More Tips On How Automation Can Lower Your Overhead

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Being a frugal businessperson means being meticulous with managing expenses. Keeping overhead costs at a minimum while optimizing performance is the kind of strategy you want to incorporate. Implement the strategy correctly, however, and you will end up with a lean yet impactful business that can compete on any market. 

Automation has always been a valuable resource for lean businesses and startups. Through automation, the capacity of the business can be boosted without actually expanding the business or your team. Smart use of automation leads to lower overhead. To help you utilize automation better, here are the tips and tricks to follow. 

Seek Repetitive Tasks 

Most automation tools aren’t specifically designed to automate everything. Sometimes, you have to be smarter in implementing automation to eliminate repetitive, mundane tasks. Naturally, you have to be aware of those repetitive tasks before you can begin automating them. 

There is a simple way to identify tasks that can be automated, and that is by taking a closer look at project lead times. Find out about how much of that lead time is spent on issuing invoices, writing purchase orders, and performing other mundane tasks. 

The portion of project lead time allocated to these tasks represents how big of an efficiency you can gain by automating the associated tasks. You will see interesting effects – such as lower overtime because team members don’t have to worry about these tasks – materializing almost immediately. 

Eliminate Costly Steps 

Another thing you can do to lower overhead using automation is simplifying internal workflows. It is not uncommon for businesses to have long workflows out of habit. Even startups are prone to this issue. The lack of real mechanism for evaluating workflows makes it difficult to see how costly long workflows really are. 

Fortunately, automation is also the perfect solution for shortening workflows. For example, you can skip printing drafts of business documents by automating the process of asking for approvals. Digital documents can automatically be shared with key decision makers, and approval or revisions can be captured in a more seamless way. 

Once again, automation improves small things in business workflows, but using automation can help shorten internal workflows considerably. In the case of our previous example, you not only save time, but also money on paper, printing, and other overhead costs. 

Boost Performance 

Last but certainly not least, automation is also handy for boosting business performance. For example, you can use PieSync for seamless HubSpot Zoho integration. Once the two solutions are integrated, the sales team no longer have to spend valuable time and resources keeping the two platforms in sync. Intelligent synchronization, a feature of PieSync, will handle everything for you. 

The entire sales team can then focus on other, more important tasks such as delivering positive customer experience. With automation, you are boosting the performance of your sales team without expanding the team itself. Since you don’t have to hire a few more team members to reach the same output level, you save on salary and other expenses. 

Automate And Dominate

There are countless other scenarios where automation helps businesses save money and operate more efficiency. Do a thorough review of your organization, find opportunities to save through automation, and begin operating at a higher efficiency level.

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