Blog Post
Are your employees drowning in data entry tasks? What if you could achieve flawless data accuracy, cut costs, and free your staff to focus on high-value tasks — all at once? Reliance on manual data entry leads to errors, poses significant operational challenges, and escalates costs as staff are inundated with repetitive tasks.
The future of data entry is AI-driven automation technology that seamlessly extracts information without human effort and structures it for backend systems. No more repetitive manual labor, just smooth automated data handling.
Read on to discover the ways data entry automation can transform your business operations and how to implement it successfully to reap the benefits.
What Is Data Entry Automation?
Data Entry Automation uses machine learning software and AI to minimize manual tasks by extracting data from sources like PDFs and emails, and then depositing it into other systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It can also involve other tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to automate simple steps in the process and capture data from images.
Why Is Data Entry Automation Important?
Nowadays, customers expect Amazon-like service speed, so manufacturers and distributors need the capacity to process vast amounts of order information swiftly. However, doing the bulk of data processing by hand can undermine success in several ways:
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Increased error rates: Manually retyping data from paper or emailed orders and other unstructured sources leaves room for human error. Mistyped, duplicate, or incorrect data can pollute databases and analytics and lead to order errors or delays and dissatisfied customers, eating into your profit margins, and increasing the Cost of Goods Sold.
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Limited scalability: The slow data processing of manual order entry makes it difficult to scale with growth and continue to meet customer expectations for fast and accurate orders. As your business flourishes and sales volume grows, handling essential business documents requires more effort and resources, increasing labor costs and stifling expansion.
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Siloed data access: With data scattered across departments and systems, access and analysis are challenging, and valuable insights get lost.
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Slower decision-making: Delayed or unreliable data ultimately means less effective responses to evolving market conditions, affecting competitiveness and growth.
What Are the Top 6 Benefits of Data Entry Automation?
Automating repetitive data entry processes through AI-powered solutions enables complete, accurate, and rapid data capture from order documents and allows it to flow seamlessly into central repositories, breaking down silos. Automation also means you’re always ready to scale to meet demand without any increase in manual labor costs.
Let’s take a closer look at the six top business-critical advantages of automating order entry.
1. Improve customer service
Automation enhances the experience for your customers by providing faster order processing, efficient onboarding, and a more rapid turnaround for orders overall. What’s more, by eliminating tedious manual data tasks, you can rededicate employee time to customer-facing interactions and strategic initiatives that create value.
2. Increase data accuracy
AI and machine learning extract order data with unparalleled accuracy. Automation minimizes human errors and produces verified, high-quality data output using configurable rules, producing far superior results versus manual processes.
3. Lower cost
As automation minimizes the need to enter data manually, it offers significant savings in terms of labor costs. It also helps reduce expenditure by eliminating expensive errors. Over time, these savings soon add up, providing an outstanding ROI.
4. Enhance efficiency
Intelligent automation drastically accelerates data processing compared to manual methods. With AI technology working round the clock, your team can focus on high-value tasks.
5. Scale
As order volumes grow, automation lets your order processing capabilities cost-effectively scale as needed, without increasing headcount.
6. Increases employee satisfaction
Shifting your staff’s focus from tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks to more impactful customer-centric work boosts job satisfaction, improves retention rates, and reduces the chances of burnout.
Graybar turned to Conexiom’s order automation solution to automate intensive data tasks slowing down its order management workflows. Graybar rapidly processed 83,000 documents with 9.5 million line items in six months with 100% accuracy. This new efficiency in Graybar’s order management freed up personnel to concentrate on improving customer experiences.
Implementing Data Entry Automation in Your Business
Customer service representatives can spend up to 50% of their day on administrative tasks like data entry. Data entry automation can give you back that time to invest in more profitable tasks. However, effective adoption of automation relies on careful planning and change management.
To successfully implement data entry automation within your organization, follow these key steps:
Identify good targets for automation prospects
Evaluate your existing workflows to spot repetitive high-volume data tasks ripe for automation. Focus on where the impact on what's most important to your business — customer experience and profitability — will be the greatest. Where can you improve both at the same time?
For example, look at how many orders you handle from high-volume customers that don’t send orders electronically. Repeatedly serving these customers has significant costs in both turnaround time and employee labor. With automated solutions processing orders accurately, efficiently, and seamlessly, you can cut costs and improve your customer’s delivery lead time without them having to change a thing.
Select and empower an automation champion
Implementing automation may require changing mindsets across your organization. Employees need reassurance that the technology isn't being introduced to replace them but will benefit them. You can appoint an ‘automation champion’ to act as a change agent who'll work with employees and customers to understand their needs and concerns. Your champion can guide them through the testing and piloting stages of the implementation process and beyond.
They should also conduct training sessions to teach employees how to use the new software, explain the tangible benefits it'll bring, get them comfortable with any new processes, and address concerns transparently.
Test and scale
Start small by piloting the automation on a limited set of orders. Thoroughly test and verify the results before rolling out more widely. Once successful, scale up automation in phases. As employees become accustomed, more customers can be included in the automated workflows as you gradually expand to handling higher volumes.
Track, monitor, and optimize
Use analytics to track and track accuracy rates, efficiency gains, and productivity improvements, to help you calculate your cost savings.
For example, you can calculate the savings on labor costs from automating order entry, by determining the time saved per order, multiplying that by the total orders processed, and then calculating the cost savings by applying the employee's hourly wage to the time saved.
You can quantify the reduction in errors that led to wrong items being shipped by calculating the cost associated with these errors (like returns, reshipping, and customer service costs) before and after automation.
You can also use analytics to help you optimize your processes further by looking for other opportunities where automation can help you improve.
When it tested Conexiom's automation platform, Johnstone Supply quickly saw the potential to enhance productivity. The company minimized employees' need for time-intensive data entry by adopting the software across order and invoice processing functions. This invisible workforce then redirected significant hours in a given year to focus on bolstering service to increase customer satisfaction.
Conexiom Makes Data Entry Automation Simple
Data entry automation delivers immense benefits over manual processes — from slashing costs to driving efficiency to enabling better decisions with accurate, integrated data.
However, not all automation solutions are made equal. Conexiom has spent over 20 years perfecting data automation technologies for business documents. The platform offers:
- 100% Accuracy: The software provides complete, error-free data extraction, even from unstructured documents.
- Comprehensive Automation: It handles automation for sales orders, purchase orders, shipping notices, receipts, invoices, and more.
- Seamless Integrations: Pre-built connectors allow extracted data to flow seamlessly into ERPs and other systems.
- Significant Cost Savings: Conexiom delivers up to 81% reductions in document processing costs.
See how Conexiom’s industry-leading platform can help you cut costs, boost efficiency, and transform document processing for your business. Book a demo today to discuss your automation needs.