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Doing More with Less
To Stay Competitive, Businesses Need to Think About Automation
At a recent virtual seminar, Delcie Bean asked attendees to think back 20 years and ask themselves, did they foresee
a time when phone books and yellow pages would not be a thing?
After all, he asked, every home had one, and
one point in time, we didn’t think we could live without.”
And it’s not just tools, but the way we do business, he said, pointing out the short jumps between dominant communication methods over the past century. That idea was one jump-
The 60-minute presentation focused on the benefits of automation and the ways it can be utilized to save businesses time, trouble, and expense — anything from onboarding a new employee or client to gathering information when someone signs up for something on a web- site, to the steps involved in the approval process when employees want to request a new com- puter. All of this, and more, can be automated, Bean said.
One common tool helping businesses do that today is the Microsoft 365 platform, an evolution of the Microsoft Office suite that offers subscrip- tion tiers and features including secure cloud storage, business e-mail, advanced cyberthreat protection, and the popular Microsoft Teams program.
“Microsoft has made a very deliberate, very intelligent decision to be the leader in small- business workforce automation, and they have invested infinite money in trying to do that,” Bean said. “And it’s actually paid off.”
Perfect Storm
The need to streamline processes through automation impacts most businesses and, as
Automation
Continued on page 16
 “What’s my phone book? What’s the thing in my business that is still antiquated and should have been replaced by now?”
ing-off point for Bean’s virtual seminar on Sept. 15, titled “Auto- mation: the Time Is Now,” and subtitled “How Automation Can Streamline Your Business and Off- set the Labor Shortage.”
At this event, presented
by BusinessWest and Comcast Business, he said everyone should ask themselves a simple ques- tion: “What’s my phone book? What’s the thing in my business that is still antiquated and should
    they were the primary way small businesses advertised and shared their contact information with the public.
Now, “look at what’s happened to that world,” said Bean, president of Paragus Strategic IT. “That’s the pace at which technology is chang- ing. These things we took for granted, that we felt were never going to change, that were part of the fabric of our ecosystem, have changed. And it’s not just phone books. Think of all the landfills that are chock full of technology that, at
have been replaced by now?
For example, he went on, “do I have employ-
ees entering data into a system that could easily be automated? Am I still doing things on paper forms that then need to be scanned into a system or, God forbid, typed in manually into another system? Do I have antiquated processes that require people to get manual approval and shuf- fle things around and put things in inboxes and outboxes, and do I still have tasks being done manually that are just ripe to automate?”
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