The concept of ‘automation’ is usually associated with mechanical devices that free people of laborious and monotonous tasks. Many of us take office automation for granted; all-in-one photocopy fax and scanning machines; dishwashers in kitchens; computer-assisted tasks like transcribing voice to text. Even email is essentially automated snail mail.

Aside from investing in a vacuum cleaning robot from iRobot (I kid you not), many of us think that we’ve got just about everything covered in terms of automating the office.

The truth is automation is not just about automating physical tasks. We can also automate information. There may be repetitive manual tasks associated with a particular instance of information automation, but the important bit is not the elimination of the physical task. The real benefit lays in facilitating and regulating the automatic flow of information to achieve complex objectives.

Computing technologies move so rapidly that the market for solutions that exploit information automation is constantly shifting. From time to time it is well worth examining information automation from a strategic perspective to see if there are any technology developments that can better help us achieve our business objectives.

Here are 5 areas where automating information not only removes manual labour, but also introduces business efficiency.

Enterprise Marketing - many organisations outsource marketing; while this works for many, it’s useful to be aware of options for in-house marketing activity. Entry level Enterprise Marketing systems automate email marketing activity and more fully featured systems can wrap in surveys and campaign-specific micro websites that capture the contact data of any unknown site visitors. Recruitment Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) may have marketing modules bolted in to publish jobs and monitor applicant activity.

OCR scanning – financial services businesses that receive paper statements may have to copy-type or scan and map data with OCR tools to enter data into back office systems. This can be labour intensive and plagued with problems of accuracy. Specialist OCR scanning providers provide turnkey solutions that enable information automation. In recruitment, OCR scanning is one option for dealing with capturing information from handwritten timesheets. Unfortunately OCR’s accuracy rate tends to fall off a cliff when dealing with handwriting.

Offsite backup – automating the flow of information from onsite servers to offsite data backup service providers eliminates the need for back up tapes, loading tapes into servers and sending tapes offsite. It’s not just for recruitment; any type of business can benefit from vastly simplified disaster recovery procedures that are enabled through offsite data backup. This significantly reduces the risk of IT failures damaging business continuity.

Sales Force Automation – Sales Force Automation (SFA) takes CRM online and enables customer information and sales opportunities from different marketing and promotional channels to be managed so that sales teams are more effectively managed and customers more efficiently serviced. Once again recruitment Applicant Tracking Systems may have elements of SFA and CRM embedded within them with features that assign a client, job or applicant to a recruiter, and enable the extraction of management information to analyse performance.

Automated online timesheets – no list of office information automation solutions would be complete without mentioning timesheets. (Even if we do say so ourselves!). Seriously though, many businesses, in recruitment or HR that use manual timesheet systems could reduce back office inefficiency and unnecessary processing costs, not to mention errors and timesheet fraud, with an automated online timesheet solution.

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