Reliable, repeatable outcomes are the cornerstone of building quality solutions for your customers.

Most of the time you can muddle your way through a complex thing once. For example, most of us have attempted doing our own taxes at least once. It might even be an achievable goal that felt as though it saved you time and produced a good result.

Now comes the question of doing it again tomorrow, next week, next month, or maybe even next year. What steps did you follow the first time you “solved” the problem? Can you reliably repeat the process and get the same outcome? Hopefully, you took notes, or better yet thought about possibly automating the process.

There are two things that can save you time and ultimately give you the ability to generate more revenue.

• Proper Documentation
• Process Automation

Sometimes dealing with both may seem like they are “not getting it done”. However, both of these concepts will lead to improved quality, reliability, and consistency while at the same time generating repeatable outcomes and saving you both time and money.

Most of us understand documentation, to one degree or another. What constitutes “Proper Documentation” is a topic on its own. However, Process Automation is something to consider. How many things do you find you or others in your business doing repeatedly? On one hand, you have the items that fill your day and take up your time. A process need not be complex to warrant automation. Many times, it is not the complex things that everyone thinks of as targets for automation, but the things that must be done over and over. Many times, it is the mundane things that fill your day that could be a great candidate for automation. Most things that we do in business day-to-day could benefit from the reliable and repeatable outcomes that can be achieved with process automation.

On the other hand, you have those other tasks. The ones that fall somewhere on your calendar that you must remember how to do or locate the notes/documentation from a year ago to do again. At first, glance automating a thing that you do once a year seems to be over the top or may make you question why. The truth is that many times these are exactly the type of items that should be automated. The chance that the process is lost or forgotten is higher than the daily tasks that fill so much of our time. These are items that can typically suffer from degradation in quality and consistency over time.

What to automate? Repetition in all its forms!

There are likely more candidates for automation in your business than you might realize. Just a few of these could be:

• Email Management
  • Checking/Sorting
  • Automated Responses
• Social Media Scheduling and Management
  • Responses
  • Content Based Alerts
• Documents
  • Generation
  • Sorting
  • Archival/Retrieval
• Invoicing
• Bill Payments
• Supply Ordering

The benefits are the same whether it is the daily and mundane or the “long” schedule tasks that repeat infrequently. There are a large number of business processes that can be automated. Save time and have peace of mind. Process automation gives you the opportunity to solve it once.

Consider the many benefits of process automation: