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Workflow Automation Is an approach for streamlining and automating multiple processes across your applications with no manual intervention - perfect for simplifying business processes! Not to mention its great convenience: everything happens automatically!
What is Workflow Automation?
Workflow Automation refers to streamlining and automating repeatable tasks in software that you utilize - going far beyond simple to-do items such as adding emails to a To-Do list.
Unsure About Workflow Automation? To understand workflow automation clearly, we need a solid grasp of what a workflow is and what automation entails.
What is Automation
Automating sets something to run automatically, using two commands called WHEN and DO. These simple phrases make even complicated automation systems manageable and straightforward.
What is a Workflow?
Workflow is an organized sequence of repeatable steps performed within an application to complete an action or task.
Assuming they're similar, workflow and processes might appear similar at first glance, but each has unique defining qualities and useful tools.
Process refers to what needs to be completed; your business might have established procedures on how to bill customers once you win an opportunity or deal.
Before beginning work on any given proposal or deal, sending invoices out and having them signed and paid off by customers are crucial steps that need to happen first.
Workflows are crucial to complete processes efficiently. A workflow describes "how" something gets done - such as uploading an invoice created in QuickBooks onto DocuSign before emailing it directly to customers for signature, then following up with them with an invoice payment request and follow-up emails via Stripe or similar services.
Examples of workflow Automation
Automating workflows enables your business to streamline processes such as invoice management or sending marketing emails automatically.
Example of What you can Automate :
- One spreadsheet to monitor brand mentions across social media and website channels.
- Follow up with qualified leads to arrange consultation sessions.
- Subscriber lists should be monitored to identify those with bounced email accounts and remove them as quickly as possible from a newsletter list.
- Create weekly reports detailing which tasks have been completed within your project.
- Encourage customers to provide feedback about a purchased product by inviting reviews to write for it on Amazon or elsewhere.
- Once a transaction has occurred successfully, collect your invoices' signatures to complete it.
Here are a few key business processes which involve multiple steps and, often, multiple management teams.
Why Automate Workflows?
Establishing processes within your business takes hard work. While setting up automatic systems may feel intimidating at first, in reality, they provide important protection and flexibility in business operations.
Automation investments bring many benefits:
- Automating your workflow can save time. Automation in work provides time savings to 66 percent of knowledge workers in small and midsize companies.
- Workflow automation reduces errors. Thirty-eight percent of knowledge workers surveyed are used for data integration; additionally, automated data entry reduced errors, according to 34 percent of knowledge workers who responded in an informal poll.
- Businesses can expand by automating their workflow. Studies show that workflow automation helps small companies compete more successfully against larger rivals by moving more quickly, closing leads quicker, spending less on tedious tasks, providing improved service to clients faster, and decreasing mistakes.
Workflow Automation can be Beneficial to Anyone
Workflow automation can benefit all industries. App and software users will especially find this beneficial. Below are several examples that showcase how workflow automation can prove advantageous for various jobs:
Ideas for Workflow Automation
Marketing Activities
Marketing Operations teams oversee all aspects of campaign back-end management, such as lead management, scoring, data gathering, and tracking.
Marketing operations people tend to become adept with automation since there's so much to take care of at once!
Workflow automation enables marketing operations teams to spot and correct data errors before they have an adverse impact, freeing up their time for problem-solving activities.
Marketing operations professionals could benefit from employing workflow automation in their marketing:
- Lead Management: Lead management refers to organizing the collection and classification of leads before routing them effectively. Automating lead collection ensures clean data for use in campaigns.
- Subscriber Segmentation: Segmenting allows you to deliver relevant messaging to your target audience. At the same time, workflow automation enables the segmentation of new subscribers.
- Automating Data to Clean it up: Formatting and data errors are significant problems that must be avoided at all costs, which is why automating your data can allow you to catch errors early and clean them without manual intervention.
Social Media Managers
Any business must implement a social media strategy. Social media managers represent your brand to customers while tracking their reactions.
Due to their nature of work, these managers tend to maintain "always on" schedules.
Social media managers can automate their workflows to stay abreast of trends, monitor customer sentiment and produce content without becoming exhausted by managing everything themselves.
Workflow Automation for Social Media Managers:
- Tracking Brand Mentions: Social media managers cannot always be everywhere at once; automation workflows may help social media managers keep an eye on online conversations more closely.
- Content Sharing on Multiple Platforms: Each platform needs its strategy for sharing, yet more than manual posting is required - workflow automation may speed up sharing even further.
- Repurposing Social Media Content: Managers have years of experience creating compelling posts quickly for social media channels like LinkedIn. Automation workflows simplify the task by collecting ideas in one central spot and developing it quicker.
- Tracking Posts: Social Media managers must provide reports detailing each post's performance to demonstrate to stakeholders their work has value. Auditing past posts helps identify which content engages followers more. With automation at their disposal, Social Media managers will spend less time manually analyzing results and more time reviewing automated results with automation tools.
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Sales
Sales is often an exhausting, time-consuming profession that comes with great pressure. Sales representatives must convert prospective customers to paying ones using tools like CRM (Customer Relations Management).
Automating their workflow allows salespeople to focus more on direct interactions.
Workflow Automation for Sales Professionals:
- Follow-Up on Leads: Responding promptly when an interested prospect indicates their desire is paramount; automating your lead contact system can make this task simpler and help ensure proper follow-up is made.
- Scheduling Demos: Consults are integral for business success; however, scheduling software saves salespeople valuable time when managing meetings by automating meeting countless times with clients or prospects. With scheduling software's assistance, they can focus on other important tasks more easily than negotiating meeting delivery.
- Management Teams: Attend seminars on process optimization, sales teams get monthly training from external professionals, marketing teams are given a budget to overhaul the website, and product teams meet with college instructors to learn how their product can be changed to better meet customer needs.Best for: Creating a framework for continuous improvementExecuting optimization in 5 stepsNo matter which of these process optimization techniques you choose to explore, there's a pretty general overarching structure to process optimization you can expect to work through:automation.Related reading:The ultimate guide to business process management (BPM)What is a workflow? times themselves.
- Tracking and Updating the Sales Pipeline: Since your CRM is the source of truth for major deals, any changes must be recorded accurately and reflected upon. Workflow automation updates statuses based on specific events to maintain an up-to-date sales pipeline.
- Updating Contacts and Managing Them: Recording customer interactions is no fun for anyone. Yet, salespeople need to do this when passing along newly acquired customers to another team. Automating workflows can help capture key info without interfering with workflow.
Accountancy
Can you imagine running your business without accounting? As businesses grow larger and money flows increase exponentially, maintaining accurate records of money transactions becomes ever more essential.
Automating accounting workflow can assist accountants in keeping an accurate tab of funds flowing in and out while helping minimize errors by tracking cash and data storage systems.
Accounting professionals could benefit from using workflow automation to streamline their accounting:
- Billing: Billing can often become tedious and repetitive, making it an excellent candidate for automation.
- Client Onboarding: With careful attention to every detail, payment receipt and client onboarding could be smooth. Automating this ongoing process will capture essential data to facilitate an effortless handoff from one step to the other.
- How Can You File Expense Reports: Data Entry and People Management can become tedious tasks; automating your workflow may relieve even the most tedious aspects of filing expense reports.
- Update CRM Tools with Payment Data: Accounting teams often find it challenging to update financial data across platforms, including databases and CRMs. Automated financial data updates may provide a solution by automatically populating each platform with financial updates.
- Collecting Signatures: Collecting signatures quickly can be as challenging as collecting payment on time; automating workflows may make this task less disruptive and annoying.
e-Commerce
Online shops must make every effort to have efficient processes as customers will quickly notice any discrepancies with them, if any exist, like missing tracking codes that they need to follow up on their order or bad processes that create poor customer experiences that result in negative reviews of products sold online.
Automating workflows in eCommerce helps streamline the purchasing experience from browsing to purchasing and shipping, all the way through fulfillment and beyond.
Workflow Automation in eCommerce:
- Order Fulfillment: Accuracy in this current process is paramount; humans may make errors with packaging, labels, or order forms which requires automation to reduce error rates and ensure maximum precision during fulfillment. Workflow automation provides the solution by speeding up deliveries while increasing delivery accuracy and improving delivery process speed.
- Tracking Sales: Tracking goes beyond accounting or stock management to analytics - you can develop better products by learning who's buying them, then target marketing accordingly. Automating workflow with eCommerce website integration into CRM systems, marketing channels, and accounting software may also prove advantageous in optimizing results.
- Keep Customers Engaged: Add customers to mailing lists: Keep in contact with customers by connecting your eCommerce platform with email platforms to keep customers informed.
- Automatic notifications on failed charges: Automating workflows allows us to keep an eye on what may not be working properly; by connecting payment and eCommerce platforms with various other communication tools, automatic alerts for failed orders or payments can be set up as automatic notifications.
- Invite Customers to Write Reviews: It has never been simpler to research products before purchasing, with reviewers acting as your social proof and impacting sales directly or indirectly. Automating workflows makes reviewing, tracking, and gathering feedback simpler for all involved.
Read More: What Are The Different Types Of Business Process Automation?
Project Managers
Project managers are charged with keeping critical business projects on schedule. Their duties include overseeing people, tasks, and budgets to achieve this end result.
Project managers can use automation technology to manage, delegate and track tasks more effectively.
Project managers can utilize workflow automation to increase efficiency:
- Reports: Project managers are held responsible for overseeing any project's progress, so workflow automation offered by project management software as an invaluable source of project updates can also assist managers with producing reports and disseminating them effectively.
- Delegating Tasks: Successful projects rely heavily on teamwork, so project managers need to communicate with and delegate tasks amongst group members to assign duties sourced from various sources; automating routine chores frees them up for more important responsibilities.
- Time Reminders: Project managers manage processes and people; however, their power may be limited. Therefore, automating reminders could save them the hassle of tracking down members of their project teams individually.
- Tracking Time: Project Managers oversee both the scope and delivery schedule for their projects, often employing time tracking instead of guesstimates to gain an accurate timeline understanding. Workflow automation reduces human error by eliminating the dependency on humans for accurate timekeeping.
Definition of BPM:
Business Process Management, often called BPM, refers to solutions and tools used for automating, optimizing, monitoring, managing, and controlling processes that help organizations become agile through automation, optimization, management, and oversight of these activities.
BPM seeks to increase operational efficiencies and scalability through a holistic approach to optimizing end-to-end process improvements within an organization.
Business Process Management, or BPM for short, is an organizational discipline in which businesses take a systematic and objective look at all processes, individually and collectively, to examine how effectively and efficiently their organization is operating.
BPM analyzes current conditions while pinpointing areas for improvement that could make an organization even more cost-effective and successful.
Each department's role is to convert raw information or material into another format; typically, they oversee several key processes that need addressing.
Business Process Management Strategy
Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach to improving efficiency, effectiveness, and agility through business process design, execution, and optimization.
BPM includes all elements needed for optimizing these business processes, including definition, design, execution monitoring, and optimization of processes.
Why Does BPM matter?
Business Process Management helps organizations increase productivity and agility. This field involves the identification, definition, design, execution, and continuous optimization of processes used by organizations for producing goods and services.
By eliminating bottlenecks and streamlining processes to increase quality while decreasing costs. Business process management also enables organizations to respond more rapidly to changing customer and market needs while adapting quickly to emerging technology or business models; by managing processes effectively, organizations can achieve long-term competitive success and greater success overall.
What is Business Process Management for?
Poorly planned and coordinated business processes can create chaos. Individuals only perceive part of a process at any time; few people can see its ramifications simultaneously - where its beginning and end points lie, what data are necessary, or whether bottlenecks exist in any particular business process.
Chaos and uncontrolled processes are detrimental to a company, often leading to disastrous scenarios:
- The Time Waste.
- More errors
- Increased Blame
- Data shortage
- Demoralized employees
Business process management (BPM) offers organizations an effective tool for streamlining operations and keeping things moving efficiently.
The BPM Lifecycle: Steps
Design
Processes typically consist of collecting data through forms, followed by a workflow process to process this information.
So create your form, assign responsibility for each step in your workflow process, and establish who needs to complete them all in time.
Model
Make it visual: timelines and conditions will allow you to comprehend how events unfold over time.
Execute
Before opening it up to all users, conduct a test run with a smaller group and restrict access to sensitive data.
Monitor
Track the progression of processes throughout their workflow to ensure effective process monitoring is carried out.
Use appropriate metrics for tracking progress, measuring efficiency, and pinpointing any process bottlenecks that might arise.
Optimize
Keep a record of any improvements that could be made to forms or workflow. Consider business process improvement when conducting your analysis.
Read More: Business Process Automation Guide 2023
Business Process Management Best Practices
Over time, best practices have developed that aid BPM strategies. BPM stands for Business Process Management, and organizations can utilize them effectively to manage their processes:
Ensure You Have Clear Objectives And Goals
Understanding the intended outcomes of an organization's business processes is vital for meeting their overall goals and ensuring their operations align with them.
Participants Should Be Involved
Assimilation of key stakeholders into business process design and management will enable you to gain their support and buy-in for improvements.
Documentation And Analysis Of Processes
Documenting business processes is an invaluable way for organizations to gain greater insights into their operations, identify areas for improvement, and track progress.
Process Modeling Is A Useful Technique
Flowcharts, BPMN models, and other process modeling tools can be helpful tools in visualizing processes to identify bottlenecks more quickly.
Measure And Monitor Process Performance Continuously
Business processes should be regularly evaluated and measured to provide data that allows identifying any problems or potential issues with performance.
Automate Processes Using Technology
Automation and technological solutions help organizations optimize and streamline their processes, decreasing manual labor requirements and increasing efficiencies.
Encourage A Culture That Values Continuous Improvement.
Encouraging a culture of continual improvement can assist organizations in remaining agile and adaptable and meeting changing requirements by adapting processes accordingly.
How can Business Process Management Benefit You?
BPM can help your business in many different ways:
- Control complex processes.
- Cartography, analysis, and enhancement of business processes.
- Operating more efficiently can assist with running your business more successfully.
- Reaching bigger goals for your organization.
- Digital transformation: the way forward.
- Reducing operations that become entangled.
- Keep an eye on individual items as they move through your workflow process.
What is Business Process Management, and what are its Different Types?
BPM systems can be divided into three main categories depending on their purpose:
BPM Based on the Integration
Business process management software is specifically tailored for processes that largely move between systems (e.g., HRMS, CRM, and ERP), where human involvement may be minimal (e.g., minimum involvement with HRMS, CRM, or ERP software is typically needed); its integration-centric systems provide APIs or connectors which facilitate quick processes.
BPM Human Centric
BPM, which focuses on human interactions, is typically used for processes where humans serve as primary executors, often including many tasks and approvals performed by individual users.
They're notable for having user-friendly interfaces with quick notifications and seamless tracking features.
BPM Document-centric
When a document is at the heart of a process (e.g., A contract or an agreement is the core of a business process.
The workflow allows routing, formatting, and verifying the document as it progresses. Most business process management software will incorporate some of the above, though each will have a particular specialty.
Business Process Management Examples
HR
Have your onboarding procedures ever seemed disorganized and too complex to manage, leaving candidates exhausted? Your HR department could benefit greatly by employing Business Process Management principles (BPM).
By automating processes through BPM in HR departments, automate entire processes while saving both time and money. Here are a few examples of how your HR department could use BPM:
- Accelerated approval of employee timesheets.
- Smooth onboarding process of new employees.
Sales
Most organizations spend considerable time and resources coordinating between their Sales team and AR department to approve invoices for sales transactions, often bogged down with manual errors that cause significant delays in invoice approval and necessitate repeated discussions between both departments regarding how best to approach it.
Business process management simplifies invoice approval by automating this step and eliminating manual mistakes while giving salespeople better communication between themselves and AR without needing to explain themselves all over again, making business process management an invaluable asset to any sales organization!
Financial Services
Every day, finance departments face an onslaught of email and paper forms from teams requiring money. When an asset management department wants to buy 50 laptops, they submit the quote from their vendor directly to finance for approval; just one example.
Now imagine all these forms pouring through from different teams daily! With software for business process management (BPM), keeping track of these processes would be nearly possible with some form of system assistance; business process management software provides invaluable help here and can save thousands in finance departments!
- Travel requests can now be approved with one simple click.
- Customize workflows for different scenarios.
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Conclusion
Business Process Management is an invaluable asset that enables organizations to realize their goals more rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Embarking upon a strategic business process management initiative allows businesses to capitalize on this powerful tool - offering tangible advantages through systematic implementation.
