Do more with less through automation

SPONSORED: More than 60 per cent of high-performing businesses say they use automation, compared to less than half of lower-performing businesses.

Maths Pathway provides personalised learning for school students, increasing growth and engagement in the classroom​.

Business automation frequently inspires fear about job losses or humans abandoning control to robot overlords. But for the time-poor small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) that are still navigating the pandemic’s impacts, it can be a way to save jobs and free employees to focus on the work they actually enjoy doing.

That was the case for our SME, Maths Pathway, a business model created by and for teachers who want to deliver more personalised, evidence-based education.

By automating processes with solutions such as DocuSign and Salesforce CPQ (configure-price-quote) software, we were able to shave our agreement timelines from weeks to days – and, crucially, it helped us protect our cashflow, staving off hard decisions about headcounts during some of the worst Covid-19 lockdowns.

Laura Marinesco

Our experience isn’t an isolated one. When it comes to tasks such as logging sales data or generating quotes, research indicates that more than 60 per cent of high-performing businesses say they use automation, compared to less than half of lower-performing businesses.

It’s not always as simple as downloading a new app, though.

Here are three key steps to make sure automation works for you.

Automate and standardise processes

The first step is to understand how much automation can improve experiences and business efficiency when it’s done right. Leaders cannot take it for granted.

There are scores of solutions that save time and simplify manual tasks. For instance, a virtual agreement solution like DocuSign replaces the need to print or scan documents with instantaneous electronic signatures.

While you’ll always encounter people who need some degree of training or guidance, helping people avoid those extra steps and complete an agreement from their mobile is often appreciated by even the most change-resistant employees or customers.

At its core, Maths Pathway’s mission is to enable teachers to deliver a personalised learning experience to all students, an endeavour heavily dependent on carefully thought-out pedagogy powered by data and automation, so it’s probably not a surprise that we began as a digital-first business.

We’ve tried to automate busy work since our inception – but that mindset comes with its own challenges if it isn’t led by a centralised approach.

Before we established standardised processes, employees could go rogue with their own digital tools and apps, resulting in a ragtag array of solutions that didn’t share information.

Whether your SME comes from a similar digital-first background or is only just starting to explore digital solutions, you’ll need to approach automation with some scrutiny: what’s sustainable and efficient across the entire business?

Target the biggest pain points

Since automating new processes doesn’t just happen at the flip of a switch, a common challenge is knowing where to start. Where do you focus your time and resources?

Your first port of call is pinpointing the most time-consuming hurdles for employees and customers –
it’s no coincidence that these hurdles tend to breed the biggest business risks, with highly manual tasks creating more opportunities for human error.

Improving your employees’ and customers’ experiences is important on its own, but it often means removing unnecessary risks simultaneously.

At Maths Pathway, many
of our agreements necessitate quotes, SLAs and contracts. Onboarding customers and managing contract renewals used to take months, often with confusing administrative burdens for our partnerships and consultancy teams and time-consuming paperwork for customers. Using Salesforce CPQ and DocuSign, we were able to automate quoting and contract management.

This has freed both teams
to focus on their relationships with educators, while educators can sign contracts online and trigger contract renewals with a single click –
a huge win since they’re usually already busy.

No cutting corners

Another common myth about business automation is that it’s “cutting corners”. When done right, it enables work that’s more precise, more transparent, more consistent.

There’s no cutting corners when it comes to the actual task of automating processes, either. Especially if you know your SME needs to digitise fast, it’s tempting to just go with whatever solution is quickest or cheapest. But this approach can leave you paying double: once for the costs of a solution that doesn’t really work, and again for the costs of migrating data or re-designing another solution.

In other words, don’t default to the cheapest or fastest option.

Go back to those questions of sustainability and priority: what will make the biggest impact across your entire business, and what will be sustainable as your business grows?

It’s a bit of extra work, but it pays off tenfold if you can shield your teams and customers from unnecessary, annoying or risky tasks that are better offloaded to technology.

After all, the less time we spend on monotonous tasks and mountains of paperwork, the more time we can all spend on learning, connecting and rebuilding.

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Laura Marinesco is director of public engagement at Maths Pathway.