Are you trying to reach higher goals while working with lower budgets? Is your leadership asking you that dreaded question, “how can we do more with less?” It is a massive headache but also a chance to innovate.
Step 1: Implement Automation Software
There has been a lot of talk recently about automation technology and what it can and cannot do. One thing it can do, however, is make your life a bit easier. Let’s talk about a few programs that streamline processes by automating the seemingly small tasks that end up being huge time sucks.
How does Zapier help automate processes and save time?
Zapier is known for its “no code” automation it integrates. If you already utilize some of the apps it integrates with, you can automate tasks and scale processes throughout your business. For example, you can automatically send Google Sheets data via Slack or send reminder emails about tasks that are completed (or not yet completed) in other apps.
Can ChatGPT improve business processes?
ChatGPT almost seems synonymous with “AI” these days. It can generate everything from headlines to captions to songs to scripts, but how can you use it to automate your less-creative processes?
AI platforms like ChatGPT that use natural language processing can be used for customer service, chatbots, language translation, and more. It can be trained to understand customer inquiries and provide automated responses, freeing up your customer support team to focus on more complex issues.
ChatGPT can also be trained to automate data entry. Conveniently, if you don’t know how to train it to understand and organize your data, you can ask it, and it’ll walk you through the steps. Once it has been trained, you can create a prompt that includes the data fields and their corresponding inputs. For example, you may create a prompt that says, "Please enter the customer's name, address, phone number, and email address."
Users can then enter the data into the prompt using natural language. For example, if someone enters something like, "James Strong, 123 Fake Street, 555-1234, jamess@email.com," ChatGPT will use its NLP capabilities to understand the inputs and generate the corresponding data fields.
You will need to double-check the work, but that would be the case with most humans too.
What software can I use to automate capacity planning and resource management?
One of the biggest challenges in trying to do more with fewer resources is managing each project from start to finish. Forecast is a software solution that uses integrated AI to help you make decisions specifically about managing your projects so they come in on time and budget.
Capacity planning enables you to operate with a lean team by analyzing your pipeline of future projects and ensuring you can meet demand efficiently. Forecast gives specific, tailored recommendations for your company and your team. This gives you a headstart on projects and helps you move forward with a data-backed plan.
Forecast helps you know ahead of time how many man-hours a project will take and continues to analyze progress along the way to keep you on track.
Step 2: Do more
Use all that time you’re saving to come up with more creative solutions to the problems your company is facing. When you’re bogged down in the weeds of mundane things like data entry or constantly juggling between apps and programs, you don’t have the time to do the higher-level thinking it takes to innovate and adapt. New technology can help you automate processes to focus on what you do best.
