How Discovering and Automating Business Processes Can Save Your Company Money
In a competitive market, businesses often focus on growth strategies like marketing, sales, or hiring talent, but one of the most overlooked ways to boost profitability is by improving how the company actually works on the inside.
At Emplex, we help companies discover, map, and automate their business processes — and the financial impact is often far greater than many expect.
This article dives deep into why understanding your internal workflows is crucial, how automation transforms them, and what that means for your bottom line.
Step 1: Discover What Really Happens in Your Business
Before you can automate anything, you need to know what is happening and how. Most companies assume they understand their internal processes — order handling, invoicing, client onboarding, reporting, communication — but once mapped out, the reality often looks very different from what management imagines.
A proper process discovery project involves:
- Interviews and workshops with employees to understand daily tasks
- Process mapping to visualize each step, dependency, and handover
- Bottleneck identification where time and money are lost
- Data flow analysis to see where manual work slows things down
For example, a logistics company we worked with handled incoming orders through email and Excel sheets. Every order required manual entry into their ERP. After discovery, we found this step alone consumed 40 staff hours per month and caused frequent data entry errors. None of this was visible until we mapped the process.
Step 2: Automate Repetitive Workflows
Once processes are clearly defined, automation can replace repetitive manual tasks with reliable, fast workflows. These can range from simple scripts to fully integrated systems, depending on the complexity.
Examples of what automation can handle:
- Data entry and transfer between systems like ERP, CRM, and invoicing tools
- Document generation such as quotes, invoices, and reports
- Approval workflows with automatic notifications and status tracking
- Customer onboarding steps like welcome emails, data collection, and account setup
Continuing with the logistics example, we built an automation that reads incoming order emails, extracts the data, validates it, and creates the order directly in the ERP system. Result: what took 40 hours per month now takes less than 2, and errors dropped by over 90%.
The ROI of Process Automation
Automation projects are not just about saving time; they are about compounding financial results over time. Here’s how ROI typically breaks down:
- Labor savings: Automating a task that takes 40 hours per month at an average salary cost of €25 per hour saves €12,000 per year.
- Error reduction: If manual data entry errors cost €5,000 annually in corrections and customer dissatisfaction, automation removes most of that.
- Faster workflows: Shorter processing times mean faster invoicing and quicker revenue recognition.
- Scalability without hiring: Automation allows growth without linear increases in payroll.
Many companies see a full return on investment within 3 to 6 months. After that, the automation continues to deliver savings year after year.
Beyond Cost Savings: Strategic Advantages
The benefits go beyond cutting costs. Automation frees your team from repetitive tasks, letting them focus on higher-value work like improving customer experience or developing new products. It also creates a more reliable and predictable operation, which is essential as companies scale.
For instance, a consultancy automating its client onboarding process not only saved 20 hours per client but also improved client satisfaction scores because onboarding became faster and more consistent. That improvement indirectly boosted retention and revenue.
Conclusion: Efficiency Is the Smartest Investment
Automating business processes is not about replacing people — it’s about letting people focus on work that actually grows the business. Most companies waste thousands of euros every year on inefficiencies they do not even see. By first discovering and mapping your workflows, then strategically automating them, you build a leaner, faster, and more profitable company.
At Emplex, we specialize in identifying these hidden inefficiencies and building tailored automation solutions that deliver measurable ROI. Whether you are dealing with manual order entry, scattered data between systems, or slow internal workflows, we help turn those challenges into scalable, automated processes.
If you are ready to uncover how much money your business could save through automation, get in touch with us. The first discovery session alone often reveals opportunities worth tens of thousands of euros per year.