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Maximising Efficiency: The Ultimate Guide to Implementing Business Process Automation for Small to Medium Businesses

Business Process Automation for SMBs

As Cost of Living continues to rise, businesses are continuously finding new ways to streamline their efficiency and maximise productivity.

Many Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) are turning to Business Process Automation to find solutions to these challenges quickly and effectively through the use of technology.

Business automation takes routine tasks and business processes and increases efficiency through smart automation, helping to reducing human error and maximise output of businesses.

But how could Busines Process Automation help an SME achieve this? Intelligent Business Automation can help to increase cost savings by providing tailored evaluation, optimising insights and offering expert guidance. 

What Is Business Process Automation?

Many industries are benefitting from this new technology including SMEs, Accounting, Healthcare, Law firms and even in the public sector.

This post will aim to guide SMEs through the benefits implementing workflow automation can bring to a business.

The cost-of-living crisis has hit UK businesses hard, with altered consumer spending behaviour, increased material costs, skyrocketing inflation levels and an unprecedented workforce shortage in the market all leading to increased costs and challenges in running a business.

Small and Medium sized enterprises encompass 99% of businesses in the UK. Together this community account for millions of jobs, economic growth and social development, and are essential to the survival of the UK economy.

Numerous challenges posed by the cost-of-living crisis include increased costs to legal services, professional and media technology, high workforce turnover, staff burnout and budget constraints.
Many SMEs have had to navigate these issues, whilst operating under a greater pressure to increase staff salaries and lessen the impact of cost rises in their workforces.

Now, countless businesses are finding resolutions to these challenges through Business Process Automation; the process of taking routine tasks that humans perform in their day to day roles, and automating them to improve accuracy, reduce human errors and to save time and resources.

Workflow automation can help employers to invest time wisely, removing the need to work on basic repetitive processes and tasks and save millions in unnecessary costs every year. Through digital transformation of your business, automation can reduce the pressure of never ending to do lists, monitoring for human error and focus employee time on strategic and higher value tasks.

These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry, handles repetitive processes and leads to substantial time savings to improve workflow and aid quick decision making.

This in turn saves employees time and saves the business money.

So how can automation improve business processes?

Get more time back in your day


A recent poll of 500 SMEs has revealed 33 per cent do not feel that they have enough time in a day to get everything done. It is no secret that no industry is immune to inefficient time management, and much valuable employee time within an SME is wasted on delayed processes that could be easily monitored by an automated workflow system such as chasing payments, managing invoices and cashflow, keeping on top of legal costs, payroll and meeting customer demands.
Benefits of automation for small to medium businesses include the use of efficiency tools for businesses which contribute to operational efficiency.

Reduction in Human Error

Additionally, many SMEs are at risk of succumbing to human error. It is largely agreed that human error is a part of human life and within some areas such as manual data entry and completion of repetitive tasks this is easy to predict.

However, a study by the IT Governance Institute has estimated Businesses in the UK loose approximately £98.6 billion annually. In addition to the immediate financial impact, human error can lead to reduced productivity, low morale, impacted client relationships, damage to perception of brand and can lead to legal consequences and issues with compliance.

Ultimately workflow automation can save thousands of manual hours of work and can save millions of pounds in unnecessary costs every year.

With the rise in AI the future of businesses will be shaped by the face of digital transformation, and survival will rely on the ability to use to use time and resources in a smart and coordinated way. The tools offered through business process automation will be essential in paving the way forward for SMEs worldwide to achieve ultimate efficiency and to unlock competitive advances.

Find out where you could improve efficiency and save money.

To learn more about how Intelligent Automation can benefit your small business, check out the links below.

More info here

Need help or have other questions about Automation? Read more here or get in touch.

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