How to Maximize Productivity in your Business through Automation

Every smart business owner always thinks productivity, efficiency and lowering costs. Automation helps to achieve these noble business tasks. If you incorporate automation in your business systems, you can systematically and seamlessly execute routine tasks, optimize processes and minimize direct human labor intervention. Doing this leads to significant savings in time, money, and other resources. It allows employees to better concentrate their efforts on more strategic tasks that are less repetitive. There are various types of automation technologies now in use by business owners. Whichever automation technologies you decide to use, the bottom line is optimization of business efficiency. That is what helps to save costs, increase productivity and profits.

 
How Automation Revolutionizes Business Efficiency

Business automation if well deployed helps to enhance business efficiency. With it, business owners are able to effectively streamline operations, mitigate bottlenecks, and minimize errors in repetitive tasks. This ultimately enables employees to focus more on high-value, specialized work. In addition, automation helps to facilitate better data management and utilization. This ultimately helps to empower businesses to make data-driven decisions more effectively. Optimization their overall performance becomes the direct consequence. Because of the diverse automation options now available to business owners, they can now strike the perfect balance between efficiency and effectiveness in their quest to optimize productivity.

Following are six of the most common automation technologies business owners routinely use. Each one has its own competitive edge when implemented optimally:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are quite handy for decision making. By applying their advanced algorithms and learning capabilities to business tasks that require decision-making or pattern recognition, these automation tools can greatly eliminate human intervention.

2. Cognitive Automation: Cognitive automation incorporates natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision to automate tasks that require human-like perception or understanding.

3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA is great for repetitive business tasks such as data entry or invoice processing.

4. Desktop Automation: This involves computer network business computing. It links tasks on individual computers such as file management or data processing and development.
 
5. Business Process Automation (BPA): BPA is quite useful for a bit complex business processes. It involves streamlining complex, multi-step workflows that involve multiple business systems and participants.

6. Internet of Things (IoT) Automation: IoT automation involves connecting and automating devices, sensors, and systems for data collection, monitoring, and control.

Final Thoughts

Significantly, and as outlined above, each type of automation is a unique tool that provides different benefits. If you understand your business needs well enough, you can decide on the best automation tool that can give you the best solution. This understanding will help you to make an informed choice about any automation solution that can help your business succeed as planned. Yes, automation really offers numerous benefits to your business but it is not without its own challenges. These challenges may stem from inadequate planning, poor alignment with business objectives and insufficient employee training which are all human related. The reason it also requires human efforts to overcome them.

Why You Must be Courageous

“The fear of failure is often worse than failure itself.” -- Shiv Khera

Every human being is gifted with the power to control his or her own mind mostly through his or her thought process. Whatsoever affects this process affects human performance, effectiveness and efficiency. Fear is basically “False Evidence Appearing Real.” It could be positive or negative; it could be real or imagined. “Fear never pleases and never attracts anything except its counterpart.” Of all human emotions, fear is the most destructive. “It is the only force powerful enough to stop you from acting on your dreams.”  Though basically a state of the mind, it is very destructive to human psyche. A state of fear paralyzes human reasoning, reduces enthusiasm, imprisons person-ness, promotes doubt and uncertainty, inhibits ambition, beclouds memory and generally dehumanizes. There are very few diseases known to man that are as debilitating as fear. 

'The late John Wayne, a popular cow-boy film star once defined courage as “being scared but moving forward all the same.” This shows that courage is not the absence of fear but it is in spite of it. Courage is using fear positively instead of negatively. By taking control of your mind, you can make fear a motivator instead of an inhibitor. Sir Edmund Hillary became the first man to reach the top of Mt. Everest. After the feat, he was asked, what was the biggest obstacle he faced in his quest to get to the top of the mountain? He replied that his biggest obstacle was to overcome the psychological barrier which nearly forced him to talk himself out of trying. He nearly gave up trying because of the fear generated in his mind. Once he overcame this barrier, climbing the mountain became an easy thing to do. His feat removed the fear from the minds of many others who have since climbed the mountain themselves. Those who earlier thought it was impossible to climb the mountain found it easier to do after one attempt succeeded.

In his best-selling book “100 ways to motivate yourself”, Mr. Steve Chandler tells the story of one Anthony Burgess who at 40 in January 1960 was told he had cancer and could die within a year. He knew he had a battle in his hands as surviving cancer then was near miraculous. Being broke at the time, he had nothing to leave behind for his wife Lynne who was soon going to be a widow. Burgess had never been a Professional Writer but he knew he had a latent-talent as a writer. Because his time was running-out and he needed to leave something behind as royalties for his wife to live on after his passing, he put paper into his typewriter and began to write. He wrote so furiously and energetically that within a year, he had written five novels. This feat alone surpassed what even acclaimed Professional Writers like E.M. Forster and J.D. Salinger could do within the same period and time frame. As it turned out, his cancer went into remission and Burgess did not die as predicted. In his life-time, he ended up writing more than 70 books.

If not the fear of death that Mr. Burgess faced, he may never have exploited his latent-talent of writing talk less of writing over 70 books in his life time. Many people are like Anthony Burgess. They have enormous talent and potential deep within them which could come out if they allow fear to motivate them instead of paralyzing them.

Time is Where the Money Is

Many of us live by selling our time. Time therefore is a precious commodity to human existence, welfare and well-being. Any commodity that is so precious must be jealously guarded and protected at all times. Unfortunately many people still drift around and waste their time doing things that have no direct bearing on how they can better their lives. Anchor yourself somewhere if you are a drifter. If you are not but you know someone who is, help them to find an anchor by giving them a copy of this article to read. Time is too precious a commodity to waste, believe me.

The use of time and how you grow the proceeds from your work are major determinants of how smart you work. The smart use of the time available to you determines how efficient and effective you can be in your business. To drive this point home, here is a paraphrase of some lyrics from a song that once dominated the Nigerian airwaves. It was made popular by a Nigerian musician. It goes like this:

“Time na money oh
Time na money.
No waka waka.
No gossip gossip.
No spoil another man.
Make you use your time well.
Use your time money go come.
Money no dey fall from heaven.
Use your time money go come.
Na true word I dey tell you so………”

This song may have been written in Pidgin English but the meaning is clear. “Time is money.” Effective and efficient usage of your time will earn you money. No more, no less.

“Efficiency is doing a job right” while “Effectiveness is doing the right job.” You could be effective without being efficient and you could be efficient without necessarily being effective. What matters in business is effective efficiency or efficient effectiveness. That is, doing the right job right always. It is not enough to be busy, the question is, what are you busy doing? If you do the right job well, the results are highly rewarding. No matter how well you do the wrong job, you can never get satisfactory results.