Posted in Procurement Automation

Multi-sourcing: How to Make Your Procurement Strategy a Competitive Advantage

What Is Multi-Sourcing? 

Sourcing the raw materials, components, products, and outsourced services needed to conduct your business is a core part of any organization’s operations. 

While some business owners would argue that a smaller pool of vendors translates to better terms, service and more personal attention pricing, a growing number of businesses are making a strategic shift away from single-source supplier agreements in response to global events that threaten to disrupt supply lines or raise costs. As a result, multi-sourcing is gaining popularity as a procurement model. 

Driven by organizations that seek to mitigate risk as well as businesses that seek more flexible, innovative and competitive supplier relationships, multi-sourcing offers a number of attractive advantages.

However, multi-sourcing can increase the complexity of managing suppliers. Procurement process automation, where you digitize and replace manual workflows with electronic ones, can make a huge difference in managing this added complexity allowing you to reap the full benefits of multi-sourcing.

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Posted in Procurement Automation

How to Reduce Fraud with Accounts Payable Automation

In March 2019, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of a Lithuanian man who used invoice fraud to steal $123 million from Google and Facebook. He managed to execute the fraud through business email compromise: he posed as trusted vendors and sent invoices for services that never took place. 

Invoice fraud is on the rise. According to the FBI, email fraud increased by 136% between December 2016 and May 2018. While Google and Facebook managed to recover their funds, the majority of businesses are not so fortunate, and sadly, small-to-medium-sized businesses are often targeted because scammers know that they don’t have the same resources to allocate to combating fraud as larger companies. 

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Posted in Workflow Automation

6 Top BPM Tools for Growing Businesses

Every organization has many moving parts. Just like an orchestra, it’s essential to make sure everyone is playing the same tune. Business process management (BPM) tools are designed to help you analyze and optimize your workflows, so that all sections work in harmony.

There are dozens of business process management platforms to choose from nowadays, each offering something a little different. To help you find the right business process management software for your business, here is a closer look at what BPM is and the top BPM tools on the market today.

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Posted in Workflow Automation

How to Set Up an Automated Customer Onboarding Process

“You had me at hello.”

Is this how new customers feel about you? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could engineer this sentiment into every new customer?

After all, good customer relationships start with good customer onboarding. 

So, what kind of first impression does your business make on new customers? 

Chances are that if you aren’t 100% sure it’s a positive one, you’re leaving room for a poor experience. In turn, you’re increasing the likelihood of customer churn or poor conversion rates.

Take Groove, for example. The customer support platform conducted an audit of its own onboarding practices. They found that designing an onboarding experience that helped customers respond to an orchestrated series of prompts increased their free-to-paid conversion rate by nearly 80%!

With a carefully constructed onboarding process, you can win over your customers from the very first interaction. Even better, you can nurture customers into lifelong brand advocates that provide even more value to your business in the form of referrals, larger purchases, and positive reviews.

Customer onboarding drives revenue – period.

If you want to build a better, more consistent, and automated customer onboarding process, this article will help you understand how to pull it off.

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Posted in Workflow Automation

How to Automate the Contract Approval Process

Sharpen your pencils — we’ll have the contract over to you by Friday. 

Generally speaking, when the conversation turns to contracts, both sides are happy. A contract might represent a new job or employee, a new home or vehicle, a new vendor or customer, or any number of other legal relationships. 

Contracts are often accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and even relief. 

However, those who work with a large number of contracts — vendors, lawyers, property managers, education administrators, and any business that outsources work to contractors — know that reaching this stage is just the beginning. 

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Posted in Workflow Automation

The Cost of Business Process Automation: Comparing Point and Enterprise Solutions

Business process automation (BPA) involves streamlining and automating the everyday workflows involved in the business operations of every organization. These range from everyday administrative processes like data entry to HR processes like onboarding, to financial processes like accounts payable. BPA can be instrumental in optimizing operational efficiency, saving business time and money while significantly improving job satisfaction.

But how much does business process automation actually cost? Unfortunately, the answer is not so clear cut. 

It will depend on the type of solution you choose (point solutions vs. enterprise automation), the number of users, and what processes you want to automate. 

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Posted in HR Automation

How the Rise of the Gig Economy Is Challenging HR

Flexibility is the new employment. Freelancers, contractors and part-timers are leaving their stable full-time positions to “gig” their way to more flexibility and freedom from the 9-to-5 grind. 

The gig economy started as a trend, but it is now becoming an industry mainstay. Last year, 41 million American workers (consultants, freelancers, contractors, temporary, or on-call) generated $1.28 trillion in revenue for the US economy. 

The HR challenge? Current hiring and onboarding protocols cater to full-time employees only. Human Resource departments will have to change their methods and introduce new practices to adapt to hiring and onboarding gig workers. 

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Posted in Workflow Automation

5 Ways to Use Workflow Automation in your Small Business

Every minute counts. For small businesses vying for growth to stay alive and thrive, saving/losing time equates to profit/loss and the difference between success and failure. 

As a small business owner or manager trying to balance resource efficiency with growth, you may have considered cutting employees to save money as you grow. The problem with this model is that fewer resources can also result in being understaffed and hinder your growth, so it becomes a vicious cycle. 

If you need to cut costs and fuel growth, there is a plan C. Instead of hiring (or firing) more people, or figuring out where the money will come from, consider automating some of your tasks and processes with small business workflow software.

With even light automation, you can speed up operations, reduce labor costs and increase profits (in a matter of days).  

Small business workflow automation not only reduces costs, but also facilitates working seamlessly with remote work and teams. Even if your employees currently work in-house, events beyond your control may necessitate employees working from home temporarily. Being prepared with automated processes will make this transition easy and prevent employee dissatisfaction and decreased productivity during these times. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits of workflow automation, what small business workflow tasks you can automate, and a step-by-step guide to automating a simple business workflow. 

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Posted in Workflow Automation

Business Process Management: The Complete Guide

Dive into any manual business process, and you’re bound to find inefficiencies — employees duplicating work, data entry errors, misplaced or lost files, and so on.

These inefficiencies can lead to higher operational costs, frustrated employees, and missed deadlines, all of which ultimately affect your bottom line.

So how can you improve your process and ensure consistent outcomes?

This is where business process management or BPM comes in — a system of monitoring and improving processes over time.

In this BPM guide, you’ll learn what business process management is and why it needs to be more of a priority. We’ll also cover the core elements of BPM, steps to a successful implementation, how you can improve your processes with BPM software, and more.

Click the links below to head straight to the section you want to learn more about:

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Posted in Education Automation

Survey: How Effectively Are Schools Using Technology?

Technology has evolved in leaps and bounds in recent years and no one can deny the incredible potential it has to impact education. With the promise of advances like e-learning and classes taught using virtual reality headsets, the possibilities for digital transformation in education seem endless. 

Technology, it seemed, could make learning easier and address different learning methods, for instance by making learning more visual or collaborative. 

Not only that, technology could significantly streamline the way teachers and education administrators communicate with parents about everything from reminding them of homework or tests to getting field trip permission slips signed. 

We had a suspicion that the technology used by many schools is outdated, so we decided to find out how parents feel about the state of technology used in their children’s schools.

So we surveyed parents to find out how satisfied they are with the way their children’s schools use technology for communication.

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