was specific to their needs and had several capabilities not found in any off-the-shelf Business Automation software. Specifically, the system needed a system that:

• Had all of ACHA’s licensure and certification requirements built-in
• Knew which employee titles corresponded to which required trainings
• Kept track of when these trainings were necessary when they were completed, and when they were set to expire
• Alerted employees and management when a deadline was coming up
• Flagged management if anything across their organization was currently out of compliance

By working with The SilverLogic, The facility was able to make this idea happen and created a very highly specific piece of software that did all of the above and then some. By starting with ALF Boss’s exact needs in mind, we were able to create a product that was fast, efficient, easy to use, and did exactly what they needed to do.

We hate to hear someone say, “I hate my CRM,” or, “My software doesn’t do [that],” because we know it doesn’t need to be that way. The SilverLogic is just as excited about business automation software as we are about all the cool consumer-facing products we’ve built over the years. And we can help you too – Let’s talk!