As a Business Owner – are you wasting time finding the status of the valuation, tracking your team, updating your banker, allocating and reallocating jobs to your engineers instead of focusing on doing critical appraisals, and generating more business? It is often because you don’t have a system that can help you to automate and monitor these tasks. You have pressure to meet Turn Around Time (TAT), yet you haven’t even made it halfway. You start to believe you need better teams, so you recruit experienced resources at a higher cost. But only to find the results have not changed. Is it possible that the fault doesn’t lie in your team, but the difficulty in the process? I’m sure you would agree the retail valuation business is highly process-driven. According to many studies and research, disorganization, or a complex process that is not easily monitored and improved in the workplace leads to financial losses, and the solution to it is automating your business.
Automation at first may seem complex & challenging to implement.
Your team leader might think its too much initial work to implement, and teams could be scared that they will lose their job.
It is not valid. Using the software means you can let it do the tasks like the below and let the team can more valuations, more important quality work which only humans can do, which means more revenue & profits.
Tasks that a Software can help to automate or digitize or enable:
- Enabling resources to work from wherever they are
- Resizing and formatting property images
- Electronic Authorization
- Regenerating reports into different bank formats for the same property
- Personally handing over property documents to field engineers
- Property inspection data submitted to report operator
- Generating invoices to clients
- Traveling back and forth between Office and Site Visit, Office and Banks
- Checking for Dataentry Errors
- Valuation Calculation or Calculator
- Searching for old report manually
- Maintaining multiple files
- Training New resources
- And many more
To avoid further inefficiency or ease your valuation business process, are you ready to make changes and ensure your business processes are well-organized and automated? This blog will help you with everything you need to know about automating your business processes.
Content of this Article:
Chapter 1: Definition of Business Process Automation?
Chapter 2: Do you need automation for your business?
Chapter 3: Advantages & Benefits of Automation!
Chapter 4: Automated Process: Why are they better than the Manual Process?
Chapter 5: Define a Successful process flow!
Chapter 6: Evaluating the process for improvement!
Chapter 1: Definition of Business Process Automation (BPM)?
Business Process Automation is all about streamlining your team’s tasks by allowing the software to do easy & menial tasks. Your employees won’t get replaced, rather will be able to perform valuable tasks instead of getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates, Microsoft Founder
The key to automation is in identifying the activities in your operations and processes, which can be done by software. Once identified, the software can be tweaked and deployed to handle those tasks. Which means, the software frees up the time of your employees to focus more on critical aspects of valuations, reviewing property document and other elements where risk is involved in an appraisal of a property.
As a business owner, you will be able to drive qualitative and quantitative results for your business. You are still unsure if your business needs automation? The next chapter will help you with that.
Chapter 2: Do you need automation for your business?
Signs your business needs automation.
- Inspite of all the efforts, you are still facing a challenge in delivering within TAT every time.
- Employees forget critical steps or data in the process, which leads to losses (both in the form of revenue and compliance & regulatory).
- Communication gaps between the teams leading to confusion.
- Very difficult to fix ownership.
- Tracking the status of the tasks is a challenge.
- No data to evaluate and improve the process or productivity.
No one knows your business other than yourself in your organization. You exactly know how to handle different situations. But what about the rest of your employees? Many people will be involved in a task. Non-availability of ownership of the process with a single person will lead to failure of the process, and most of the time, you and your team end up fire fighting. If you could have the bandwidth to do all of them by yourself, you wouldn’t need a team.
We will find the benefits of process automation in the next chapter.
Chapter 3: Advantages & Benefits of Automation
In your valuation business, you find yourself going over the same process every day. Though you and your teams know the process; you have to do the same tasks to complete the valuation reports; that’s exhausting, right?
Doing unnecessary repetitive tasks are a waste of valuable time. As you are very familiar with the workflow, it would be easier if you create a platform that works automatically, right? Process automation saves time as you are eliminating human intervention by streamlining multiple routine tasks into a continuous flow.
Automation makes your whole valuation business easier. Some are:
Communication:
Clear communication is a crucial factor in aiding the successful completion of every task of the process. A field engineer passes property information to the backend operator; the maker prepares reports and passes on to the checker, and the cycle continues. Many studies reveal that employees spend more time following up and or waiting for the right information. If they get them as quickly as possible, their productivity will improve.
Minimizing Error:
Regardless of how active the employees are, errors are inevitable. The point is: How frequently do these errors happen?
Mistakes are very high when employees have to think a lot to complete multiple tasks. They get distracted and commit mistakes. Process automation simplifies those for the employees; they just have to feed the data. For example, calculating the valuation of the property may lead to errors, wherein it can be automated.
Minimize the Risk:
For every error, the risk increases. A small mistake in valuation calculation can get you into legal trouble. Inaccuracies in the reports can lead you to lose your client.
A digital system will help in the quality of the data which is fed into the system with the help of validation rules. So it will prevent the user from making data entry errors which could lead to reworking or gross mistakes in estimating the value of the property.
Saves Time:
The long and complicated process doesn’t help both you and your clients. You get stressed as the clients are irritated by longer TATs.
Processes often become longer because of the traveling time and manually processing the document. Employees can get their required documents right in their mobile or desktop from wherever they are. They could be working from home or at the site.
Increased Productivity:
Let’s say your field engineer traveling time between office and property to collect in 30 mins; automation can help him save time by providing these documents wherever he is. He can use this time to do a more productive job.
Chapter 4: Automated Process: Why are they better than the Manual Process?
The goal of an automated process is to deliver the maximum reports in minimum time. Let’s assume your maker needs checker input about property information in the document to complete data entry. He will have to take the documents from desk to desk. When they are busy, he will leave them on their desks to return at a later time. There are other possible issues here. They are not necessarily in the same place or they are traveling to the client’s meeting or valuation visits, so he spends time walking to their desks multiple times. There’s also a possibility that some of them might even forget about it. These could lead to a delay in completing reports on time.
Instead, they could send the documents to the employees in the software to make necessary inputs. They check, either approve or make corrections in the report or reassign to back to the employee for more modifications. If the error continues, they will simply repeat the same. So which of them is a better solution? Manual or Automated?
Features:
- Structured data for future analysis and audits
- Tracking and Business MIS
- Secured Access
With these features in place, your business gets to enjoy:
- Low costs of operations
- Better customer service
- Happier the employees
- Happier the customer
- Flexible operations
We shall now discuss how to create the perfect workflow automation.
Chapter 5: Define a Successful process flow!
A simple and clear process is a win-win situation for everyone as it makes everyone’s job easier.
Find how to create process automation that will help:
- Identify the areas that can be improved.
- Define your business goals.
- Identify useful processes.
- You train employees on your new system.
- Execute automation.
Chapter 6: Evaluating the process for improvement!
Once you set your digital system, now its time for continually looking for ways and means of improving the process for better results. As you will have access to data, use the data to analyze and look for opportunities to reduce time, improve productivity, increase revenue, etc.
Softwares are built based on generally accepted practices and processes, which is mostly adopted by the majority of players in the Valuation industry. This standardization may, at times, result in deviation from existing processes followed by few Valuation firms and hence resulting in resistance.
Conclusion:
Technology will transform all our lives and businesses.
It will not be inappropriate even to address software as a partner in growth. Especially with the Corona impact, the need for technology has advanced itself by at least 5-7 years. We have proven instances of long-term advantages of success and also short-term resistance in adaptation. It is advisable to device a transformation plan depending on the current firm’s needs and accordingly chooses the solution layer.
By – Team Evalo