Guide
Business process automation examples, department by department
Automation is easier to picture as a list of chores than as a strategy. These are everyday tasks that follow a rule, grouped by the department that does them today. If your team does one of them by hand every week, it is a candidate.
Sales
Sales teams lose most of their time to typing and remembering. Both can go to the system.
- Enquiries from calls, website forms and messages land in one list, each with an owner
- Follow-up reminders arrive on the day they are due, not when someone remembers
- Quotations are generated from a product list with the right prices and terms
- An accepted quotation becomes an order without being typed again
- Order requests that arrive on WhatsApp are read into a queue for a person to confirm
Accounts and finance
Month-end in accounts is often the same assembly job, done by hand every month.
- Invoices raised from approved orders or delivery notes
- Payment reminders sent on a schedule, and stopped when the payment arrives
- A list of overdue payments built fresh every morning
- Bank payment files generated from the payroll run
- Figures passed to the accounting system instead of re-keyed
HR and payroll
Payroll is rules applied to attendance, which is exactly what software does well.
- Punches from biometric devices flowing straight into the monthly muster
- Salary calculated from hours worked, with overtime, advances and deductions applied by rule
- Leave requests routed to the right approver, with the balance checked
- Payslips generated for everyone at once
- Reminders before probation periods end and documents expire
Operations, stock and dispatch
Operations runs on status. Automation keeps the status true without anyone phoning round.
- Stock alerts when an item falls below its reorder level
- Production status updated from the floor or synced from the ERP
- Work that has waited too long at one stage flagged every day
- Customers told when their order has been dispatched
Management and reporting
Managers rarely need more reports. They need the few numbers that changed, without having to ask. Reports that arrive on a schedule, dashboards that update as the work happens and a short morning list of exceptions replace most of the month-end scramble.
What the examples have in common
Every task above happens often, follows a rule someone could write down, and starts from data that already exists somewhere. That is what makes it automatable. Each one should also keep a history, so you can always see what the system did and why.
Leave judgement with people: an unusual discount, a complaint, a promotion. The system’s job there is to gather the facts, not to make the call.
Questions
Common questions
Which of these should we automate first?
The one that happens most often and costs the most when it goes wrong, provided its inputs already exist digitally. Our guide on where to start with automation explains how to choose.
Where to start with automationDo we need a separate tool for each one?
Usually not. Most of these belong in one system that holds the data, connected to the software you already run. A separate tool for each chore tends to create new copying jobs between the tools.
Can automation work with WhatsApp?
For incoming orders, yes. The CRM we built reads order requests arriving on WhatsApp into a review queue, where a person checks and confirms them instead of retyping them.
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