It’s not easy to scale your business, right? Business process automation is no longer simply a luxury for larger companies; it is quickly becoming a need for companies of all sizes to ensure continuous success. Businesses are actively looking to automate their operations as much as possible, seeking software that can optimize the time and money spent on such resources. Organizations prefer software that is efficient, integrated, and overall best-in-breed. Software of high quality can help reduce various inefficiencies that occur in the organization such as workforce management, billing & payroll, material planning, production and distribution, and much more.
Working on these inefficiencies can help significantly reduce operational costs and can help scale your business. Of course, the implementation of software seems easier said than done, and there are some changes that the entire business needs to adapt to. In this blog, we look at the various software that businesses might benefit from the most and then explain the importance of completing the software scalability analysis to see whether and how a particular software can help scale your business.
How to use Software and Automation to Scale your Business.
You can attain many results at once if you have the potential to grow your firm. You may greatly increase business development while simultaneously enhancing service and having happier, more engaged employees.
1. Scaling financial processes
Financial procedures check all the boxes for whether or not something should be automated. This is usually true for Repetitive and time-consuming but necessary tasks that have a low-value return.
You can automate everything from your internal payroll operations to client invoicing and even vendor payments when it comes to expanding your firm. You will never have to worry about capacity again if you automate your money. You’ll also be able to redirect some of your financial hours to strategic research and insight. As a result, you’ll be able to expand your firm even further!
2. Scaling customer service to improve service delivery and satisfaction
There are several techniques to scale customer service and eliminate constraints on the number of people you can assist at once through automation:
- Customers can self-solve problems utilizing helpdesk software and associated FAQs.
- Businesses can use Chatbots to automate replies to frequent questions and cut down on the number of individuals that need to contact you.
- Your clients can accomplish anything without contacting you by using self-service features like account admin sections.
The introduction of mobile banking apps is one of the most extraordinary instances of growing customer care in the previous decade. People can now accomplish everything they used to have to call someone or go to the bank with their cellphones. While this assisted large banks in becoming more lucrative, it also created an atmosphere in which new banks might enter the market and enjoy long-term success. Ultimately, all banks have been able to scale their business using the right tools.
3. Scaling your lead generation and nurturing process
Anyone who worked in business development 15 years ago remembers how tough it was to maintain their contacts with an Excel database. Surprisingly, there are still some firms that do not use CRM software today!
It’s difficult and time-consuming to get leads. You have to nurture them and ensure you only schedule meetings with people you know are interested in your company. That is, however, exactly why you should automate it! It will not only help you to have more leads in your pipeline, but it will also allow you to better segment them and create a connection with them before even seeing or speaking with them in person. Of course, being able to manage existing leads effectively and attract more leads is a sure-fire way to scale your business. More leads mean more opportunities to close and generate revenue, which brings us nicely to our next point.
4. Scaling your sales processes
It’s a good idea to automate as much of the sales process as possible. If you’re offering a digital service like software, your sales process might be completely self-service and online. You may connect your sales process to contract production, invoice creation, and whatever onboarding or new client nurturing process you use, depending on the applications you use.
The days of closing transactions in person or over the phone are long gone, and consumers are happier than ever! Automate your sales process to allow you to grow your company with as minimal human interaction as possible!
5. Scaling your legal operations
Legal activities may be time-consuming and costly, whether you are a law firm, have an in-house legal staff, or outsource your legal services. You may scale your legal activities in a variety of ways, including all of the following:
- Contract automation is achieved by combining contract management software with your CRM platform and other sales tools. To help automate bills, you may also automate modifications and link your contracts to your finance applications.
- Using standardized “plug-and-play” legal templates to swiftly populate the appropriate information. Depending on your integrations, you may be able to automate this as well, since you can extract data to populate your contract from your other applications.
- Version control is essential for maintaining the integrity of your legal documents. You can simply track version history and save each version without relying on someone else.
You may also utilize AI document review tools to help uncover contract flaws and make modifications at the press of a button, in addition to these features. Saving time on these tasks frees up time to scale your business elsewhere.
6. Improving the quality of workforce management
Workforce management is one of the most ongoing difficulties businesses face. The amount of time and effort employers require in managing their staff and their schedule can often overwhelm companies that are still completing most business tasks using paper. Through automation, companies can use an all-in-one software that tackles all workforce management-related problems. These problems include:
Employee Onboarding:
- Onboarding employees is a vital business activity that we frequently ignore. The necessity of an organized onboarding process is often overlooked by businesses. According to O.C Tanner, workers who have a positive onboarding experience are more likely to stay with a firm for three years. The burden and time frame associated with the procedure can be reduced by streamlining it. It also sets the tone for the new employee, demonstrating what they may expect from their job and what they should expect from themselves.
- Employee onboarding is a wonderful place to start with business automation. It should, at the absolute least, make signing key documents and contracts for new workers pleasant. It should also include a section for business culture, the workplace, and expectations, among other things. The more positive an onboarding experience is, the easier it is to hire and scale your business.
Communication with employees
- To achieve business objectives, most firms rely on various teams or departments to collaborate. This is impossible to achieve without the appropriate communication tools. Many remote employees’ supervisors rely on personal communication channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, and text messaging. While these are functional, they aren’t suitable for work-related communication and cooperation.
- Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Team are examples of automated solutions that streamline communication and make collaboration simple, regardless of where the team is located. The beauty of these communication tools is that they frequently interact with other internal systems and technologies. Other professional communication channels can be accessed through current systems, such as your staff scheduling software.
Employee Scheduling
- Employee scheduling is another aspect of business automation that helps improve workforce management. Celayix has been assisting businesses with automating their personnel scheduling process for over 20 years and can save you up to 95% of the time you spend preparing and monitoring schedules. You can fill a schedule in minutes thanks to tools like autofill. At the touch of a button, Celayix AI may provide optimization recommendations. We also provide a number of integrations to help with things like payroll and attendance monitoring.
- You may free up management and scheduler time to focus on other important tasks by automating the personnel scheduling process. With a platform like Celayix, you can save time, money, and effort, and ultimately scale your business.
After looking at the processes that can be improved through software, it is also important to do a software scalability analysis to see if it fits your business.
Software Scalability Analysis
Every forward-thinking IT firm must prepare for future expansion in every facet of its software development operations. Your organization must pick algorithms, network protocols, and applications that can handle future modifications, whether you’re designing software infrastructure for an internal corporate system or a customer-facing product.
However, before making a final choice on any current or future application development project, you must first evaluate the scalability model that will endure database growth and increasing user activity.
What is Software Scalability Analysis?
The process of assessing the performance of a system or software application is known as software scalability analysis (scalability testing). This technique specifies how the system or application reacts to workload increases caused by structural changes.
Software scalability, like performance, can be measured. All you have to do now is decide the performance criteria or system attributes to track.
Measurement techniques for software scalability
There are 4 factors to consider in seeing whether your business can benefit from software scalability:
- Response time: The time between a user’s request and the application’s answer is measured in response time; the shorter the response time, the better the application’s performance. Users can endure a 5-second reaction time on average. Anything above that degrades the performance of your program and degrades the user experience.
- Resource usage (network and memory): When the program is fully operational, this property evaluates the memory capacity and network bandwidth in use.
- Throughput: Throughput is a metric that records the number of requests processed in a given amount of time. Web applications, for example, assess throughput by the number of requests received or processed within a given time interval.
- Cost: The price of each transaction carried out by the software.
These 4 factors can provide a personal standpoint on what the business expects from its software. Through these metrics, a company can identify whether they should scale their use for a particular software or not.
Benefits of completing a software scalability analysis
- Scalability testing can assist you to figure out how to expand your application as demand grows.
- A scalability study aids in the selection of an appropriate scalability model for your software application.
- Scalability analysis may also save you money while scaling up (or down) your application.
- Software scalability analysis helps identify various issues that require be solved and can be solved through upgrading or finding a new software:
- Compatibility issues and lack of integration in legacy systems.
- Internal vulnerabilities such as flawed code and competing codebases may be causing the system to malfunction and long downtimes.
- Huge maintenance costs due to recurring issues.
Now that we have an idea of how a software scalability analysis may help figure out your business model, it is clear that every business is different. The business automations you choose to use will be unique to your needs. Software can cut costs by automating routine tasks, improve the efficiency of staff, increase or measure office productivity, streamline business operations and accounts, replace paper processes, communicate more effectively with customers, suppliers, or partners and so much more. With Celayix, we can certainly meet some, if not all, of these needs. If you’d like to hear more about how Celayix can help your business through automation, reach out to a Solutions Advisor today!
