Top Strategies and Benefits of Workflow Automation for Modern Enterprises
Automation has started becoming a norm across various industry sectors. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of companies want to automate their workflows. As a result, a Marketsandmarkets.com research report has expected that the workflow automation industry will reach $18.45 billion by 2023.
This article will discuss workflow automation’s top benefits and the top strategies to automate workflows in your enterprise. Let’s start from scratch and see what workflow automation is.
What is Workflow Automation in Your Enterprise?
Automation is designed to reduce the need for any human intervention. When it comes to workflow, automation can reduce the requirement for any manual work in the process. Put, in workflow automation, some parts of the manual tasks or work area assigned to technology, including a tool, an app, or AI-powered bots.
Workflow automation aims to manage the business workflow with ease. It can handle all the repetitive tasks and mundane activities to reduce your employees’ workload. An advanced task management tool or workflow automation software can optimize the entire workflow by automating various business activities.
Your business’s various departments can leverage workflow automation’s benefits using the advanced project management tool or task management software. For example, the sales and marketing departments can get automatically qualified leads from the website or product page and automate the email marketing campaign. The HR department can take help of automation in employee onboarding and leave management.
Automation also plays a vital role in managing the company’s expenses, travel reimbursement, and accounts payable. The customer service department can bring automation in raising and assigning support tickets and providing status updates to the customers in real-time. In a way, an automated workflow system can increase employees’ efficiency and enhance their productivity.
Let’s go through the top benefits of workflow automation.
Major Benefits of Workflow Automation for Modern Businesses
When a quick and excellent job is all you want, workflow automation should be your choice. As many as 67% of managers agreed that workflow automation helps them remain competitive amid increasing challenges.
Here is what workflow automation can give to modern businesses.
- Reduction in Human Errors
To err is human- however, most errors occur when attempting repetitive tasks like data entry. Some of the most common workplace errors are incomplete information, mishandling of sensitive data, and misplaced documents. There, the workflow automation solution lends a helping hand by automating such repetitive tasks and reduce the possibility of human errors.
- Increased Productivity
When repetitive administrative tasks get automated, the employee’s lot of time and effort is saved. Automation also enables your teammates to take up bigger projects to add value to the business. It makes it easy for employees to focus on core processes to meet the deadlines more effectively for every project.
- Quick Communication
Long email threads are outdated, but their use is significantly decreased thanks to real-time and efficient communication. Process automation enables your team to make efficient communication. As a team member finishes one step of the process, the workflow automation software can notify the other team members responsible for the next process. What’s more, the team automatically receives the task files that facilitate the members to get rid of pesky email attachments. An advanced task management tool shares a list of tasks with team members, and everyone can track the project’s progress.
- Improved Customer Service
If your customers are unsatisfied with your products and services, the chances are high that they will find other options. It is possible to retain customers with the help of automation. For example, the manual process for resolving the customer’s queries and issues is insufficient, and you miss out on many important requests. On the other hand, the lack of response will lead to unhappy or unsatisfied customers. Automation can enable you to respond quickly to the customer’s queries.
How to Initiate Workflow Automation?
Initiating workflow automation seems a daunting task, but it becomes quite an easy process with the customized task management tool. Here we give four aspects that you should keep in mind while initiating automation in your workflow.
- Identifying Tasks
This is the first and foremost step. The task management tool can help you identify repetitive and complex tasks. You can easily identify tasks as repetitive, especially if they
- Keep on running on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
- Need a lot of time to finish and follow the same steps
- Require more manual intervention and are non-critical
- Need a large amount of data to be processed
- Have a high risk of human errors
Defining Goals
Ideally, this should be the first step for your organization. However, as goals keep changing in different projects, you can define various goals that can be easily achieved after implementing workflow automation. Your automating workflow goals can increase team productivity, speed up production, or improve customer services. After identifying repetitive tasks and defining goals, you can start giving training to your team.
- Giving Training
Workflow automation needs active participation from all your team members. It is quite possible that, like many other companies, your company may also witness some resistance when you initiate the automation process. Therefore, you should communicate and give your employees training to ensure a smooth transition and make their lives easier.
- Measuring KPIs
So, you have initiated the workflow automation process. But, has it started yielding results? Well, you can track KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to see the difference made by the workflow automation in your business operations. These KPIs need to be based on key business goals. You can find whether productivity increases and track online feedback to know whether customers are satisfied with automated processes.
Concluding Lines
Workflow automation is a need of the hour. It is indeed a powerful way to optimize any business process. When done right, it can enhance your team’s productivity and efficiency, and you can easily meet the deadlines for the project. All you need to integrate a robust task management tool in your business system to remain competitive and productive. The task management software will take care of various processes while you can focus on other productive activities.
Author Bio
Annie William is a content cum digital marketer at TaskOPad, a leading Task Management Software. She is an avid reader and likes to remain updated on the latest time management and project management trends. Her articles are informative and interesting at the same time as she can express insightful thoughts clearly.
