Do you want to scale your business and improve your employee productivity, without hiring extra staff and whilst reducing costs? Here are ten data entry automation solutions to prepare your business to scale faster and more efficiently.
1. eCommerce Order Management:
eCommerce order management enables you to eliminate administration errors, fulfill orders more quickly, increase product line profitability and make sure that stock and pricing are consistent in ERP and eCommerce systems. Other automated solutions include:
- Integration between ERP and eCommerce software, for example Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Amazon Marketplace etc.
- Automating the order management process
- Courier integration for delivering orders swiftly e.g. Parcelforce, DPD, Royal Mail, FedEx
- Automating product updates from ERP to eCommerce platform
- Payment Gateway integration for automated bank reconciliations e.g. Stripe, PayPal, WorldPay etc.
2. Credit control automation:
Automating credit control procedures reduces aged debtor times, boosts cash flows and eliminates manual administration tasks that are prone to human error; automating credit control letters, putting customers on credit hold and more. Automating financial reports for scheduled or data driven events protects cash flow and brings consistency.
Other automated solutions include:
- Automating customers credit references via services such as Creditsafe
- Expense management automation
- Reminders for annual tax and VAT returns
- Creation and delivery of invoices and statements
- Automating financial reports
3. Automated customer renewals:
Automated customer renewals create and administer emails and letters that adhere to business rules (such as expiry within 30/60/90 days) to any clients with which you have a renewal based contract with. This reduces debilitating costs, enhances financial performance and as above, frees up staff from time consuming manual administration. Other automated solutions include:
- Support ticket creations and delivery
- Customer self-service portals
- Creating and delivering welcome packs, documents and statements
- Assigning support tickets to employees
- Contacting customers with information about deliveries, new stock, services etc
- Automating old, pending support issues
4. Manufacturing
Automating data entry for stock reports, courier integration, self-service supplier portals and credit control enhances cash flow, profitability and productivity. Other automated solutions include:
- Integrating ERP and accounting software
- Creating self-serve supplier portals
- Calculating and distributing KPI reports e.g waste % per product line
- Communicating with other departments regarding when manufacturing is complete.
- Automating event-driven data collection on stock levels to check the impact upon production techniques such as Just-In-Time (JIT)
5. Wholesale and Distribution:
Automated alerts for warehouse stock can be put in place to report and monitor your systems and applications for data changes. Automated emails/SMS alerts can be sent to alert employees on stock levels, order status’s, supplier schedules and customer demands. This solution again takes the pressure off staff to manually check on data. Other automated solutions include:
- Self-service portals for customers, suppliers and trading partners
- Automated reports for stock, pick lists, delivery notes, cash flow statuses, aged debtors etc.
- ERP, eCommerce and Courier service integration
- Credit control automation
- Automated alerts for deliveries, stock levels, back orders now in stock etc.
6. Sales
Your CRM system can be integrated and streamlined with other business systems, meaning your sales team are saved from manually entering client and sales data into the system, generating pipeline and KPI. This time can be invested in serving existing clients and developing new business. Other sales management automated solutions include:
- Automating website enquiries with follow ups.
- Integrating CRM system with MS Exchange
- Automating notifications for price changes
- Automating sales leads to the relevant employees
- Automating notifications for customer accounts on credit hold within accounting software
7. Human Resources
The creation of a self-service portal removes the necessity for employees to request records, HR policies, holiday requests and other documentation. This automated solution also relieves HR of unnecessary administration. Other data entry automated solutions include:
- New starter welcome emails, with all the relevant documents and policies
- Holiday Request Forms
- Alerts to managers when probation periods are approaching
- Alerts and notifications for when employees start or leave the company
- Monitoring sick days; notifications are sent to senior management if an employee has a high number of sick days.
- Automated alerts to managers when an employee’s probation period is nearing its end
- Automate alerts and notifications for when employees start or leave
8. Marketing
Data entry automation within the marketing department allows your marketing team to concentrate on improving marketing performance by removing manual tasks such as unsubscribes, updating eCommerce stores and entering sales leads from campaigns into CRM systems. Additional data entry tasks that can be automated include:
- CRM and email marketing integration e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sage CRM, dotdigital, MailChimp, HubSpot etc.
- Automation of upgrade, upsell or cross-sell marketing activities
- Automated SMS notifications and alerts for offers and promotional activities
- Automatically process unsubscribes from marketing campaigns
- Automatic monitoring of marketing databases and CRM systems for duplicate, poor quality or missing data
9. Operations
Automating simple office tasks such as the creation of pick lists, placing orders with courier services or the creation of web portals for suppliers and clients, assists operations teams in assuring consistency of output, service and performance. Additional data entry tasks that can be automated include:
- Approving workflow for design, quality control, production and planning
- Purchase ledgers and the cross-referencing of invoices against anticipated costs
- Monitoring stock levels and creating alerts when they fall below certain levels
- Producing obligatory statistics for quality schemes such as Six Sigma and ISO
- Creating self-serve web portals for enquiries.
10. Information Technology
IT departments are of course at the front line of data entry automation. With the assistance of business automation software (BPA) and low-code application tools, they can create and enable changes to seamlessly take place, in step with business growth and transitions. Using the BPA Platform means there is virtually no coding in 90% of this process. Alongside IT departments using automation across all business processes, their own administration, budgets and development times can likewise be enhanced through BPA. Additional automated solutions for IT processes that use a lot of data (to reduce costs) include:
- Checking space on hard disks on servers and sending alerts where necessary; with the possibility of automating deletions from Temp folders.
- Monitoring key business systems and sending alerts via email or SMS
- Inputting low-code application development tools to build 100% fit applications, bespoke add-ons and software for specific tasks
- Fast and cost-effective delivery of process automation projects using a set of tools that are in harmony with any data source via ODBC, OLEDB, Web services or 3rd party APIs through connectors
- Using drag and drop tools (BPA Platform and Applications Platform) can reduce the costs and speed up bespoke system integration and app development.
The advantages of operating as an automated office:
Regardless of your field and whether you are an established business or a start-up, businesses are increasingly more dependent on the provision of accurate data to drive revenues and productivity. Data entry automation software eradicates common bottlenecks whilst streamlining your existing business processes, removing time delays and the inevitable mistakes from manual data entry. Additional benefits from office automation include:
- Cutting operative costs
- Minimising administration errors
- Controlling workflow approval
- Eliminating the need to outsource day-to-day administration tasks
- 100% accurate audit trails
- Increase visibility of data and essential business information
- Enhance strategic business planning and decision making
Want to take it to the next level?
Are you inspired to transform your business through automating data entry systems? Contact us here and book a call with one of our system architects today or download our brochure at vh3.digital.
