Introduction

Increasing digitalization has made process automation more important. All kinds of processes are being automated and made more efficient, leaving people to concentrate on more creative and strategic tasks. The machine is ideally suited to take over recurring and time-consuming tasks. The benefits of automation are manifold and interesting for every company.

The benefits were divided into four categories:

1. Increased efficiency
   Automation enables companies to handle processes faster and more efficiently. Machines and software solutions work 24 hours a day without interruption and are ideal for repetitive and time-consuming tasks that do not require human intervention.
   
   
2. Quality improvement
   Human fatigue is often the cause of errors in the execution of any task. This human fatigue is completely eliminated by process automation. Automation is therefore ideal for keeping the quality of products and services at a consistently high level.
   
   
3. Cost reduction
   The reduction in costs through automation is enormous. If less manpower is required for the same work, it is cheaper for the company. This is because many automation solutions initially involve high costs, but in the long term you recoup this through savings. So you could say that capital costs increase, but operating costs decrease.
   
   
4. Scalability
   Automation allows companies to scale processes in a simple way. So when demand increases, it is easier to adapt the automation systems than to hire new employees. The cloud in particular offers a high degree of flexibility in this scenario. It allows a company to react quickly to market changes and adapt its processes.
   
   

Examples of successful process automation

This chapter is intended to show some examples to improve understanding of automation.

• Finance
  In finance, processes such as invoicing and payment processing are automated and invoices are created automatically with some software. Payments and postings have also been automated, which has minimized the error rate and massively increased the speed of transactions.
  
  
• Customer service
  Another area that has also benefited greatly from automation is customer service. Many companies offer chatbots and AI-driven systems to help customers. These systems are available 24/7, always friendly and cost the minimum as opposed to a workforce. This has also meant that customer queries have been answered much faster and customer satisfaction has increased at the same time.
  
  
• Marketing
  Personalized emails that are automatically sent to customers based on their purchasing behaviour and preferences can significantly increase customer loyalty. In the world of big data, these automation processes are indispensable. There is so much information being collected that it would not be efficient at all if humans had to search for correlations between customer data.
  
  
• Automation in IT support
  Automation is also used in IT support. For example, in a company that works with tickets. The system can automatically categorize the tickets according to urgency and type of problem. This allows IT support to work in a much more goal-oriented way, as it is not necessary to first check who needs to process the ticket. These were just two parameters, but the number of parameters can be as high as you like.
  
  

Tools for process automation

A variety of tools are available for integrating automation into companies.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) makes it possible to automate manual and repetitive tasks such as data processing, form entry and document management. RPA is particularly suitable for activities that are based on clearly defined rules and are not extremely varied.


Business Process Management (BPM) tool helps a company to model and optimize complex business processes. They offer a platform that analyzes workflows and designs automated processes. BPM systems also have the task of monitoring and continuously improving processes.


Workflow automation tools are designed to integrate multiple applications and systems with each other to enable seamless execution of business processes. The aim is to minimize manual intervention and execute different tasks in a sequence.


Cloud automation tools help to manage the cloud infrastructure efficiently. The various management tools can be used to ensure that the Cloud environment is consistent and scalable. These tools can automatically provide resources as required. These resources could be computing power, memory, databases or network resources.

Conclusion

It can therefore be concluded from this information that process automation offers considerable advantages for companies. Especially in the areas of efficiency, quality, cost reduction and scalability. Automation optimizes workflows, minimizes human error and makes companies more flexible. The examples presented were intended to show a few examples of applications. With the right tools and a clear strategy, you can benefit from the advantages of process automation for your company.


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