Mountains of turkey and carbs at the Thanksgiving dinner table produce copious amounts of tryptophan which when mixed with serotonin creates melatonin.

This is the main reason we feel sleepy and ready for that nap after a large Thanksgiving meal (and that’s why some of us at Prescriptive Profits think ham is the better choice, but that’s an argument for a different day).

What is problematic for many businesses is that the post-turkey nap rolls into the workplace and many people can’t shake the holiday fatigue until the next year, in this case 2023, rolls around.

We can sit and blame the hearty turkey meal for the slowdown in production by a business and its employees but the truth is there are other reasons why:

• People taking time off that has accrued throughout the year
• Holidays disrupting typical work weeks
• Individuals taking their foot off of the gas if they’ve met their goal on the year

Crunch time is when inefficient systems, bottlenecks and workflows rear their ugly heads. In order to have December match or surpass the efficiency of any other month of the year, regardless of employee variables, businesses need to adopt automation.

A prime example of this is a generic Accounts Receivable process. Typically, this is how the process looks:

• An employee manually sorts through current open invoices and identifies customers with past-due balances.
• The employee pulls relevant invoices with past due balances and manually collects the client’s contact information from the invoice.
• The employee compiles the list of contacts requiring outreach and manually calls each contact to inform them of their payment status.
• The employee marks the status of each to include in the end-of-day report highlighting their activity.
• The employee takes time to manually construct their daily report to send to the AR manager.

These tasks are interrupted by incoming request emails that require attention, or a second employee can be deployed to handle the inbound requests. All of this is done with the risk of human error, fatigue and distractions.

Here is how that same process works with automation:

• A bot processes an AR analysis report for current open invoices.
• A bot runs collection rules against the report and extracts needed customer contact information to individually contact each customer via email/text to highlight past due amounts.
• A bot can signal specific customers that fit a client’s criteria like past due balance or time lapsed. The identified customer is contacted with a call from a bot or is added to a call list to be completed by the client. The list is populated with all relevant information needed by a human caller.
• A report is generated and sent to the AR manager highlighting the day’s results.
• The bot simultaneously monitors the AR inbox. As requests are received, the bot pulls needed information from AR systems and sends relevant requests to clients, such as a request for invoice copies. All other requests would be forwarded to the AR manager.

This singular process can be customized to each client’s individual needs and enables a vital part of the organization to still function at a high level even when human individuals are out or not on their A game. To make a long story short, automated processes don’t:

• Take time off for vacation
• Have sick days
• Have inefficient days
• Only work 9-5

If there are highly repetitive tasks taking place behind a computer screen, chances are that the task can be automated even if your staff has that holiday daze. Look at your processes to see where you can add automation to your wishlist.

Lets get to work.

Prescriptive Profits #12