Automation Services

It’s only five minutes. Five minutes spent manually copying client data from a spreadsheet to a CRM system. For an average office worker paid $20 an hour, the cost for those five minutes is $1.67. With payroll in the thousands, those minutes seem negligible. Only it isn’t just five minutes. If this employee updates 20 clients a day, that’s now 1.6 hours to input the data or $32 on a daily basis to manually move the data from the spreadsheet. 1.6 hours a day is 8 hours a week – or a cost of $160 and around one whole day of the employee’s workweek. And that’s just manual data entry from a spreadsheet to a CRM. Many other tasks such as sorting email or generating reports can steal similar chunks of time. In fact, estimates state that a large percentage of the average office employee’s time is wasted on similar time-sucking tasks. Companies are often forced to hire more personnel to perform routine tasks. A good technology partner can help a company incorporate AI, which will help fix the underlying inefficiency in the company’s business processes, reduce the company’s reliance on manual labor, and allow the company to save money by working better.  

Time can evaporate in small, nearly invisible increments. Each time a user switches between tools, waits for approval, or manually moves information from one system to another, time is lost. While seconds and minutes don’t seem like much, they can soon add up to hours of lost time. Much like the old nursery rhyme where a missing nail led to a lost battle, minutes here and seconds there can slow down an entire organization. Automation helps remove bottlenecks and allow processes to continue to flow without waiting on human intervention at every step.

Keeping three tomato plants watered is easy with a watering can. Using that same watering can on a garden the size of an acre is inefficient at best and almost impossible at worst. While the size of the garden grew, the processes remained the same. Many companies have a similar issue. At the beginning, workflows were manual and sufficient, but when the company grew, the processes didn’t change. They convoluted. Unnecessary steps, redundant tools, manual workarounds, and other make-it-work attempts lead to systems that technically function but at a level far lower than it could be. A technology partner can help a company take a second look at how the work is getting done and evaluate whether the process needs updates, overhauls, or step elimination to increase its efficiency. Concurrently, Swan will evaluate ways that AI can be seamlessly incorporated into the new processes to streamline efficiency.   

An Oxford study determined workers were 13% more productive when they were happy. Those studied did not work extra hours; they simply were more productive in the time they worked. While a company cannot do anything about the weather affecting their employees’ moods, a company can help improve employee morale. One commonly cited reason for the average office worker’s discontentment, and even burnout, is being stuck performing basic and repetitive administrative tasks. One of the highest-ranked of all hated tasks is data entry. An employee hired for their creativity or strategic vision should not be buried under a mountain of important but draining administrative tasks. Hiring a technology partner to help your company automate can remove the most draining part of an employee’s workload and allow them to focus on the part of their job that excites them – providing the high-value contributions for which they were hired.   

A parent selecting shoes for their child will try to find the balance between extra room to grow and not so much extra room that the child trips. Many businesses are left in this same quandary. They must meet the need for bigger spaces and more employees to be ready for more volume without increasing overhead costs so much that the business is no longer profitable. In addition to the physical needs of business growth, companies also face the more hidden needs of scalability. Processes that were easy to do with a small team and small volume may no longer work with a bigger team and higher volume. AI Automation helps companies to increase the work that can be done without significantly increasing their overhead, which allows them to safely and effectively scale operations to meet client needs and keep their business in the black.

A lot of studies dive into the causes of mental zoning out. When faced with tasks that are repetitive, the brain decides to give itself a break and avoid burnout by entering a sort of autopilot where daydreaming, planning, or reminiscing happen. Unfortunately, while this mental break might have helped a person update his or her mental to-do list, it also means that key details of the “boring” task are missed or errors are made. When this happens during repetitive tasks at work, tiny errors like an incorrectly entered number can lead to big problems later on. From missed entries to inconsistent data to overlooked details, every manual task has the potential for risk. Even the minds of the best team are human and prone to wandering when faced with high-volume and monotonous responsibilities. Having a good technology partner help your company automate these mind-numbing duties leads to greater consistency and reduces errors.  

If a band is marching in perfect sync, it is easy to spot anyone who is out of step. The conformity allows a high degree of oversight. Many companies have lost this oversight by allowing everyday processes to become rife with untracked actions, inconsistent workflows, and a lack of visibility into who did what and when it was done. While spotting errors in a five-person band is possible at field level, the bigger the band grows, the higher one has to climb to see it all and recognize and eliminate errors. In the same way, the larger businesses grow, the more inconsistency is introduced and the greater the risk of larger and larger things slipping through the cracks. Swan works with a company to introduce AI automation into their processes. As structure, standardization, and traceability are incorporated into the company, the risks of errors, compliance problems, and operational failures reduce. 

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. While we may manage to gradually change another person’s opinion of us, most people are unwilling to give that same chance to a business. Slow responses, inconsistent communication, and service delays are often enough to permanently lose a customer’s business. While some of these issues are unavoidable at times, many are caused by internal bottlenecks. The more a company relies on manual involvement, the more workflow suffers. Swan helps companies to incorporate AI automation into their business. This AI automation can help companies give customers faster and more accurate responses, which keeps customers happier and more likely to become loyal, long-term clients. 

Many mines cycle through being opened when extracting the ore is economically feasible and closed again when the cost of extraction is greater than the potential profits. While the cost of ores affects the decision to open or close the mine, one “ore” that is often left untapped is data. Companies collect massive amounts of data during their operations. However, the valuable data is often lost because the company cannot afford to manually sift through the massive amounts of generated data for the small amount that is actually useful. AI automation can collect, process, and provide relevant data to teams in a company, which helps them to make better decisions by mining the raw information for actionable insights.

AI is a great tool. Most companies want to use it, but AI is not one-size-fits-all. Automating a process in one company might be beneficial, but automating that same process in another company might not be. 

When you allow Swan Software Solutions to work with you to incorporate AI into your business, you make sure that AI is used in the best way for your business. We take the guesswork and stress out of using this powerful tool to benefit your company.