In today’s fast-paced business world, effectively utilising the workforce through streamlined workflow process is the secret sauce for success. Workflow automation is a game-changer solution. By simplifying complex work processes, minimising human intervention, and freeing up significant time for your team, this innovative approach enables companies enhance efficiency and productivity at work.
If you are thinking about how to get started with workflow automation, this comprehensive blog post is the perfect place! You will learn the fundamentals, including what is workflow automation, how it can benefit your businesses, and steps to implement this approach for seamless operations.
What is workflow automation?
Workflow automation is a method of automating repetitive manual tasks, activities and processes using digital tools and software in accordance with your business’s defined rules. The aim is to minimise human intervention to enhance efficiency and accuracy, save time and money, and boost organisational productivity.
Examples of workflow automation
Automation in the workflow in not restricted to certain area or department. It spans all the functions of your business. Here are some examples of automated workflows that are commonly used across various departments:
- HR workflow automation: Automation in HR workflow creates smooth coordination between different departments for tasks such as collecting documents, sending welcome emails, and assigning works to HR team members.
- Invoice processing: Automatically routing invoices through the approval process based on predefined rules and criteria reduces the need for manual data entry.
- Inventory management: Automation in the inventory tracking and replenishment ensures the availability of sufficient stocks, reducing stock outs or overstocking.
- Risk management: By automating the assessment and identification of potential risk or vulnerabilities across projects, processes, and systems companies can improve risk the management process, enhance decision-making and avoid potential disasters.
- Sales pipeline: Automation in the sales pipeline can track leads, assign follow-up task with customers, and update status based on customer interactions
Why is automated workflow important for business?
According to our last year Annual Trends report, 50% of manual work is expected to be automated by 2030. This is because workflow automation doesn’t only allow businesses to automate manual tasks, but also empower them to reimaging how they can operate to become more agile, resilient, and customer centric. Here are six key benefits of workflow automation that you can enjoy.
- Save time and money: Automating tasks like data entry, invoice approval, progress tracking, and report compiling can help you save a significant amount of time and effort. An example is OneAdvanced’s workflow automation tools save customers an average of 3,300 hours annually on administrative tasks. Furthermore, by reducing manual tasks and avoiding human errors, they allow you cut expenses associated with labour and protect your business from huge financial loss.
- Deeper visibility and transparency: Leveraging automation in workflows offers a comprehensive view of every stage involved in the project, allowing employees, and stakeholders to monitor advancements, pinpoint obstacles, and know the real-time status of projects. In short, it provides you clarity and visibility of tasks and how tasks are competed.
- Better productivity and efficiency: Automated workflows can reduce repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to dedicate their time and efforts to valuable activities and become more productive. Moreover, this strategic approach can enhance the quality of work by minimising human errors and executing work with accuracy and consistency.
- Enhanced collaboration and communication: When it comes to improving collaboration and communication within a business, workflow automation plays a critical role. Automated workflows lead to seamless flow of information across departments and teams. In project management, for instance, automated processes can notify team members about task assignments, deadline, and project milestones. This streamlines communications and ensures everyone is on the same page by coordinating among teams and departments.
- Engaged workforce: No team or employee wants to be burdened with obsolete technologies or processes, as these can hinder their decision-making ability, reduce efficiency, and breed dissatisfaction. Workflow automation can equip employees with the cutting-edge digital tools to simplify their tasks, enhance their productivity, and increase their engagement and satisfaction.
- Satisfied customers: A satisfied and happy customer is the cornerstone of a successful business. By automating the work processes, your employees can deliver projects on time, improve the quality of work, and ultimately, make customers happy and satisfied.
How can you automate your workflows?
Now that you have deep understanding of what is workflow automation and why it is important for your business, let’s dive into the step-by step process of automating your workflow.
Step 1: Assess your current workflow
Inefficient workflows, outdated tools, and tedious manual tasks are fundamental causes of poor productivity in the workplace. To address this, analyse your existing workflows and digital systems, identify all the elements involved – such as people, documents, data, systems, applications, and time and gain a complete visibility into the work. Furthermore, if you want to explore the three simple steps on how to analyse your workflows and system, download our eBook today!
Step 2: Map out the process
The next step after analysing your current workflows and identifying blockers is to map out your workflow processes. This involves creating a visual representation of tasks (from initial stage to the final stage) in the form of flowchart or diagram to understand how tasks are being executed and completed. Remember, your aim is to find the bottleneck! By mapping out workflow processes, you can identify inefficiencies and redundancy in the workflow and decide where automation can help in the best possible way to enhance your work efficiency and productivity.
Step 3: Define clear goals and objectives
Now that you know where the slowdowns are, you can’t jump into the automation process straightaway. You need to establish a clear automation goal. Instead of taking business -centric approach and asking yourself questions like “how can automation help your business?”, adopting customer-centric strategy can be a prudent decision. Understand how can automation improve customer experience and make your company a reliable partner for customers. Once you define your goals, communicate the same to your team. They can then put their efforts in the right direction and select automation tools keeping customers at the centre.
Step 4: Choose the right automation software for your needs
Workflow automation is more than just a trend; it’s essential tool for boosting workplace productivity. With wide array of automation software available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when selecting the right workflow automation software. Therefore, see a solution that not only automates your specific workflows but also integrated smoothly with your existing systems. Additionally, ensure that it is customised to meet your unique needs and is supported by exception customer service.
Step 5: Implement, test and, validate
Rolling out an automation tool all at once is not advisable. Once you have the right workflow automation tool in your toolkit, the next step is to implement it into your task. Note: Remember not to choose the entire project at first. Select a small section of the project where automation is highly required. Thoroughly test and validate the automation to identify any potential issues or errors that may arise before starting a smoother transition for the entire team.
Do you want to explore OneAdvanced’s ABC process for the effective implementation of workflow digital tools? Download the ‘Power Your Productivity’ eBook today!
Step 6: Train your workforce
Implementing the right automation tools to streamline your work and enhance productivity will only be worthwhile if your workforce knows how to use them efficiently. Train your employees on how to use workflow automation tools to gain maximum benefits. At OneAdvanced, we believe in continuous learning and help our customers achieve the same. We not only offer digital workflow automation software but also provide necessary resources, guides, tutorial videos, and other essential materials to train and make your employees efficient in fully utilising the new digital tools.
Step 7: Monitor and improve
Your job doesn’t stop here! It’s crucial to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of automation tools and make necessary adjustment if required. Gather the feedback from employees, teams, and departments on the performance of automation tool you have implemented. Collect data related to time required to complete tasks, error rates, cost to execute the task completion, and any extra advantages that automation can offer. Compare the results before and after automation. Finally, note the area of improvements and tweak your systems for further optimisation.
Automate you workflows with OneAdvanced!
At OneAdvanced, we've spent years understanding the diverse digital workflow management required within the sectors that we serve. We have developed eight sector-focussed software portfolios that automate your end-to-end processes to enhance the productivity of your employees and clients. Our portfolios encompass Financial Management, Spend Management, Workforce Management, People Management, and Governance & Risk, all underpinned by a resilient cloud platform providing common services for data & analytics, security and AI.
Through these sector-specific portfolios, we are committed to support your digital transformation journey and achieve full potential to success in the digital era. Want to discover how? Download our eBook “Power Your Productivity” today and learn how OneAdvanced software portfolio can help you automation your workflow management and improve business productivity.