It’s often said that the best way to begin mapping out your organization’s business processes should start with following a piece of work through the company, from initial marketing activity or lead-sourcing exercise, through to approach, quotation, sale, procurement (if required), delivery, after sales and support.

That approach gives business owners some insight into how their company works day in, day out, but of course, isn’t the complete picture. Business processes often start out in one form, and then alter over time, either due to changing technology, or different markets, or even changes in personnel’s skill levels and aptitudes.

Pulling together the oversight required for a dynamic business needs a clear picture of all the processes in the company and their underpinning systems, be those systems paper-based or digital. From that model, the business owners can then begin to modify and unify, creating efficiencies, driving out costs and opening up new opportunities, or even changes in direction into new markets.

The key to oversight is one of ensuring that all the systems interconnect efficiently. A sales team needs to use the same information as the marketing division, so targeted advertising’s results can be followed up by clued-in sales personnel. New leads from sales’ independent work should feed into marketing for personalized outreach, and once proposals have been converted into ongoing projects, procurement and supply need the pertinent information, as do the support and aftercare departments.

A crucial factor in keeping costs low is to ensure that the data interchange between information systems and business areas is efficient – either from interfaces between discrete systems (like those offered by RPA – Robotic Process Automation) or created by overarching business management systems from a single ecosystem.

Either path has its advantages, and below we highlight two companies operating in APAC and Australasia specifically that offer unique propositions for the growing digitally-focused business.

Rather than choose either route (or a combination of RPA and a larger business information system like an ERP), the vital step to take first is to determine the specific requirements of your company, whose needs will be unique. A technology services provider may, for instance, want to offer cloud-based disaster recovery, backup and failover facilities to its clients. A pure-play hardware reseller of IT equipment will need a robust purchase order and procurement system that’s tightly integrated with the sales and finance departments.

However, there’s more on offer than the real efficiency gains and increased agility that results from the proper integration of data systems. The aggregation of data across the entire company means that there’s a data “pool” that becomes available, comprising normalized information. Where previously, discrete systems were dealt with in proprietary, closed systems, an integrated model creates multiple opportunities from the various data insights, right across even geographically diverse enterprises.

Data analytics can bring to the surface previously disregarded information that can have very positive impacts. Examples might be identifying your least profitable clients or customers and determining why they might have that unfortunate status. Additionally, the information about the roadblocks and methods used by personnel in dealing with these customers may give insight into how that situation may be turned around. Or, in extremis, the client cut free.

There may also be surprises: your most vocal and successful salesperson may turn out to be a poor constructor of long-term deals with space to up- and cross-sell. Alternatively, the smallest marketing initiative may have yielded the highest conversion of leads into sales, for example.

Your process management platform of choice should be open and allow for further integration. Imagine using your data from customer interactions with applications that can identify keywords or phrases to ensure better responses from support staff. Or being able to spin up services to support a venture into a new market, but one that uses the same, valuable data pool used by the core of the business. The choice is yours, but the platform you choose will affect your abilities now and for the future.

Here at Tech Wire Asia, we think your choice might be one of the following two providers, each offering different solutions to the same problem – creating efficient, unified and positive change on your business processes and the data that underpins them.

CONNECTWISE

ConnectWise transforms how the teams behind successful technology companies build, manage, and grow their businesses. Its award-winning, tightly integrated platform of software solutions provides a seamless and efficient platform for companies in more than 70 countries across the world. Its experience in the technology sector gives ConnectWise the ability to increase its clients’ productivity, efficiency, and at the end of the day, a bottom line made healthier by a significant factor.

Because ConnectWise lives and breathes the technology industry, its passion shows through, and has done for over 30 years. The company’s solutions deliver the results companies want at each step of their business journey, integrating sales, support, remote monitoring, remote assistance and a whole suite of back-end solutions across your company. The platform is highly extensible with many dozens of partner integrations into a range of third-party services, from Apple Mac support to public cloud management dashboards. There are SDKs and APIs too if your specific requirements haven’t already been satisfied by an existing offering.

To see for yourself, why not attend one of the ConnectWise events in your area, and learn the benefits of becoming part of its community first hand? For more information, visit the ConnectWise website or read the full profile here.

NICE

Global company NICE is unique in that its platform offers intelligent and intuitive assisted automation with unassisted back end automations. Its RPA platform unifies legacy technologies, but one that’s fit for the future in terms of its open, extendable nature, with APIs open and ready for bespoke integration. This combination, plus the company’s ethos of human-centric RPA sets it apart and means it can support more complex processes and operations for technology-based companies, and other verticals too.

NICE overcomes the traditional stumbling block along the path to RPA deployment – identifying possible automation points – with its Automation Finder. This is a home-grown diagnostic tool that’s designed to pinpoint processes ripe for automation by utilizing desktop analytics, and back-end, analytic cognitive technology.

Employees can ask NEVA, NICE’s desktop assistant persona, to execute a task, perform calculations or display contextual process guidance as and when needed. NEVA can also trigger the unattended robotic workforce in the backend to execute various operations.

NEVA is an example of how NICE provides “automation for the people”. The company’s ethos is that business success comes by bringing together man and machine in a collaboration. It’s this two-way interaction that distinguishes NICE from its competition.

*Some of the companies featured on this editorial are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia