The content in this article is based on an upcoming webinar designed by Liz Mason; the webinar "Using Processes to Boost Productivity: Tech Stacks, Integration & How to Find the Right Tools," is being presented on August 13 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You can register here.
Technology has been integrated into nearly every aspect of today’s workplace – in fact, it is hard to imagine how we ever did business without it. Innovation has revolutionized several business processes, largely by significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the need for manual labor and replacing it with never-before-seen levels of efficiency and productivity.
Boosting productivity through innovation starts with reviewing your processes, determining which processes offer room for improvement, and making sure you have the right technology in place to achieve those improvements.
To get started with boosting your productivity, you can follow these steps to ramp up innovation within your business processes.
How Innovation Increases Efficiency and Productivity
For far too long, many of our most common business processes have relied on manual tasks that are both time-consuming and repetitive. This is particularly true of accounting activities like submitting expenses or compiling expense reports. Traditionally, these processes required pieces of paper to be physically transferred from person to person before they could be approved, sometimes by more than one department, and reimbursements could be collected.
Technology is changing all that, replacing manual processes with automation and innovation, freeing up significant employee time in the process. The technology produces faster and more accurate results, and employees can focus their freed-up time on completing higher-level tasks. Innovation is a win-win, boosting efficiency and productivity in all aspects of daily operations.
Identify the Processes You Want to Innovate
Some processes are more ripe for innovation than others. When you want to start incorporating technology and efficiency into your day-to-day operations, you should start by doing a thorough review of all your regular processes to identify the areas where you see the most inefficiencies.
Compiling and submitting expense reports is a perfect example of a task that can benefit greatly from automation. In the past, the expense reporting process started with collecting piles of paper receipts (assuming people remembered to get them, hold onto them, and can now find them), organizing those receipts into some logical order, and then manually entering the individual expenses into an expense system. The system would then generate a report, which often had to be manually submitted to another person or department for approval and signatures.
This is a clear process, and one that should be improved. Technology exists to replace each of those manual steps, making the entire process more accurate and efficient. Identifying processes like this are the first step in implementing innovation for process improvement – you must identify a bad process before you can replace it with a good process. Good processes, incorporating technology and automation, remove the outdated manual aspects, creating gains in efficiency and productivity.
Take a Look at Your Technology Stack
You will only obtain the efficiency and productivity improvement you want if you have the right technology in place to get the job done. The tools you use matter – while they may look good on their own, if they are not seamlessly working with the rest of your system, you’re likely not getting the maximum efficiency out of them and may be slowing down your processes in other ways.
An integrated approach to technology is the best way to get the results you need. All of your software, apps, and systems should work seamlessly together. When you’re selecting new tools, ask questions and see how any given product will integrate with the rest of the tools in your tech stack. The goal is to create one centralized system for handling all processes, not a collection of disparate solutions that add extra work on your end.
Implementing Innovation
When it comes to innovating productivity, it’s important to take a holistic view of all your processes to make sure that they are, in fact, good processes being handled with the right technology. Take the first step toward innovation today by reviewing your processes and singling out those areas that are ripe for innovation.
Make sure to join Liz Mason in this Insightful Accountant webinar, "Using Processes to Boost Productivity: Tech Stacks, Integration & How to Find the Right Tools," which is being presented on August 13 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You can register here.