Business process automation (BPA) is a process designed to automate a business set-up. As a business owner, keeping track of all the activities in your business is a tedious task. Data manipulation, record keeping, tracking employees, their productivity and having all-inclusive knowledge of your business in general: Tracking all these activities is extremely significant for the smooth running and growth of a business. The difficult part is, actually tracking them!
Therefore arises the need of Business process automation. A Business process automation comes with a package of different tools. Each of these tools carries out a specific purpose intended to ease the business processes by computerizing them. This ‘digitizing’ of the business processes not only increases the speed and efficiency of each of your business but also introduces a level of accuracy which goes a long way in multiplying your business growth.
For the automation of your business, the basic tools that a BPA comes loaded with are
- ERP
- CRM
- Bulk-Emailing
- Bulk-SMSes
- Google Apps
- Digital Marketing
- Websites/E-commerce
Let’s have a look at each of these tools, and how they come in handy in boosting the all-round growth of your company.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP):
When you are running a business or a company, it becomes extremely essential for you to have control over all the activities in your company, so that you can assess them and introduce necessary changes at required points of each business processes. But tracking each of the company processes and then drawing suitable conclusions, without having a database for the same, is humanly impossible. Therefore, Enterprise Resource Planning.
ERP software help you to maintain a regular check on all your business processes. With ERP you can have an Overview of each of those processes. For example, if your company has following units, ERP will help you have an overview of each of them individually as well as a combined system:
- Finance unit
- Supply chain unit
- Marketing unit
- Sales unit
- Manufacturing unit
- Customer relationship unit
- Human resource unit
Thus for the integration of your business and making sure that each of the unit in your business is growing and also adding value to the other related units, ERP becomes mandatory.
Customer Resource Management (CRM):
In any business, the driving force is customer or clients. Hence taking good care of them becomes an unavoidable task. It is essential to not only maintain a customer profile but also to note customer trends and being able to effectively track them so as to make a better sale as per customer patterns. This is only possible by maintaining a well-kept customer database. To ease this purpose, CRM proves to be a great blessing. Apart from maintaining in-detail profile of each your customers, it also helps you in drawing conclusions which are best suitable for your company.
Besides you can also track and manage:
- Inventory details
- Employee effectiveness
- Leads to sales conversion ratio
- Payrolls
- Purchase orders
In case of multiple outlets also, CRM gives you a Centralized View of each of them.
CRM is a part of the ERP system, but for companies with smaller needs, CRM alone pretty effectively.
Both ERP and CRM are cloud based softwares and hence are much safer and prone to almost no risk.
Bulk-Emails:
In today’s era of digitized world, sending mails by conventional methods, to educate potential customers/clients about your product or service is not even an option. Thus, to spread the word about your product, sending e-mails becomes the right path. From your personal e-mail account, you have to either send a personalized mail to each of your prospect client one by one which is a time consuming rather time wasting task. Or you have to choose multiple recipient option, which does not give a lasting impact, as it shows to the recipient that he is one of the targeted client and hence loses the impact. Besides, using your e-mail id for commercial purposes can lead to the blockage of the id by the service provider. But with bulk –emailing option, all of these concerns are taken care of and the chances of putting a lasting impact on the prospect client increases.
Bulk-SMSes:
Bulk messaging is another powerful tool that strengthens your business. It helps you reach a larger number of people at just a click and helps you to put your product knowledge before them without bearing much cost. Another usage of SMS is that they can be used for transactions while dealing with the customers.
Google Apps:
Branding has come to play a large role in businesses today. Each and every business wishes to strengthen its brand. Google apps help you go a step forward in doing so. With google apps you can direct all your mails from a regular mail account to a mail account at the rate of your company name. For example, it’s always effective and impressive if your client can send you e-mails at [email protected].
Another highlight of Google apps is the access it provides to the cloud. Having your data stored on the cloud makes it easy not only for retrieval and usage at any desired location but also eases the data editing even by multiple users. It enables to work more productively by linking your e-mails and Google docs with Google calendar and have a hassle free working. Plus there is an added feature of Google Hangouts which enables the user to start one to one or group video chats which is a more professional version of video chat. Similarly Google sheets come in handy while sharing a set of regularly updated live data with a large number of people.
Digital Marketing:
The most effective, currently used and inexpensive way of marketing today is digital marketing. To sell your product/service well, it is becoming increasingly essential to go online and attract the larger number of people. Thus the role of digital marketing cannot be ignored. A few of the most popular and appealing methods of digital marketing are:
- Social media management
- Remarketing
- Hashtag marketing
- Making your presence on mobile apps
- Blogging
- Analysing customer search behaviour
And these are just a few of the digital marketing techniques from the large pool.
Websites/E-commerce:
The world today is so digitized that it becomes utterly essential to make your mar on the digital world to have your business flourishing. Each business be it large or small, are making it a point to have a website of their own which easily gives out a lot of the sought after information to the current or future client. This not only increases the possibility of attracting more customers but also adds value to your business by making you appear more professional before your clients.
Furthermore, e-commerce websites are growing exponentially and attracting a very large number of customers because of the ease it provides. Thus, this has become the new flavour of the market and is essentially being a part of the businesses today.
At Target Integration, we aim to customize these business automation tools to suit the requirements of your company. With these tools incorporated well into your system, the GROWTH, that you have always hunted for can no longer stay away from you!! So go ahead and AUTOMATE to PROSPER.
*image source google.
