How To Increase Productivity Through Automation

While not a new term, Automation software continues to provide exciting opportunities for Australian businesses to embrace digital transformation and improve productivity.

With the economic forecast looking increasingly grim, business leaders are turning to automation solutions to drive efficiency and productivity, and cut costs where possible. As technology becomes more sophisticated, every business department and process is 'on the table' for automation.

Mark Fioret, Managing Director Australia and New Zealand of the automation software company, UiPath, says "Automation is no longer a nice bolt-on to have. It has now become critical to sustaining efficient business processes that drive greater levels of productivity, scale and agility, and importantly enhance the employee and customer experience".

"Organisations that continue to view end-to-end automation as a nice to have rather than a mission-critical infrastructure could be left behind in the digital economy within the next few years," he said.

What is Automation?

In a business sense, automation (often called business process automation) is defined as the automation of complex business processes and functions beyond conventional data manipulation and record-keeping activities, usually through the use of advanced technologies. It focuses on “run the business” as opposed to “count the business” types of automation efforts and often deals with event-driven, mission-critical, core processes.

Automation's potential impact on Australia's productivity

A recent report presenting research conducted by McKinsey Australia in collaboration with the McKinsey Global Institute, "Australia’s automation opportunity: Reigniting productivity and inclusive income growth" shares exciting findings about the forecasted potential for automation in Australia.

Managing Partner of McKinsey Australia and New Zealand, John Lydon, says "Australia needs to boost productivity to rekindle the kind of sustainable economic growth that spreads income growth across the population, especially given the long-term headwinds of an ageing population. Without a renaissance in productivity, Australia risks a permanent future of lower growth, and reduced resources to invest in creating more opportunities for all its citizens.

The report goes on to provide detailed findings, including:

• Automation could provide just the fuel Australia needs to turbocharge productivity, with the potential to boost productivity growth by 50 to 155 percent relative to a base scenario, depending on pace of adoption. This could result in a 20 to 70 percent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) growth, and a 60 to 190 percent increase in per capita growth.
• The scale of this opportunity is considerable: automation could add around $1.2 trillion to the Australian economy by 2030 and give each Australian additional income of $4,000 per year. A bold push to rapidly automate could more than triple these benefits to $4 trillion and $15,000 respectively.

One such program that is available to businesses that use Microsoft 365 is called Power Automate.

Introducing Power Automate

Power Automate is one of the many features added to the Microsoft Office 365 suite in the last few years that are not as well known as the traditional desktop favourites such as Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. If you've not yet tried Power Automate, we recommend you do.

Power Automate is a user-friendly, low-code workflow automation environment that empowers coders and non-coders alike to optimise their workflows by automating repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks across your digital environment. One of the many features added to the Microsoft Office 365 suite in the last few years, Power Automate's goal is to "give you time back for more high-value work by automating 'busy work'.”

The software allows you to simplify business tasks and manage them more effectively. With nearly 300 data sources or APIs available to connect to, the capability of what Power Automate can streamline is only limited by your imagination. These connectors allow you to connect your favourite services, such as SharePoint, social media sites, Microsoft Teams, or Mailchimp, so they can be put to work in your workflows.

How can Power Automate help automate the Modern Workforce?

Power Automate can help transform your business by streamlining everyday tasks, and improving productivity and business processes.

Power Automate can be used to:

• Send automatic reminders for past-due tasks.
• Trigger single or multi-stage approval flows for documents or other requests.
• Move business data between systems on a schedule for weekly, monthly, or quarterly reporting.
• Automate tasks on your PC like computing data in Excel.
• Send SMS notifications when a high-priority email is received from a certain employee.
• Automatically save email attachments.
• Monitor social media posts that are published about your business, and respond automatically with pre-scripted templates.
• And so much more...

With Power Automate also available in Mobile App, you can carry the full power of the application in your pocket.

So, what is holding you back from investing focus in automation to increase productivity this year? Reach out to our team today to find out more about how you can easily automate time-intensive and repetitive tasks.

How can Diamond IT help?

We can work with you to select the right Microsoft solutions to support your modern workplace, from collaboration and communication tools such as Teams and SharePoint, which can help increase productivity and streamline workflows for remote teams, to premium features that include additional security and device management tools to help you run and grow your business.

Whether you need our assistance to use Power Automate to automate your existing systems or need it as part of a broader system, our Software Development team is ready to assist you in giving your organisation a competitive edge, call us today on 1300 307 907.