DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Grow in a slowdown and reduce your headcount…  Wow did I just say reduce your headcount. Erm what I meant to say was ’streamline your operations’ or ‘reduce you reliance in manual processes’.

Come on lets get real. There are some businesses out there that need to reduce costs right now and quickly. No-one likes loosing good people but its a harsh reality of business at the moment.

Whether this is part of your cost reduction strategy or not Business Process Automation is an important component in creating a leaner meaner fighting machine to weather the Recession storm that is now upon us and forecast to deepen.

We have recently put the finishing touches on our workflow automation ‘core’ we should really put some thought into giving it a fancy title shouldn’t we? We have been using this to connect to a businesses existing systems as a way of both monitoring the traffic of the workflow as well as having the ‘intelligence’ to assign task to other users. The intelligence in question is a series of business rule unique to your business.

Lets pick an industry. Say Logistics. A consignment is entered into the system for pick up and the system calculates the closest vehicle to pick it up. In its calculation the following rules are considered

• The the vehicle too large for the customers premises
• Is there room on the vehicle?
• Is the vehicle over weight?
• Will the extra job force the driver or exceed his hours or rest breaks

The system automatically notifies the driver, The driver accepts the job and the system texts the customer to confirm confirmation.

The rules in question are applicable to any industry but in this example we have built business logic into the role of Transport operations manager. The actions taken by the system are compliant with the companies policies for late pick up. The manager can handle more work and can focus time on account management or driver liaison which are more humanistic tasks.

If you need more clarification on Business Process Automation and what it can do for your business. Drop me a line. 0432 968684

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