Business operations rely heavily on good administration of workflows and processes. In order for the business to successfully reach their intended goals, all processes must go as planned and work seamlessly with each other. This is where business administration becomes more complex. The task of business admins isn’t just to manage the business as a whole, but also to ensure alignment and efficiency.
Fortunately, business administration is made less complex thanks to technology. Modern business solutions designed to streamline workflows and processes are easy to find and integrate. Even better, they are now available as cloud-based solutions rather than on-premise software, which means they only require a small initial investment.
Technology becomes an inseparable part of business operations. You can use technology to further streamline your business’s admin workload, and these next several tips and tricks will help you get started right away.
Integrate
One of the first things you want to do when streamlining business workflows and processes is to integrate the different business solutions used by different functions in the organization. Your sales team may rely on Salesforce, but the same tool isn’t always useful for other departments.
Fortunately, most business solutions on the market are designed to be flexible enough to work with other solutions and platforms. Data from Salesforce can be synchronized with data stored by HubSpot, allowing CRM and marketing automation solutions to work with each other seamlessly.
The integration of multiple business solutions comes with a number of benefits:
- When business solutions work seamlessly with each other, manual work (i.e. transferring data from one platform to another) can be completely eliminated, significantly reducing the workload of your business’s admin in the process.
- Possibilities of human errors are reduced to a minimum with business solutions talking to each other directly.
- Business processes can be made more efficient with the help of solutions triggering actions and automating tasks.
That actually brings us to our next tip, which is….
Automate
Automation is a must in any business process. Automation is how you boost output without significantly increasing input or expanding the team handling business administration. Automation is such a popular solution that top programs such as this Bachelor of Business Administration course from the Central Christian College of Kansas now include modules on automation.
Automation is a handy management tool. You can do a thorough assessment of common tasks performed by business admins and find repetitive ones to automate. There are multiple ways to automate mundane, repetitive tasks too.
- You can trigger an action based on certain parameters. For instance, when the inventory management system detects low inventory, a purchase order for that item is automatically created and sent for approval. This eliminates the manual creation of POs and saves a lot of time.
- Another form of automation is automated synchronization. When you use different tools to track leads and manage projects, a new lead added to one platform can trigger the synchronization of data between the two business solutions.
- The automation of repetitive tasks is even easier. You can use tools like Zapier to automate the creation of a quotation or sales document when a new request email is received. Zapier can automatically parse new emails and collect important details about the request.
The possibilities are endless with automation. Thanks to the advanced business tools we have today, there is no task that cannot be automated to some degree.
Define Business Processes
With the two previous tips implemented, it is time to go back to basics. After technology is implemented to refine existing processes, you now have the ability to use technology to review business processes in a more comprehensive way.
A lot of organizations don’t really have a well-defined set of business processes. This is where a good business process management solution – also known as a BPM tool – comes in handy. Rather than trying to understand internal workflows, you can visualize them instead.
The visualization of business processes helps with a lot of things:
- When you use a BPM tool to visualize business processes, you have the ability to identify bottlenecks and potential issues early, which means you have the ability to refine the processes in a more in-depth way.
- Visualization tools also come with features that help analyze and refine business processes. Some even rely on AI to help review existing processes and suggest possible improvements automatically.
- You also have a visual guide that can be used to enforce workflows and processes within the organization.
There are still so many other ways technology can help streamline your business’s admin workload. As processes become more refined and these tips get implemented, boosting output of the organization becomes easier to do.
