If your organisation is still manually handling workflow processes and spending resources on repetitive mundane tasks, it’s time to change!
Manual tasks that are mundane, repetitive and tedious are draining for your resources. Working on such tasks wastes your employees’ valuable time which they would rather spend on crucial tasks. With that being said, such tasks are an important part of the existing workflow processes and cannot be ignored.
So, how do you streamline these workflows and ensure that you and your teams stay highly productive? The key is workflow automation. In this article, we will share how your organisation can benefit from workflow automation and also take a closer look at some real-life use cases and examples of workflow automation. But before we dive in, let’s understand what terms like workflow process and workflow automation mean.
A workflow process consists of a set of sequential tasks that must be performed in order to complete a job. Such a process relies upon pre-determined business rules for actions and is typically linear and repeatable.
A workflow process is different from a business process, since it focuses primarily on the completion of a specific task, rather than achieving a higher business goal or objective. For example, employee onboarding is a business process, while assigning the new employee with an email address and employee ID is a workflow process.
The process of using automation software or bots to automate a series of manual tasks is known as workflow automation. It’s aimed at increasing the efficiency of the processes and reducing the amount of time spent on manual tasks. Some common use cases of workflow automation are document routing, payroll processing, invoice generation and data entry.
Here are just some of the benefits that your organisation can achieve after implementing workflow automation:
The majority of work hours of your employees are typically spent on repetitive tasks and manual processing of information. As a result, their potential goes underused and their overall productivity is reduced significantly. With the help of workflow automation, you can significantly reduce the need for manual intervention by automating the task as far as possible, thereby directly increasing the work output and productivity of your teams.
The more manual intervention, the higher the chances of human error. No wonder why manual workshoes are typically more prone to errors! Needless to say, such types of errors can have a negative impact on your bottom line and you will need to spend even more resources in order to fix the resulting issues. When you implement workflow automation, you can greatly reduce the risk of errors, since the automation software will handle the tasks on the basis of pre-defined rules and logic.
Accountability is crucial for ensuring smooth business operations and satisfied clients. Workflow automation can increase accountability in your business processes by notifying your team members to intervene only when their input is required and also by keeping your team leaders constantly aware of the task’s progress.
It’s common for manual processes to have bottlenecks and long waiting times. In addition to this, it’s generally hard to determine the exact causes for the bottlenecks, due to the limited visibility of the overall process flow. However, when you implement workflow automation, it’s not only easy to pinpoint where the bottlenecks lie, but also the reasons behind them. Once the bottlenecks are eliminated, the waiting times can be greatly reduced, resulting in faster processing and delivery.
Needless to say, manual processes are highly dependent on your manpower. When you reduce the dependency on people, reduce waiting times, eliminate bottlenecks and improve the efficiency of your workflow process with the help of automation, it has a direct impact on your profitability and the bottom line.
Just like every other department of an organisation, the IT department carries a good share of responsibilities, which includes everything from managing the servers to resolving technical issues. To avoid overburdening your IT teams, it’s best to automate processes like these:
More often than not, accounting processes require a significant amount of manual inputs in the form of data entry. As a result, there is plenty of room for error and it can potentially lead to cash flow problems, if the errors go unnoticed. If you wish to minimise such errors and invest in workflow automation instead, here are just some of the processes you can consider automating:
The HR department of any organisation can benefit from workflow automation, especially if their role requires chasing others for pieces of information or working on tasks which could rather be automated. Here are just some of the HR processes that can be easily automated:
Sales teams are responsible for building and maintaining relationships with clients and play an important role in growing the business. However, sales processes have bottlenecks which are often associated with manual tasks, which in turn affects the team’s productivity and allows them lesser time for other crucial tasks. This is why it’s a nice idea to automate sales processes and let your sales teams focus on what’s more important: closing deals. Here are some of the sales processes that you should consider automating:
Some of the most common marketing jobs include audience research, market research, and campaign management. Workflow automation can improve the efficiency of the existing processes and help the marketing team get more done. Here are just some of the marketing tasks that can be automated with relative ease:
Considering the plenty of benefits, wide range of applications and ease of implementation, every organisation should consider utilising workflow automation in as many departments as possible.
If your organisation is interested in automating the existing workflow processes and maximising productivity, get in touch with our team of automation experts today!
