Ludwig Van Beethoven, the musical genius’s symphonies need no introduction. He orchestrated music for every possible emotion of human existence. Have you ever wondered about the number of musical instruments that work in coordination during an orchestra to create a symphony of such sophistication and soothing to your ears? It could be mind-numbing. Such should be your high expectations when it comes to your office automation system because technology can help you today reach that degree of coordination and efficiency ensuring that your daily office administration activities are now going to be simply on a song!
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Many could be of the opinion that by replacing memos with emails, filing cabinets with shared drives or embracing digitization they have arrived at the age of automation. How can going paperless make your organization leaner when you’re pushing around volumes of data? Handling work electronically doesn’t mean your office is automated. Real automation is about using intelligent technology and intuitive processes and not just axing mundane tasks or becoming a slave to complex workflows that use heavy coding and needs one to be a programmer to understand them. It’s about augmenting your capabilities as an organization by shrinking processing time for multiple teams with multiple needs, placing the human mind as the controller of processes and not vice versa, getting insights into processes and performance and making more sense out of data for smarter investments in the future.
Brands who are evangelists, always ahead of the technology curve are identifying the need and purpose of office automation systems right from their visitor check-ins & access management system to intuitive workflows, integrate cloud tools to remote working possibilities and rely on data as the ultimate decision maker. There is no dearth of brands creating futuristic examples of office automation equipment. For instance, Pepsi Co is using intelligent software to make a call and interview candidates to fill blue-collar job vacancies in its factories. Closer home in India, several brands like EY, DLF etc. have started using a smart visitor management system that shares geo-tagged invites with special instructions around parking, authorization etc, to visitors.
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Here are five essentials features of your office automation system that should keep in mind to be on par with the biggest global brands:
Intelligent Automation – The Way Ahead
Workflow software, in the current scenario, for your payroll, marketing and finance teams could give more visibility, can make your key professionals view the critical processes at all times, and identify problems and bottlenecks but what it fails to deliver are recommendations about improving them. This is where intelligent automation will come to play with technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Intelligent automation will guide your marketing teams about re-marketing possibilities to consumers post-purchase and spell out trends. We already have big data companies satisfying real-time needs by providing info on weather, traffic etc. It will come in the near future not to overhaul your current, entire workflows and incur reinvestment with a need to rebuild systems but as a supplement to make your processes more intuitive. It’s one feature of office automation that’s what your company should look at in the near future towards integrating into your existing workflows or while creating new ones.
Cloud Tools for More Automation Freedom and Integration
Big data rules the roost and is the new currency of your business. Zillions of data are generated by businesses from internal databases, CRM, financial software or a marketing automation tool. You cannot just push around data from one system to the other, and store it in cumbersome hardware as that would occupy immense office space and use resources. Here a cloud tool like Zapier can come in handy for you to open and integrate your software with thousands of other cloud tools for making your operations even smarter. This is where the aforementioned Beethoven’s symphony comes into the picture where you’re orchestrating tools for seamless integration of your business processes. Even visitor data piling up in your front office logbooks can now be stored in the cloud with a smart visitor management system of Veris which is a very good office automation software example.
Mobile Compatibility of Your Automation Tools
Mobile compatibility with your office automation system tools is paramount. The tool you choose should work from anywhere in the world so that you don’t have to worry about work from outside the office and you can open a process from anywhere. Albeit while on a holiday! The second thing you need to ensure is that your process opens from a secured cloud and you never have to worry about your data or who is protecting it.
Begin your Office Automation with Access Controls
With more stringent laws being enacted in India about data privacy and compliance needs, a cloud-based visitor and an access management system for your office is of paramount importance for reprocessing and analysis of sensitive information in seconds and getting rid of log books or cumbersome data. A mobile and iPad-based visitor check-in system will help your curtail front office costs, cut down on resources like a receptionist for your front office, and hardware for storing data and present a picture of automation to your visitors right from the entry into the office. By using a Veris cloud-based software suite you can send a geo-tagged invite to your visitor at your premise, help him with real-time information about parking racks available and other authorisations, share an SMS about the arrival of the visitor to the host, and help the visitor gain access across entries and exits of the office using his own phone. A Mercedes Benz office in India has taken a step further towards freedom of its employees using automated access management by letting its employees use their own phones to gain access to the office using a Veris app. Imagine how more humane it would be not having lanyards hanging around your neck to be identified as an employee of an organization. The world would be a more open and inviting space.
While you pave way for automation in your office never put into hindsight that ultimately all automation is to bring out the best in our performance and productivity and not make us a slave of dictated processes with more room for thinking to us and innovating.