In every organization, delivering value to customers is often carried out with several multi‑step workflows involving several people and systems. Automating these processes and workflows can help businesses achieve desired outcomes faster and more effectively.
The ServiceNow platform offers a range of business process automation features that allow end‑to‑end automation of repetitive tasks to improve efficiency, cut costs and boost customer satisfaction. This post details how you can leverage ServiceNow Solutions for business process automation.
- What is Business Process Automation
- ServiceNow Business Process Automation Examples
- 5 Effective ServiceNow Solutions for Business Process Automation
- ServiceNow Automation Best Practices
- Conclusion
What is Business Process Automation
Business process automation (BPA) is the use of technologically advanced software to accelerate and automate time-consuming, repetitive business processes that employees usually do manually.
Businesses can achieve greater operational efficiency and cut expenses by automating business procedures, giving workers more time to focus on innovative and strategic projects. BPA often applies to repetitive processes like data entry, customer communications, and report generation but may also be used for a wide range of other manual business processes and across different departments within an organization.
For instance, a business could use BPA to send client satisfaction polls and instantly create sales reports. Additionally, it can be used to automate more challenging processes like IT services, handling client purchases, or onboarding new workers.
ServiceNow Business Process Automation Examples
Implementing Business Process Automation can seem challenging. However, due to advanced solutions like ServiceNow, businesses can now access various tools and workflow management systems that make automating critical processes within their day-to-day workflow easier. Some aspects of business that can be streamlined with ServiceNow workflow automation include:
Employee Onboarding
Seamless employee onboarding is essential to every company’s success because it enables new hires to adjust to their new workplaces quickly, fit in with the culture, and start contributing effectively immediately. ServiceNow can help streamline employee onboarding by creating automated workflows to distribute welcome emails, account setup, schedule training sessions or distribute training resources, assign tasks, etc. Automating key onboarding steps this way eases the transition for new hires so they can hit the ground running and start contributing to your company’s success in no time. Streamlining the hiring process with ServiceNow workflow automation also reduces the burden on your HR team so they can focus on other tasks.
Purchase Orders
For businesses that need to make purchases such as production materials or office supplies often, keeping track of all of these in hand may lead to such problems as incorrect orders, invoicing issues, and so on. Businesses can create automated workflows to create purchase orders, track deliveries, and make payments based on specific triggers.
Real-time alerts sent to appropriate stakeholders can eliminate the delay between approving the purchase order, getting the information to the vendor, and tracking the purchase order. ServiceNow purchase order workflow automation also protects your business by providing a complete audit trail to keep track of the purchase order process from start to finish.
Report Generation
Tracking data and generating reports is a crucial step that provides valuable information and insights about key business processes. Reports are also needed for decision-making. Most reports are time-bound and also require a high level of accuracy. Both qualities are hard to enforce with manual report generation but easier with automation. You can save time and money by automating the process of generating business reports with ServiceNow workflow automation. ServiceNow can create customized data reports related to business operations, such as customer interaction, marketing reports, employee reviews, etc.
Time-Off Requests
Handling manual requests for employee time off can result in mountains of paper and never-ending email exchanges. Businesses can streamline and automate the time-off request process with ServiceNow workflow automation. This system would enable employees to make requests online. The proposals are routed appropriately, and approvals are sent back more effectively. Automating time-off requests ensures that these requests are reviewed and authorized by corporate policies and guidelines.
5 Effective ServiceNow Solutions for Business Process Automation
As a cloud-based workflow automation platform, ServiceNow helps organizations define, manage, and automate key services across various company departments, including operations, security, customer service, HR, and so on. The following are the different ServiceNow solutions that can help improve operational efficiency through business process automation.
ITSM (IT Service Management)
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) refers to tools or workflows for managing and delivering consumer IT services. ServiceNow ITSM takes a structured approach to manage IT services. It allows IT teams to handle and track incidents from start to finish to ensure they’re solved quickly and efficiently. ServiceNow also serves as a centralized platform for managing changes in IT systems and a centralized platform for managing IT knowledge.
Benefits of ITSM (IT Service Management):
ServiceNow ITSM is crucial for organizations because it ensures they can deliver consistent and efficient IT services to customers. It increases customer satisfaction and overall business outcome. ServiceNow ITSM also provides a centralized platform for managing IT services which helps to improve collaboration and communication between (and within) the IT team and other departments within the organization.
ITOM (IT Operations Management)
ITOM means Information Technology Operations Management. It refers to a set of practices, tools, and strategies organizations use to manage and optimize the performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and applications. ITOM includes IT operations monitoring, event management, automation, and performance management.
Benefits of ITOM:
ITOM ensures an organization’s IT systems are fully operational and running efficiently. It helps to reduce IT downtime and improve performance. The result is an increase in the reliability of IT services. With ServiceNow ITOM, organizations can get complete visibility into their IT operations and get intelligent insights that can help identify issues before they occur and resolve them as quickly as possible.
ITBM (IT Business Management)
ITBM represents Information Technology Business Management. It refers to a set of tools, practices, and strategies used to align IT with an organization’s business goals. Some critical aspects of ITBM include financial management, resource management, portfolio management, demand management, and so on.
Benefits of ITBM:
ITBM bridges the gap between IT and business functions, improving collaboration and communication between various organizational departments. The main benefit of ITBM for IT organizations is that it helps them improve the visibility, transparency, and oversight of their IT investment. It also helps organizations become more strategic and business-focused.
CSM (Customer Service Management)
CSM stands for Customer Service Management. It refers to the tools, practices, and strategies organizations rely on to optimize their customer service experience. Some core activities in Customer Service Management include case management, service level management, customer engagement, and self-service.
Benefits of CSM:
ServiceNow CSM helps automate customer requests and includes a range of other solutions to address customer issues to deliver seamless experiences to customers proactively. The main goal of CSM is to help organizations provide top-quality customer services and attend to customer requests (and complaints) in a way that exceeds their expectation. It improves overall customer satisfaction.
Now Platform
ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a dashboard for various ServiceNow products and tools. It serves as a unified architecture for various ServiceNow services, such as performance forecasting, predictive modeling, anomaly detection, etc. Developers and business users can also use this dashboard to build their applications or manage the flow of work seamlessly.
Benefits of Now Platform:
The ServiceNow Now platform’s main benefit is connecting siloed processes within an organization, digitizing them, and combining them to make workflow more seamless. The Now platform connects data across an organization as a unified platform to manage your digital business. It helps to optimize processes and accelerate innovation.
ServiceNow Automation Best Practices
Although ServiceNow offers robust toolsets that help businesses of all sizes achieve process automation, getting the most out of these solutions can be challenging. The following are tips and best practices to remember to get the best out of the ServiceNow Workflow Automation Process.
Prefer the End-User
In designing automation workflows in ServiceNow, the end user should always be the top priority. There needs to be more than a fixed idea of how you intend to enhance workflow with ServiceNow. If the user experience could be better, work performance will be affected. When designing ServiceNow automation, meeting with users to understand how you can help them streamline workflows is recommended. You should also roll out automation in phases and take user feedback at each phase’s end to discover improvement areas.
Optimize Dashboards
Thanks to simple drag-and-drop widgets, the ServiceNow dashboard is easy to program and customize to your preference. Adding new functionalities to your dashboard can complicate the user experience with irrelevant and distracting information. To avoid this, every new feature you add to your dashboard must be carefully considered to ensure it is necessary and that it isn’t distracting users from more important business-critical information.
Use KPIs
Determining your strategy for building process automation is one of the key steps in using ServiceNow. Some people favor starting with a project and then breaking it down into more minor phases because it is guided by high-level thinking. Others take the opposite approach by focusing on small tasks and gradually building up. A much better practice that allows you to enjoy the benefits of both options is to leverage your key performance indicators (KPIs). Building ServiceNow automation based on specific vital metrics improves both the focus and effectiveness of your workflow automation strategy.
Analyze Existing Automation
Most organizations don’t start designing workflow automation from scratch. If there’s some level of automation already, it’s always best to examine it again before designing or deploying your ServiceNow workflow automation. Auditing existing automation can reveal new ways to achieve your automation goals.
Conclusion
So why ServiceNow? The platform offers a range of solutions that can be customized to meet your unique needs to serve customers better and improve business outcomes. As more organizations adopt digital transformation initiatives, ServiceNow aids in automating business processes and unlocking valuable assets to drive innovation and growth. By automating repetitive or manual tasks with ServiceNow solutions, you can free up their employees to focus on more valuable work, such as problem-solving and driving innovation across all aspects of your organization.
About acSoft Blog
Every article on the acSoft blog serves as a toolkit, offering specific, actionable guidance that you can apply to your ServiceNow endeavors. Whether it’s customizing user interfaces, automating workflows, or enhancing data security, our content is designed to provide step-by-step instructions and best practice advice that you can trust and implement, ensuring that you’re always enhancing your ServiceNow proficiency.
