Choosing the Right Automation Solution for Your Business

One of the biggest bottlenecks for many businesses today is manual data entry and document processing, tasks that are both time-consuming and prone to errors. CSRs spend up to 50% of their day on repetitive manual tasks, 25% communicating updates to customers, and 23% on manual data entry. These legacy methods hamper efficiency, significantly impacting your bottom line and hurting customer satisfaction. However, with the right solution you can automate these processes, reducing the risk of errors, improving turnaround times, and enhancing your overall productivity.

Read on to discover how embracing automation can transform your operations with substantial gains in efficiency and customer satisfaction.

What Are Automation Solutions?

Automation solutions are technologies designed to streamline and optimize business processes that formerly required repetitive, manual labor. These systems are able to mimic human actions and decision-making processes, completing tasks thanks to a combination of rule-based algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation.

Examples of Automation Solutions

Let's look at a few examples to better understand automation solutions and how they can benefit your business. Note that these are some of the most common automation solutions, and this is by no means an exhaustive list.

• Document Automation: Streamlines the management of documents used in various business processes. These platforms can automatically create, format, and distribute documents that traditionally required repetitive, manual labor to create.

• Invoice Automation: Automatically processes invoices, eliminating the inefficiencies of manual data entry and the risks of human error. These systems extract data from invoices and verify it before sending it to an ERP or other system.

• Sales Order Automation: Automates the processing of sales orders to provide a faster, more seamless customer experience. Order documents are processed by the system with a reduced cost per order and lower error rate.

• Vendor Order Acknowledgment Automation: Instantly creates and sends order acknowledgments to speed up the order fulfillment process.

• Workflow Automation: Tools that can be used to automate any number of repetitive tasks, especially those that only require specific if/then rules to complete.

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Enables the creation and management of automated software solutions designed to behave like humans to complete certain tasks across your organization.

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Uses artificial intelligence and pattern recognition algorithms to detect characters and convert them into machine-encoded text. These systems allow for the digital processing of paper-based documents.

• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP): Software solutions that use AI, machine learning, and OCR technologies to automatically process documents on a large scale. IDP tools often integrate the unstructured data from these sources with other business processes.

Where Does Automation Add Value to a Business?

In a world of ever-increasing customer expectations and rapidly shrinking time frames, automation solutions offer a shortcut to staying competitive. Let’s examine some of the most important ways automation can give you a competitive edge.

• Streamlines Processes: Automation solutions excel at taking the dry, repetitive tasks off the hands of your employees so that they can focus their ingenuity on exceeding customer expectations and growing your business, increasing efficiency and productivity.

• Reduces Costs: Performing tasks like data entry and document processing manually increase your costs by tying up valuable employees in tedious work and, at the same time, slowing down your whole operation. Automating these time-consuming and labor-intensive activities both frees up your staff and accelerates sales, ordering, and invoicing processes, significantly reducing your operational costs and improving profitability.

• Improves Accuracy: While humans inevitably make mistakes. automated systems are much less prone to errors, ensuring greater accuracy and consistency in data entry, calculations, and decision-making.

• Enhances Compliance: Automation solutions can also enforce predefined rules and workflows, helping businesses ensure continuous compliance  with industry regulations and mitigating the risk of rule breaches due to human errors or oversight.

• Increases Scalability: Small-to-medium-sized teams can be easily overwhelmed by rapid increases in the number of documents to process, making it a challenge to smoothly expand your business. On the other hand, automation solutions can scale as a business grows, accommodating increased volumes and workloads without additional manual resources.

• Provides Data-Driven Insights: Automated systems can capture and analyze vast amounts of data far more efficiently than humans, providing your business with valuable up-to-date insights that enable data-driven decision-making.

• Boosts Customer Satisfaction: All the many benefits of automation combine to enable you to provide better customer service, faster response times, and a more positive overall experience.

To learn more about how automation can revolutionize your business, explore this case study to see how Genpak was able to achieve 100% accurate automated ordering and deliver more positive outcomes for their customers.

How to Choose the Right Automation Solution?

Selecting the right automation solution is a critical decision that can significantly impact your business's efficiency and bottom line. Let's take a look at some key steps that will help you navigate the complex world of automation technologies and find the solution that best fits your business.

Identify Processes to Automate

The first step is to identify processes that involve repetitive tasks or which are creating bottlenecks in your operations. To see quick results from automation, prioritize processes with high volumes, require manual effort, or are prone to human error.

For example, if you’re a manufacturer or distributor, one high-volume process to look at would be order entry. This typically requires significant manual work in the form of receiving, inputting, and processing customer orders. Automated order entry software can automatically identify, extract, and process orders and even send the order information straight to your accounting software.

Assess Integration Requirements

Automation solutions vary in the integration capabilities they offer, so evaluate how the software will integrate with your existing systems, such as your ERP, CRM, or accounting software.

For instance, if your lead nurturing process involves the slow, manual inputting of data from different systems into your CRM, an automation solution that integrates with your CRM will allow you to automate that workflow.

Consider Scalability and Flexibility

Look for a solution with the flexibility to accommodate changing volumes, processes, or requirements.

In the case of accounts payable teams, they can become quickly overwhelmed by the increase in the number of invoices to process when a business begins to scale up. This can hinder your ability to grow effectively. With effective AP invoice automation, your team can handle a much larger number of invoices, allowing your business to scale without disruption.

Evaluate User-Friendliness

While many automation platforms come with a long list of features, it’s also important to look beyond the marketing hype and assess the solution’s ease of use and training requirements. A diverse array of automation features is only valuable if your employees can actually use them easily.

Choosing a platform designed with user-friendliness in mind can help you avoid these headaches. This is where demos come in, allowing a hands-on experience that can give you a good idea of how your staff will interact with the technology.

Analyze Vendor Support and Expertise

Even with the best software systems, unexpected issues sometimes crop up. That’s when you want a reliable partner to call on, not a distant third-party vendor.

So, when selecting an automation solution, it’s also important to consider the vendor’s experience, industry knowledge, and support offerings and look at their track record for providing training, maintenance, and upgrades over the long run.

Calculate Return on Investment (ROI)

When evaluating automation solutions, the most crucial factor to consider is the return on investment (ROI). To assess this accurately, start by estimating your potential cost savings and efficiency gains. Next, determine the payback period — the time it will take for the benefits to outweigh the initial investment. However, be cautious of hidden costs that might affect the solution's long-term viability. These could include maintenance fees, upgrades, or additional training requirements.

By considering both immediate and future financial impacts, you can make a well-informed decision about which automation solution truly offers the best value for your business.

Why Conexiom Is The Best Solution For Your Automation Needs

Implementing the right automation solution can transform your business operations, leading to increased employee morale, enhanced productivity, and an improved customer experience. However, selecting the ideal tool requires careful consideration. Key steps in this process include assessing integration requirements, evaluating vendor support, and calculating potential return on investment (ROI).

One common challenge many businesses face is the digital order gap. Traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions often apply to only the largest tech-savvy companies, a fraction of transactions, leaving the rest to be processed manually, unless your customers agree to change their own processes. While eCommerce platforms can help with small call in or walk up orders, but may not be suitable for large B2B orders. This is where Conexiom come into play.

Conexiom offers automatic processing of emailed orders, extracting the information with 100% accuracy and converting the orders into easy-to-process EDI-like digital transactions. It works by combining tailored business rules with self-learning generative AI that's been specially trained on over 1 billion purchase order lines per year.

Conexiom provides many other benefits, including:

• Automation of purchase order-backed transactions from all customers
• Rapid order processing of under 2 minutes
• Improved On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) rates with 22% fewer late deliveries,
• Increased efficiency by freeing up 50% of team time
• Cost savings through 49% fewer order errors

For a real-world example of Conexiom's impact, consider the case of Woodhill Supply's Accounts Payable team. Their implementation of Conexiom resulted in a positive ROI within just four weeks.