Automation shouldn’t be seen as a threat to employees’ jobs, quite the contrary. In fact, an intelligent automated back-office solution replaces laborious manual tasks, removes repetitive processes, and allows employees to focus on strategic business initiatives that make better use of their skills. Automation empowers your workforce, facilitates career development, and enhances operational efficiency, which is good news for everyone. It can literally save you thousands of man-hours a year.

Implementation certainly doesn’t have to be complex, and when the dust settles and your team adapts to the changes, your employees’ lives will be easier and happier; data will be more accurate; and chasing pieces of paper and updating spreadsheets will be a thing of the past.

So, how does automation affect the dynamic of the workforce?

From Busy Work to Meaningful Work

A properly automated back office provides scalable insights into your business and opportunities for growth. A properly system provides an easy to audit trail that connects different parts of a business from accounting and payments to shipments and delivery.

Going digital provides the invaluable oversight your business needs to fully understand each stage in the cost of production, so you can work out where to eliminate errors, waste, or inefficiencies from the process.

Employees can focus on meaningful tasks instead of repetitive busy work. Automation minimizes human error and ensures that customers always receive the correct orders. By automating back-office and administrative duties, your business saves significant time, effort, and energy, ultimately improving operations, increasing profits, and making work better for everyone.

Key Benefits of Automating the Back Office

• Eliminate repetitive tasks. Automation streamlines processes and operations, allowing employees to turn their attention to more demanding and specialized tasks.

• Boost productivity. Software solutions are transparent, accurate, and fast–saving countless hours and boosting productivity.

• Support and grow skilled staff skills. Automated systems are not designed to replace people, but to take some of the arduous legwork from their day-to-day roles.

• Minimize errors. A system that can successfully extract and input data is far more efficient than someone manually entering all the information, and reduces the likelihood of human error. No more unintelligible handwriting, transposed numbers, or miscommunication. That means lower costs and happier customers!

• Create Happier teams. With software taking care of repetitive, more mundane tasks, employees are empowered to use their skills more effectively and are often more satisfied with their roles. This thereby facilitates workforce development and career growth, and helps you retain your people.

• Scale your business. An automated system enables business scalability and helps you grow without needing to hire more people for data entry and admin.

Tackling Inconsistent Order Formats with Ease

In an ideal world, all customers would send their orders in a standardized format. Orders come through in a range of formats, sometimes as a document, other times as handwritten faxes. It can be quite a pain, and format variations can become a time-consuming effort to extract data and input it into the system the way you need it.

Modern automated systems accurately scrape those documents and make light work of data entry, removing all that hassle. Staff can focus on high-value tasks, while software mines your documents and quickly and easily converts them into digitized records. Instead of manually mapping fields, teams only need to address unexpected values.

Automation software is not replacing you, but easing your workload, says Eric Dompkowski, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Datacor. “There will still be a role for people to check that these entries are correct,” he says. “There will always be a need for people to tend the system, but automation can replace hundreds of manhours.”

Optimizing workflows with AI

Datacor is leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to provide users with the control and oversight they need to be even more productive and efficient, while minimizing the chance of errors through mis-entered data. With advanced AI-enhanced data capture and workflow automation, key information can quickly and accurately be extracted and captured from Purchase Orders, Advanced Payables, Certificates of Analysis, and more with minimal effort–giving your team the time to focus on more skilled tasks and grow the business.

AI is redefining how work gets done by optimizing data handling and accelerating everyday processes. Compared with manual data entry, Datacor’s AI-powered automation can deliver up to three times greater productivity. Pairing traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with machine learning can improve document parsing accuracy by 25% or more, while learning over time to provide even greater accuracy and processing speed.

Back Office Automation: Empowering Employees Through Smarter Data Entry 

Companies may not always recognize the financial benefits of automating back-office functions, but these systems can scale easily. When revenue grows, automation ensures that operations remain efficient without adding complexity or creating bottlenecks. Rather than relying on additional manual effort, teams can focus on more rewarding and strategic work that contributes greater value to the organization.

The biggest challenges in adopting automation? Change management. It’s important to get buy-in from everyone in the organization. Make sure your teams understand how the software will assist them moving forward, how their roles will inevitably change and improve, and what will be required of them to support automation. Ensure your employees know when and how to check and confirm data that has been entered into the system.

This may mean changes to workflows and processes, but once up and running, it will transform your business by adding efficiency and eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. Automation empowers employees by removing routine work, giving them more time to focus on higher-value initiatives that drive growth. It also improves accuracy, strengthens transparency, and helps organizations operate more efficiently and effectively.

Click to find out more about Datacor’s automation solutions or request a demo.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 What is back office automation?

Back office automation is software to minimize human interaction and remove the need for employees to spend time working on repetitive,  time-consuming tasks like data entry or processing invoices.

What are the benefits?

Beyond the significant time savings that can be achieved, implementing back office automation helps to eliminate errors, improve efficiency, and free up time for teams to work on value-added projects