How automation is helping organisations create efficiencies

Automation is being implemented by organisations to improve processes and help leaders scale their workflows.

[L-R] Toby Wong, CEO, moomoo; Ryan O'Connell, CTO, Humanitix; Velvet-Belle Templeman; and Andrew Hottes, chief digital information officer, Cranbrook School.

At the Digital Nation Digital As Usual: AI, Automation and Analytics breakfast event audience members heard insights from C-suite leaders on how automation has transformed their organisations.

Andrew Hottes, chief digital information officer, Cranbrook School began his tenure under a six-month contract and five and a half years later he is still working at the school finding opportunities for improvement.

One of them is around automating workflows, Hottes explained to the Digital As Usual audience how they used automation to speed up the onboarding process for students.

“When I looked at the process, part of me, from a parent's perspective was thinking, this is horrible. We're a premium school, we should have a premium product,” he said.

Cranbrook School’s enrolment officer spent all weekend onboarding a total of eight students.

“She took me through the enrolment process and I was flabbergasted by the manual effort from creating files and folders in SharePoint, assigning student IDs from this solution and bringing it together. There has to be another way,” he said.

Hottes explained once he understood the manual journey it took from onboarding a student to enrolling them, he realised it could be automated, freeing up the enrolment officer to connect with potential students.

“We were able to take what seemed to be a two-hour process from that particular weekend, down to about 10 minutes. We put the onus back on the parent or the guardian when they were submitting the enrolment form to make sure that they completed all the information correctly,” he said.

The second stage of this automation is streamlining the approval processes for identifying documents to give time back to the parents.

“The workflow side of it, it's fascinating how much time you can solve and give them back to do the things they are best doing,” he said.

Automation in sales processes

Ryan O’Connell, chief technology officer at Humanitix said chartable ticketing platform uses automation across the platform, particularly within the sales process.

“We use automation in the sales process so we can get warm customers in front of our staff on the sales calls so they are leaning in and then they will buy [our product],” he said.

“We use automation to prospect these leads and we're using it to also then assign it to the right salesperson.”

He explained that automation is directly tied to revenue generation. The automation tools will know which salesperson has the most experience in specific areas like music events, school events or festivals and automatically assigns that lead to that salesperson.

“Then they'll automatically create a demo for them and a demo time for that that salesperson gone in and talk to that prospect,” he explained.

To learn more about how automation can transform your organisation. Read our latest Digital As Usual: AI, Automation and Analytics report here.