The 7 Most Important Benefits of Digitizing Business Processes

What benefits can companies expect to see when they decide to digitize their business processes? There are many more, but these seven are particularly significant:

1. Increased productivity

Process digitization allows you to speed up and improve repetitive, time-consuming, and often monotonous tasks such as processing vacation requests, accepting cost invoices, settling business trips, processing contracts or granting credit decisions. As a result, employee productivity increases, and that dividend of time creative potential can be applied to more ambitious activities, bringing greater added value for the company.

However, it is not only about greater efficiency in performing tasks – the automation and digitization of processes provides much better access to important, up-to-date information on an ongoing basis. This doesn’t only make it easier to quickly make the right operational decisions, it also assists with identifying areas for further optimization. This results in a more long-term increase in productivity that fortifies the company’s infrastructure.

2. Time savings and reduction of process costs

As mentioned previously, an automated process can be completed by up to 87% faster. Such an increase in productivity saves employees time and significantly reduces the cost of each process. One shouldn’t ignore that this also affects morale and satisfaction among the employees, who not only spend less time on administrative work, but also tend to appreciate the support of new technologies when carrying out their daily duties.

3. Better quality of work and reduced risk of errors

To make mistakes is human, but employee mistakes can cost a lot; – certainly time and money, but in serious situations mistake can even damage the company’s reputation. Digitization minimizes the risk of making mistakes, especially the so-called “human mistakes”, which can easily occur while doing simple, routine tasks based on paper documents that are repeated every day. The result is that employees not only get more done in less time, but the quality of their work and process execution is also much higher.

4. Better insight into business processes

Applications that standardize business processes, while ensuring their transparency and auditability, are a treasure trove of valuable information for management. Knowledge about the course of processes taking place in the company allows them to make better decisions, ranging from tactical optimizing and “bottleneck” reduction to strategic course changes regarding the further growth of the organization.

5. Flexible and effective prototyping

Creative business divisions provide ideas on how to improve and distinguish the company from the competition, which products are worth introducing to the market, and how to develop existing and create new business models. Not all of them will turn out to be a hit, so it’s not worth creating a dedicated application for every stated idea. However, a company that’s well-prepared to digitize processes should try to make prototyping fast, cheap, and readily available for trying out any such concepts. Thanks to this approach based on Proofs-of-Concept, Rapid Prototyping, and Failing Fast, we can effectively support new ideas for business development – without incurring significant costs or financial risks.

6. Improving the quality of customer service

According to research by American Express, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better shopping experience. Satisfied customers are also loyal customers, strongly associated with a brand’s products and services. Thanks to automation, the customer handling can be made faster and more reliable, with the risk of making a mistake minimized. The company’s employees also benefit from this, and because they have access to all contextually relevant information about the relationship with a given customer, and hence are able to better respond to their needs – all the while handling a much larger number of customer inquiries.

7. Improved cooperation and internal communication

E-mails, spreadsheets, phones, chats – unstructured communication can cause chaos and hinder the efficient implementation of projects. Employees often try to find ad hoc solutions to improve cooperation in their team, which often ends in even greater chaos resulting from the simultaneous use of many different communication channels.

Business applications come in handy as they collect all the tasks of a given user in one place, automatically assign them to the right people, and enable managers to monitor their realization on an ongoing basis. Why is it important? Because probably each of us has a tendency to focus on our tasks and when our part of the work is finished – we do not monitor whether other people involved in the process continue it, let alone whether they do so well. That is why it is worthwhile to guard the effectiveness of business applications that will ensure the efficient implementation of each process by all its participants from beginning to end.