siliconindia | | April 20198IN MY OPINIONBy Tejas Goenka, Executive Director, Tally SolutionsAn alumnus of University of Pennsylvania, Tejas is at the helm of Tally's business direction and expansion. He has a keen interest in emerging markets and the tremendous potential & scale of growth they offer.he world of business today is a buzz with a plethora of hot topics such as Big Data, Cloud, AI, IoT, Blockchain, Social Media, and Digi-tal, to name a few. As the world is slowly turn-ing towards digitising processes, one of the key things, which has grabbed a lot of attention is business automation.What is Business Automation?In simple terms, business automation is a way in which organisations take-out the most complex and/or the most redundant steps from their day-to-day processes and streamlines them for simplicity. It is basically an oppor-tunity for you as a business to apply innovation and make your most critical business processes systematic, such that your business becomes more efficient, and your life becomes simpler. If you are looking for a simpler defi-nition, automation can be viewed as that magical move, which cuts-down costs, saves your time, prevents errors from happening, and allows your human workforce to solve more intelligent problems, rather than spending time on routine, repetitive tasks.Now that we have tried to define automation from var-ious angles, let's ask some basic questions: Is there any business in the world which would not like to cut costs? Is there any business which would not like to save time, or avoid errors? Is there any business in the world which would not like to have a simpler way of carrying-out a complicated task? Of course, everyone would love to.But then, if that was the case, all businesses in the world, big or small, would have been automated since inception. A glance at the Indian MSME indus-try will easily reveal that there is still a large chunk of businesses out there whose business processes are still driven manually. An important point to note here is that automation does not necessarily mean owning a computer ­ there are sufficient instances of businesses having a computer, but then still using only some ba-sic functionalities to handle one part of their business operations ­ be it sales, purchases, receivables & pay-ables, inventory or banking ­ but not using it to integrate the entire business as one entity.What holds businesses back from automating?So, what holds them back? What could potentially stop a business in India today to automate its operations, when clearly the advantages are many? Broadly, the reasons can be either or both of the following:· The automation required will need too much time, and the time spent on implementing automation is much more than the time saved if automation happens.· The automation required will need too much cost, and the cost spent on implementing automation is much more than the cost reduced if automation happens, or the cost spent on implementing automation is much more than the profits.In short, if you chose to base your decision on only time & money, then you can arrive quickly at an answer. If automation is quick & economical, you will adapt it BUSINESS AUTOMATION: FIVE THINGS TO KEEP IN MINDTBusiness automation is a way in which organisations take-out the most complex and/or the most redundant steps from their day-to-day processes and streamline them for simplicity
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