Transform Your ITSM Game: Get Peak Performance Through Automation

Business Process Management Solutions (BPMS) can dramatically benefit companies of all shapes and sizes. Automation of processes, in particular, can improve work quality, save time and money, and even increase employee satisfaction – as long as it’s used efficiently.

If you ask someone to do the same (often dull) task over and over again, they are bound to make mistakes here or there. Automation of these basic duties can greatly reduce those inevitable human errors that occur over time thus increasing your company’s quality. In turn, that continuous quality improvement leads to a reputation of reliability and an uptick in sales.

Take onboarding a new employee, for example. It’s a notoriously repetitive process which can lead to careless mistakes or overlooked steps. Fortunately, its repetitive nature lends itself perfectly to automated solutions. Implementation of a simple, automated sequence will reduce errors because the software will automatically trigger each step of the process as soon as your Human Resources (HR) team kicks off the process. Furthermore, you can customize the steps of the onboarding process to suit your specific company’s needs.

And it’s not just onboarding where automation can benefit your company; automation can help with other office tasks including the creation of work material requests, approval of material requirements, IT service requests, invoicing, appointment management and many others.

There are several different types of process automation to suit each type of task. They include:

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a robot-supported process automation uses software robots or bots to take over humans’ repetitive tasks.
• Automated Workflows – automates an entire series of tasks, offering companies the chance to automate digital workflows and integrate them into systems through things like BPM diagrams to represent work steps in a standardized way.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) – the two are closely linked. AI uses ML data to automate tasks and continuously optimize business processes.
• Chatbots – text-based systems that use a combination of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to both understand and answer customers’ questions.

It’s simply a matter of figuring out which type of BPMS suits your needs and forging ahead. Often, the motivation to begin pursuing BPMS and automation in the first place is the desire to save both time and money; fortunately, that’s where automation really shines. As discussed, one of the biggest benefits of automation is the reduction of human errors. This means your employees won’t have to spend their time backtracking and tied up trying to fix their costly mistakes. They can focus their energy on figuring out ways to make your company more efficient and ultimately how to improve your business as a whole.

By automating everyday (and often mind-numbing) tasks, it frees up employees to try new things, innovate, and tackle the bigger problems that your company may face. This can give your employees a renewed sense of importance and vigor in the workplace resulting in overall higher workplace morale.

Just be sure if you do want to pursue automation in your business, that you train your employees and staff on how to actually implement the new processes. According to a recent survey conducted by OTRS Group, even though two-thirds of U.S. companies (67 percent) have invested in at least some tools to automate their business processes, 45 percent of those lack the necessary expertise to actually use them; a serious waste of resources.

After all, IT teams are the driving force behind process automation so it’s important to treat them well by setting realistic expectations, encouraging open communication, and most of all, providing ample training for your team! You can offer support for your support through automated, ITIL®4-compliant processes for incident and request management, asset management, change enablement, and onboarding with OTRS Group’s out-of-the-box software solution.

Embracing BPMS will almost certainly benefit you and your company in the long run. Just be sure to do your research, ask the experts for advice, and, of course, actually train your team on how to use it! Your IT team (and your bottom line) will thank you.