All businesses want to do more with less – and it would be hard to find employees that want to spend time on repetitive tasks that need minimal skill or expertise. True productivity happens when employees are engaged in meaningful work that uses their talents to the full.
This is why successful businesses go to great lengths to automate manual work as much as possible. By using business process automation (BPA) technologies – now often powered or supported by AI – to take care of these tasks, businesses drive down costs and boost efficiency as well as empowering their people to do more valuable work.
Here’s where – and how – automation can unlock productivity for your organisation.
Examples of Where Automation Can Unlock Immediate Benefits
9 Ways to Automate your Business
There are many ways to automate work inside a business. Some tools come with built-in workflow features, while others offer automation as a separate product or as one module in a larger system. In some cases, companies choose to build their own automation, either with an internal team or with help from an outside developer.
Here are some ways to make automation work:
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Adopt automation tools
Today’s market offers a wide range of automation platforms designed to streamline business workflows. These vary according to the processes they handle, the technical skill needed for deployment and whether they are basic automation tools or use advanced AI-driven automation.
Simple, non-technical tools now frequently cover social media scheduling, workflow and project coordination, e-commerce operations, marketing execution and more. For most organisations, the best choice is a solution that requires no coding ability. Look for options with intuitive interfaces that people without technical backgrounds can easily use. Transparency is essential. Your team should always be able to see and understand the steps the system will take to complete any task. Automation bots or workflows must remain easy to configure and monitor.
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Integrate AI and ML where possible
Accounts payable (AP) is a useful way to illustrate how today’s machine-learning (ML) and AI systems can take over complex business processes. ML models are trained by analysing large volumes of historical data until they recognise what typical activity looks like. For AP, that might mean ingesting years of digital invoices so the model can establish patterns.
As they process more information, models become better at flagging unusual behaviour such as potential fraud or suppliers quietly increasing prices in ways that could erode margins. Machine learning focuses on pattern recognition within existing datasets, whereas AI can go further by interpreting broader context. An AI-driven AP platform could, for example, pull in data from internal systems and external sources at the same time – fuel prices, fleet-performance benchmarks, usage logs – to automatically judge whether a particular month’s fuel invoices fall within an acceptable range. When they do, the system can approve them without human involvement; when they don’t, it can escalate exceptions to the AP team.
The key is to understand what level of insight a platform can produce and whether that intelligence justifies the investment. With automation, the ambition should be to eliminate as much routine checking and manual oversight as possible.
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Streamline task management
Automation helps eliminate duplicated effort across teams, which is particularly valuable now that many organisations work with distributed staff, hybrid work patterns and external partners. At its core, automation shifts routine tasks from people to systems. Few activities are more repetitive than issuing work assignments or chasing status updates.
Consider a scenario where a project manager configures a content management platform so that as soon as a new document is uploaded, the system automatically creates a review task and routes it to the right approver. This replaces the manual back-and-forth of nudges, emails and reminders that teams often rely on.
The same logic applies to ERP systems. Once a company grows beyond a small team, it needs a smooth flow of information between operational processes and the finance function. Better automation strengthens these links. That’s the premise of cloud-based ERP platforms: unified, real-time data that keeps operational activity and financial reporting in sync, without manual intervention.
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Improve document sharing
The ability to move information between teams quickly is fundamental to running a modern organisation. BPA and AI can automatically pull full documents – or extract only the relevant fields – from large volumes of files and distribute that information to colleagues or other applications. As well as saving time, this reduces the risk of compliance failures caused by manual data handling or missed details in critical documents.
When evaluating platforms for business intelligence, sales automation or high-volume messaging, prioritise tools that make it easy to surface and share documents directly within dashboards.
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Connect apps and devices
Many platforms rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) to link software systems together. Other tools automatically synchronise information across devices and systems soteams always have the most up-to-date data to hand. A simple example is email that keeps messages aligned across your devices. As well as keeping information consistent, this capability can also reveal and remove duplicated steps within business processes.
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Track communications
Customers get a better experience when organisations can track every interaction and respond quickly and appropriately. CRM platforms can extend this by generating personalised, self-service portals tailored to each customer. These systems can also track activity such as support hours logged against an account, giving both customers and service teams clear, real-time visibility into the relationship.
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Develop an automation plan
It’s worth creating a clear automation roadmap so you don’t miss opportunities, add unnecessary complexity or end up with duplicated or disconnected workflows. Start with the quick wins. Or focus first on the processes that cause the most frustration or take up too much of your team’s time.
From there, work systematically through the rest of your operations, assessing each process for its automation potential. This staged approach helps employees shift their energy toward higher-impact work while ensuring automation is introduced in a controlled, strategic way.
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Build a culture of automation
Culture can undermine an automation programme far more quickly than any technical challenge. Leadership must make it clear that automation is intended to remove friction from people’s day-to-day work, not to put them out of a job. When employees feel secure, they’re far more willing to engage with new tools and often become strong contributors in highlighting where legacy processes need modernisation.
Ultimately, successful automation depends on broad commitment across the organisation. That’s why it’s important to focus on communication and change management from the outset.
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Set automation targets
Define clear, outcome-based targets before you deploy – or expand – automation. Start with baselines, then tie each automation to a measurable business goal, an owner and a timeline.
- Establish baselines: Current cycle time, error rate, cost per transaction, backlog volume, SLA attainment.
- Choose outcome metrics: Efficiency; quality; financial; experience; risk/compliance.
- Set time-bound milestones: Checkpoints for adoption, throughput and accuracy.
- Define guardrails: Escalation paths, exception thresholds, rollback, criteria, access controls.
- Instrument and monitor: Build dashboards for leading indicators (queue depth, SLA risk) and lagging results (ROI, savings).
- Iterate: Run A/B tests on workflows, retrain models as data shifts, retire steps that no longer add value.
- Align incentives: Connect team OKRs to automation outcomes and recognise efficiency goals:
Explore How NetSuite Helps Businesses Automate
NetSuite’s Professional Service Automation unifies project planning, resource management, time and expenses, billing and financials in one cloud platform. Teams have real-time visibility into portfolio health, are able to automate workflows and can collaborate from anywhere to deliver on-time projects to happy clients.
NetSuite ERP supports accurate financials with automated revenue recognition and allocations, ensures compliant, audit-ready reporting and streamlines staffing by skills and availability. Move away from disconnected tools and spreadsheets, improve margins and scale your business using a single source of truth.
