The Complete Guide to Operations Automation: From Simple Tasks to Complex Processes

When any organization decides to increase productivity, reduce costs, or address compliance concerns, the most useful tool for this endeavor is automation. Automation can significantly reduce manual work and related human errors, increase efficiency, and even unlock hidden growth potential. But how can automation boost growth in the organization? 

Think of it this way: Every resource you have can be allocated either to sustaining the current business (keeping it operational and essentially flatlined) or to growth (expanding your business). Therefore, the more your main resource (people) is occupied with operations that can be automated, the less time they can dedicate to actually growing the business. 

Automation is not an initiative "to save a penny here and there" but a foundation for sustainable growth in any organization.   

Here are a couple of examples:

• People operations: The more time HR personnel spend on documents and forms, the less time they have to develop your talent pool, thus hindering growth potential.  
• Customer support: The more a support team focuses on replying to customers with issues, the less time they can commit to expanding existing customers.  
• Legal Operations: The more your legal team is involved in every contract your organization prepares and executes, the more they become a bottleneck for growth.

When Is the Right Time to Automate?

There is just one simple criterion when it comes to making a decision to automate a specific process (or a part of it): process maturity. Process maturity reflects how well-developed and thought-out a specific process is. There are several layers to assessing process maturity:   

1. Does the process work (bring value)? Think of automating a marketing process that doesn't bring any results. Why do it?    
2. Do you believe this process will be sufficient for the next year or so? If you grow 2-3 times during the year, will this process still be of any use?    
3. Does it take 10% or more of someone's time? 10% can cost you at least $2,000 a year plus lost opportunities on the growth side of the business.

If the answer is "yes" to all three questions, the process is mature enough to automate. Even if you answer yes to just two of these questions, you should look into automation as well.   

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The Pressure of Compliance Grows with Time

As soon as an organization reaches a certain size, compliance becomes crucial to ensure risk-free operations. Nowadays, the consequences of non-compliance can be dramatic even for big organizations (consider regulations like DORA, NIS2, AI Act, and others). We strongly suggest getting ahead of the game and starting to automate compliance-related processes, documents, and data points as soon as possible. 

The math here is simple: expenses and risks of non-compliance will grow exponentially with your business size. Early on, you might need to invest $1,000 to automate a certain number of compliance-related processes; a year from now, you might need $10,000 to do the same. This is a result of "accumulated" documents, processes, people, systems, and other business entities involved in the process. 

Start compliance automation early, as it will save you a lot of time and money later.

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Intelligent Document Management System at the Heart of Operations

Every organization, depending on its scale, creates, processes, and stores dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of documents and contracts. All these documents are created as part of the organization's operations. People ops, revenue ops, legal ops, procurements—all these business functions contribute to the total pool of documents. Creating, storing, organizing, accessing, and destroying these documents should be a starting point for your automation efforts.   

Understanding the Power of Centralized Document Management

First, let's try to change our mindset. Documents and contracts are not just pages and paragraphs of text. They are data points—your assets describing your relationships with employees, vendors, customers, shareholders, and partners. All the payments you can get from customers, all the expenses you should pay, and all risks are detailed within these documents. Therefore, it is crucial to start by choosing the right document management system for your organization.   

Here are some guidelines and requirements for a modern document management system:

1. Data-centric approach: The system, in addition to managing documents as files and folders, should be able to reveal and manage key data points inside every document. Managing just files is useless at the moment.  
2. "A-Z" approach: The system should enable your organization to create, negotiate, share, execute (e-sign), store, manage, and track all documents without leaving the system (forget sending them via email).  
3. Built-in Document Automation: The system should give you a toolkit to automate documents in a user-friendly, no-code environment. Imagine clicking "New employment agreement" and having it fully prepared for you.  
4. Legacy Documents Support: The system should support the processing of existing documents. It should be able to extract key data from your legacy documents, whether scanned or uploaded.  
5. Interconnectivity: The system should be able to connect to other systems for data exchange. Think of the HRIS system sending over employee data to amend an employment agreement.  

Missing even one of these requirements will significantly decrease the ROI and impact of the centralized document management system.   

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Avokaado Approach

At Avokaado, we combine all the requirements mentioned above (and much more) in our Operational Intelligence Platform, allowing our customers to upload all their existing documents, extract business-critical data, automate outgoing documents, and achieve compliance on autopilot. Feel free to book a demo or sign up for a free trial to learn more.   

Automating Operations Step-by-Step

Now that we have our new and shiny intelligent document management system in place, we can embark on our automation journey. Where do we start? As mentioned above, you should start with the most mature business process. I strongly recommend choosing one business function to start with (HR, revenue, legal, procurement, or any other that you feel is most painful).  

• HR Function Automation Examples:
  
  • Automated employee initial onboarding with digital forms and e-signatures.   
  • Automated performance review workflows with document templates and notifications.   
  • Centralized storage of employee documents (contracts, training records) for easy access.   
• Legal Team Example:
  
  • Creation of a centralized library of legal templates and pre-approved documents.   
  • Automated contract generation and approval workflows.   
  • Secure document sharing and collaboration with clients and partners.

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Mapping the Process

When you've identified a starting point (a mature and painful enough process to automate), it is time to do process mapping. This is a simple but insightful process where you write down all the steps, define the documents needed, add stakeholders involved, and note any required external system connections. To make it simple, you should describe every step of the process with the following structure (feel free to adapt it for your organization): 

1. Step description: Make sure everyone can understand your description.   
2. Incoming data: Think of employee personal information or customer data for a sales agreement.   
3. Outcome: What does this step produce as an outcome? What data does this step send further?    
4. Documents involved: Incoming documents and/or documents being created at this step.   
5. Stakeholders: People involved in the current step with roles and responsibilities during this step. For example, who can sign or approve the document?

When you are done with the full map of the process, you can identify bottlenecks, places for automation, and areas for improvement.   

This approach will help you define any process within any function in your organization. When done properly, it reveals many opportunities for automation and improvements.

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Scaling Automation Across the Organization

When your first process is completely automated and runs smoothly, it is time to focus on scaling automation across other processes or business functions. For example, when you successfully automate job offers and employment agreements, you can switch to vacation applications, travel expenses, terminations, amendments, and other HR-related process automation.   

Here is a checklist of how to successfully scale automation within your organization:

• Prioritize High-Impact Areas: Focus on processes with significant document volume and potential for ROI. Think outside the box (outside your function).   
• Replicate Success: Leverage learnings from the initial implementation to speed up automation deployment.   
• Involve Key Stakeholders: Include key people from each business function in the automation initiative.   
• Ensure Cross-Functional Integration: Connect document management and automation tools with existing systems like CRM, ERP, ATS, and HRIS for seamless data flow.   
• Keep it "up-to-date": Make sure your automation setup, including process maps, document templates, and data points, are all up to date. 

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Conclusion

Automation, and document automation specifically, isn't something you do "to save a penny" but rather a foundation to grow and scale your business. Choosing the right document management system is crucial to ensure compliance and efficiency moving forward. With Avokaado's Operational Intelligence Platform, companies can move beyond traditional DMS tools and embrace a data-first approach that integrates contracts, compliance, and business operations into a single, unified platform. If you're still relying on legacy DMS (focused on files, not data points), now is the time to consider making the switch to Operational Intelligence and AI instead.   

Interested in learning more and seeing Avokaado in action? Book a demo with us and discuss your use case to see how Avokaado can help you manage data, workflows, and documents on a single platform.