Wouldn't it be great if you
could just push a button, and all tasks in your business work
flow would be accomplished automatically, like an assembly
line? Well that is the goal of automation. Business automation
isn't just for industrial applications or manufacturing
plants. Much of business automation today has little to do
with the manufacturing plant, however, it does borrow from its
methodology of efficiency, speed and consistency.
Business automation features application integration, where
computers can be set up to automatically carry out the routine
tasks involved in running the day to day operation of the
organization. This frees human effort for more creative tasks
which can achieve smoother running and develop that
all-important competitive edge.
How does this work?
Business processes operated by computers either locally or
remotely can trigger a new business process automatically.
Some of the areas to which automation may be applied:
Web site orders integrated with accounting
Accounting integrates with sales goals and projections
Inventory and purchasing integrated with accounting
Offline Transactions integrated
Sales Goals and real time sales integrated with Intranet data
Data Entry streamlined
Acounting, Posting and Bookkeeping streamlined
Taxes
Reports linked and integrated
Fulfillment of services or good |
|
Consequences of
Improved Process Inter operation
With automation in place, redundancy is eliminated - the inter
operation process itself initiating the responding process. At
the same time, the cost of manual keying and the cost and
disruption caused by the attendant errors (detection and
correction) are also eliminated. With computerized business
processes being triggered automatically, the elimination of
processing delays while operators complete other tasks is an
additional benefit.
Redirection of Human Ingenuity
No matter how intelligent the programming of a computer might
be in implementing a business process, there are always
exceptions that need human intervention. For instance, a
purchasing process operated by a computer might be able to
determine how many of what item to order from which supplier
and when without any human assistance. But if all the
suppliers known to that business process (i.e. are identified
as alternate suppliers on the database) are out of stock, a
human has to track down an alternative source or determine an
alternative action.
In a smoothly running operation, these exception requiring
human intervention are infrequent.
So your staff's effort is now directed into the solving of
problems in a more dedicated manner rather attempting to solve
them on the fly in order to complete the data entry and get on
with the next task The role of the human has changed from data
entry specialist to problem solving specialist. This change in
focus can only enhance the effectiveness of the organization
and reduce operating costs.
|