Authored by Tejas Goenka, Executive Director, Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd.
The world of business today, is abuzz with a plethora of hot topics – Big Data, Cloud, AI, IoT, Block Chain, Social media, Digital – to name a few. As the world is slowly turning towards digitising processes, one of the key things which has grabbed a lot of attention, is business automation.
What is Business Automation?
In simple terms, business automation is a way in which organisations take out the most complex and / or the most redundant steps from their day-to-day processes and streamline them for simplicity. It is basically an opportunity for you as a business to apply innovation and make your most critical business processes systematic, such that your business becomes more efficient, and your life become simpler. If you are looking for a yet simpler definition, automation can be viewed as that magical move – which cuts down costs, saves your time, prevents errors from happening and allows your human workforce to solve more intelligent problems, rather than spend time on routine, repetitive tasks.
Now, that we have tried to define automation from various angles, let’s ask some basic questions:
Of course, everyone would love to.
But then, if that was the case, all businesses in the world, big or small, would have been automated since inception. A glance at the India MSME industry will easily reveal, that there is still a large chunk of businesses out there whose business processes are still driven manually. An important point to note here, is that automation does not necessarily mean owning a computer – there are sufficient instances of businesses having a computer, but then still using only some basic functionalities to handle one part of their business operations – be it sales, or purchases, or receivables and payables or inventory or banking – but not using it to integrate the entire business as one entity.
What holds businesses back from automating?
So, what holds them back? What could potentially stop a business in India today to automate its operations, when clearly the advantages are many?
Broadly, the reasons can be either or both of the following:
In short, if you chose to base your decision on only time and money, then you can arrive quickly at an answer. If automation is quick and economical, you will adapt it nevertheless of your size. If automation is time consuming and costly, you will need to get into calculations, check whether it is worth it, and then take a call. And which is why, a valid question for all businesses to ask is – when is the right time to automate my business.
5 things to consider for Business Automation
For you to take a more informed decision regarding business automation, we have listed down 5 factors, which we are calling as the A,B,C,D& E of business automation.
Let’s see what these factors are:
Now, that you have gone through the 5 factors listed above, ask yourself – Are these factors currently a challenge for me? Are these factors important to me and my business, at this point?
If the answer is “No”, you may still want to wait for some more time, for your business to grow further in terms of size, revenue, customers, before pressing the button for business automation. But if the answer is “Yes”, now is probably the right time to automate your business, than anytime else.