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New Zealand an Example That Process Automation Isn't Just About Costs

Joshua Hoffman
September 17, 2015

Business process automation gets a bad rap. It has a reputation for being a tool used almost solely to cut staff and reduce costs. While there certainly are businesses that leverage the technology to that end, the potential power of automation goes well beyond replacing people. In fact, many organizations will use process automation to empower their existing work force. Optimizing and automating business processes ensures that your workers operate at peak efficiency and don't get bogged down in tedious tasks that don't use their skills.

Automation can free your workers from tedium, and a recent ComputerWeekly report explained that many businesses in New Zealand are embracing the technology to achieve that end.

New Zealand an example of process automation at its best

According to the news source, businesses in New Zealand are facing a growing talent crisis. The small population in the region combines with an increasingly competitive economy to make finding the right workers for complex positions incredibly difficult. This has forced businesses to take creative measures to alleviate the operational burden on the workers already on staff. This is helping companies in New Zealand maximize the value of their existing workforce by automating repeatable processes so the workers who are available can function at peak capacity.

"Automation can free your workers from tedium."

Simon Baxter, sales and marketing manager for the collaboration practice at Spark Digital, told ComputerWeekly that the size of businesses in New Zealand has played a major part in creating a mature process automation market.

"New Zealand is relatively advanced in automation when compared with places like North America," Baxter told the news source. "That's because the economy here is built on small and medium enterprises. Organizations in North America tend to be larger - they have more people and have the human resources to use more manual processes. They have far more paper trails than we are used to. I worked for a while with Veteran's Affairs in the US, where everything was paper-based. There's nothing like it in New Zealand."

Using automation to get the most out of your business

The global economy is still making sense of the post-recession operational climate, but one trend is clear - businesses of any size can't afford waste. As businesses the world over embrace digitization and maximize their workforce, they can use business process management tools as a catalyst for innovation. Using BPM to automate tedious process lets your skilled employees spend more of their time on their core competencies and less of it on mundane tasks. Following New Zealand's lead can help organizations of all sizes eliminate operational waste.