Given the digital underpinnings of most business processes today, ensuring an organization’s smooth running comes down to IT function. If there’s a bottleneck or problem or if a department isn’t working efficiently, the IT department will play a role in the solution. (In many cases, the IT department gets the blame when things go awry – whether or not there’s truth in the accusation!)

Therefore, IT processes must operate highly effectively, using technologies like automation and intelligent decision-making to manage productive change management, get a better overview of workflow monitoring, and drive improvements across the business.

Standardizing and automating business processes starts with removing manual and repetitive work carried out by human operators, wherever they are in the company. Tired and bored employees make mistakes, add to high staff churn metrics, and generally add little value to the business in the long term. In the short term, the business suffers from higher levels of staff absence and poor performance in the workplace.

Yet, many companies cannot escape from manual operations because they lack the facility to automate. That’s especially true for smaller businesses (according to a McKinsey survey) who are often mistaken as to the overall cost of service automation.

It’s been proven by innumerable surveys and articles over the last ten years that delays to automation projects cost companies significant annual revenue. Despite the often surprisingly low cost of implementing business process management systems, many companies must catch up to their more digitally committed competitors.

According to Daphne Sim, Country Manager OTRS ASIA, “Averagely in APAC, people work 2,200 hours a year (about 45 hours per week) doing mundane tasks or wasting minimum 30% (OTRS Survey Source) of the time (on average two hours a day) researching for information within the company. It is liberating to have tasks scheduled as it frees time for essential company growth activities such as brainstorming for new product innovation or Go-to-New-Market strategy.”

In a complex business, it’s often difficult to pinpoint where best to target automation technologies. The answer lies in identifying significant pain points and then flipping the argument. If your customers rarely re-visit, why? Identifying where CX (customer experience) may need to improve will lead to missing or faulty business processes at critical touchpoints. The cause of a drop in standards is often easily resolved by ensuring that business processes happen automatically. It’s here that human repetitive work can be replaced with more effective technology-based solutions.

Business process management software platforms can highlight bottlenecks and suggest automated solutions that, when in place, allow staff to be re-tasked to more fulfilling and value-creating work. To take another example, imagine a talented individual in your IT Support department whose role is, essentially, copying from one application to another.

By automating this, the worker can better use their skills creatively in other areas of the job. Automated solutions reduce errors, ensure higher customer satisfaction, and reduce staff turnover. They also allow employees to bring better value to their department and the company.

Mature service management solutions that bring efficiency to all business processes allow the company necessary room to grow. Instead of the organization’s decision-makers being hampered by overheads and internal problems of insufficient resources and inefficient business processes, companies can look to new markets and opportunities.

The solid foundation of business process management gives company owners and C-Suite executives the wherewithal to plan well into the future, safe in the knowledge that their people and systems will be able to respond effectively to new challenges.

A mature service management solution best creates reliability, and for the APAC region, the logical solution comes from OTRS. As a proven sector leader (and award-winner), it’s a platform that enables you to speed up deliverables, improve accuracy, customer retention through workflows and long-term cost savings on scaling business with technology.

The OTRS solution can be found in multiple sectors, including leading IT companies and financial institutions, where it’s valued for its abilities to unify communications, enable change management, handle requests for support, asset management, resource planning, and automation across a wide range of business processes.

Several more case studies highlight the efficiency gains brought by the OTRS platform, and these are available on the OTRS website. We suggest further reading there, but to learn about what benefits could be brought to your organization, check out OTRS’s ITSM software here.