Making mistakes is human nature, and no one is exempt. However, human error in the workplace can directly impact a company’s bottom line, especially when it relates to data collection. For many businesses, the quality of data is integral to achieving accurate profitable insights and informed decision-making. Low-quality data can, in turn, lead to misguided decisions, time wastage, and lost revenue. Beyond financial costs, poor data also impacts customer satisfaction and staff morale and instils organisational mistrust.

Data quality issues arise from human error, but a lack of knowledge, human resources, and technology can also hold businesses back. While an accident due to human error can sound like a minor inconvenience to the flow of operations, it can create a myriad of issues concerning compliance, revenue, and brand mistrust when it happens repeatedly. Therefore, it’s necessary for businesses to implement business process automation to not only lower human error but also save time and money in the process.

Implementing an effective business process automation (BPA) solution can deliver three key benefits:

1. Increases consistency and reduces errors

Consistent, high-quality data impacts decision-making and improves the efficiency of business operations. On the other hand, data inconsistency results in misinformation and incorrect decisions, often ending in dire consequences to business operations. By automating business processes, organisations can expect a consistent standard of outcomes, minimising the need for human judgement, which reduces the risk of human error. Once data becomes more accurate and has real-time access, businesses can make confident data-driven decisions to achieve business objectives.

2. Improves collaboration

Data quality often relies on collaboration across departments. When data is communicated effectively across departments, businesses can make better decisions backed by trusted data. However, data stored in separate repositories that are not so easily accessible by other departments creates data silos. As data silos are often left unobserved, they are rarely updated and can result in duplications. This can affect business strategies because decisions aren’t based on all the available data, leading to flawed decision-making and lost business opportunities. BPA overcomes this challenge through real-time automated data sharing that breaks down silos and gives every department access to accurate, current, and complete data on a unified platform, reducing the chance of human error.

3. Provides real-time visibility

Organisations heavily rely on data to understand and meet customer demands, improve decision-making, and determine the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts. When data has poor visibility, it can lead to an organisation unwittingly exposing confidential data or failing to make it comply with regulations. When data is visible, it improves compliance and gives real-time insight into an organisation’s processes, letting staff monitor progress across each step and flag any issues that might need corrective actions. With artificial intelligence (AI)-powered BPA, data can become more visible and accessible, minimising human error and ensuring the business continues moving forward.

By automatically executing a series of tasks based on defined business rules, BPA can ensure consistency, adherence to compliance, and stronger customer satisfaction. With a unified solution, organisations can easily adopt workflow automation for routine tasks to eliminate human error while also freeing up teams to focus on mission-critical tasks with an innate need for human touch.

Before choosing a BPA solution, it’s important to identify business needs and pinpoint weaknesses in operational processes. By knowing where a business is going wrong, management teams can identify the type of software that will best reduce the impact of human error in the workplace.