Oas36ty: Best Office Automation Products & Software for Your Building
Office automation is the process of watching data flow around on its own without any human intervention, inaccuracies, and errors. It is the process of using an office automation tool to create, collect, store, analyze, and share confidential office data that is required to accomplish basic day-to-day routine tasks and processes effectively.
Technology has made a serious impact on the daily work of office administration. Emails have replaced memos, shared drives have done away with filing cabinets, and biometrics have taken over employee timesheet stamping. Many businesses think that they have attained office automation nirvana simply by going paperless.
But office automation is a different ballgame altogether.
Using online forms and sending Google Calendar invites might mean that you’ve ditched a lot of paper, but it doesn’t mean you are automated. It just means that instead of pushing around the paper, you are pushing around data.
What is an office automation system?
An office automation system is a tool that enables data to move from one system to another on its own without human intervention and inaccuracies. These tools help organizations collect, manage, and analyze securely to accomplish everyday tasks and processes. It optimizes and automates existing business processes and procedures.
Why use an office automation system?
In today’s digital age, office automation systems offer an array of benefits for organizations of every size. Powerful office automation systems reduce manual effort and store a large amount of data in little space. They not only streamline day-to-day tasks but also speed up information retrieval. Additionally, these tools improve process visibility and help businesses spot bottlenecks easily.
On the other hand, you could be watching data flow around on its own – that’s automation.
Some of the biggest advantages of automating office workflows include
- Reducing the manual effort to complete mundane tasks
- Cutting down on manual errors
- Shrinking the processing time for items
- Getting insights into process performance metrics
- Gaining greater process visibility and identifying potential bottlenecks
- Making sound business decisions based on data
Office automation tools adds efficiency to your workflows, but you need to look beyond emails and digital forms to really embrace it.
If you are looking for an office automation solution that can take your company workflows to the next level, don’t settle for anything that doesn’t have these five essentials.
Most common types of office automation systems
In today’s digital world, there’s no limit to which aspects of work can be automated. And considering the speed at which technology is evolving, the future of work automation is genuinely limitless.
Some office automation systems that might be familiar to you are:
- Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. If your business has a website or blog, you probably use a CMS to write, schedule, or edit digital content. CMS solutions are cloud-based, meaning that authorized team members can access them from anywhere.
- Change management systems make it easy to introduce new policies, company culture, workflows, and automation to your commercial office. Additionally, change management systems boost employee morale through planning and adaptation.
- Commercial access control systems manage who has access credentials for the office building and designate specific times they can enter. In other words, commercial access systems can limit access to certain parts of the building so that no one can enter restricted areas.
- Electronic communication and collaboration tools facilitate constant communication throughout the company and simplify teamwork. For example, chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams yield faster response times than emails or phone calls. Furthermore, word processors like Google Docs and Office 365 allow collaboration in real-time.
- Business process management (BPM) tools discover, manage, optimize, and improve business processes. BPM solutions facilitate back-office automation, such as data entry and employee on- and off-boarding procedures. Back office refers to aspects of work that are not client-facing but still pivotal to business operations.
The 5 Essentials of Office Automation Tools
- Easy workflow designer
Creating workflows used to be the domain of hard-core system coders. So, as workflow software evolved, it assumed the people using it would be programmers as well.
However, a modern office automation system should start with the business user in mind, not the coder.
When you sit down to trial an office automation tool, start off by making your own workflows. How easy is it? Can you intuitively create the sequence of tasks needed to finish a process? If you can’t figure it out within the first five minutes, you need to move on to the next option.
A piece of software shouldn’t determine how your business should set its operations. It should instead aid your teams to strengthen the existing processes.
- Mobile compatibility
Your office is mobile, and all your tools should be too. Whether you have remote workers or you just want to check in while waiting for a flight, the office automation tool you choose should work just as smoothly on someone’s phone while on a trip to China as it does on a PC at the main office.
Your marketing campaign can’t be delayed a day just because you need to wait for Greg to get back from his vacation in Machu Picchu.
You should be able to run your core processes from a secure cloud and never have to worry about where your data is or who is protecting it. If you use an office automation tool like Oas36ty Workflow, then Greg can go over the marketing plan on his mobile from his hotel lobby in Peru and give his nod before he goes on to take selfies with the llamas.
- Integration with other software
Office automation software isn’t the only thing you are running. You’ve got your internal database, a CRM, a marketing automation tool, and your financial software, and that’s just for starters. When you’re reliant on so many systems, you need a tool that doesn’t just keep to itself.
Of all the software out there, office automation should be the easiest to integrate with your other tools. If it doesn’t, you are stuck pushing data around from one system to another.
When doing an evaluation, see what kind of pre-integrations the office automation software provides, or if it takes advantage of connecting to a tool like Zapier to open access to thousands of other cloud tools.
- Reports and analytics
How do you know if your office automation is yielding results? You can’t just evaluate process performance based on how happy your team is. Data is the ultimate decision-maker, and it’s important for your business to compare a process’ history, its speed, the outcome quality, etc.
Adopting another software to measure your workflow data is time-consuming and unnecessary. Why not have a single piece of software that comes embedded with reporting and analytics features? The best office automation products now come equipped with this feature as part of their fundamental offering.
- Access control options
Just like limiting entry to your office premises, you should also have access privileges set to all of your business workflows.
A good workflow automation system understands this sensitive requirement and will have access control as part of its integral features. Don’t overlook this capability when considering office automation software for your business.
What are the functions of office automation software?
An ideal office automation software:
- Requires less space to store data
- Streamlines data storage and retrieval
- Retrieves information instantly
- Eliminates the need to preserve paperwork
- Removes any chance for data redundancy
- Allows multiple people to access data
- Reduces the possibility of errors
Save money, save time, and step into the future
If you have been fooled into thinking your office is automated, when it’s really just digitized, it’s time to upgrade your workflows and take the leap towards office automation.
Offices that automate can save a tremendous amount of time and money and let their workforce focus on the things that actually bring value to the company. Try Oas36ty’s Workflow today and see how far you can go with office automation.
Benefits of office automation
Overall, there are countless benefits of implementing office automation processes throughout the workplace. Besides the obvious benefits of saving time and money, it also improves workflow and efficiency.
Here are four benefits of office automation:
- Improved data storage
Long gone are the days when important documents were stored in file cabinets. Manually filing documents is not only labor- and time-intensive, but it’s susceptible to human error and theft. The same is true for data entry.
Instead, storing and processing all information on an encrypted cloud-based device automates the data entry procedure and safeguards all sensitive business information. Plus, authorized workers can access the information to do their jobs anywhere with a secure internet connection.
- Lowered operating costs
Usually, implementing office automation systems requires a one-time payment and sometimes a monthly or annual subscription. This is significantly less expensive than paying employees to handle the tedious tasks that no one wants to tackle. Therefore, employees can instead focus more on strategic and high-level tasks, increasing the company’s ROI.
- Increased employee retention
The modern employee wants to work smarter, not harder.
Considering how many white-collar jobs today require higher education degrees, employees look to contribute more knowledge and creativity than manual labor. And if employers invest in office automation tools to handle repetitive, mundane tasks, employees will feel their time and skills are valued. In turn, they’ll choose to continue working at the company for a long time and producing great results.
- Enhanced employee and building safety
When it comes to safety, electronic security systems provide more robust protection and detection than humans. Devices like video access control systems and security cameras work 24/7 to continually keep employees and assets safe.
These modern devices automate security-related tasks. For example, camera systems can automatically notify building administrators of unusual activity or alert authorities of break-ins. And video access control systems allow tenants to navigate the building seamlessly and give authorized visitors digital access credentials for easy entry. Plus, they can take a photo of every entry event for property staff to review.
