Workflows can be complex endeavors and can be found across functional areas like finance, marketing, sales or IT. Problems often arise when a short-term workaround becomes a long-term “solution,” or just happens when nobody’s taken the time to sit down and create a thought-out workflow. Workflow problems can slow down or derail processes from onboarding new employees to generating sales leads.
The main challenge companies face when automating workflows is that they’re often poorly documented, which results in employees following certain practices over time without much thought about whether they make sense. While there are tools that would help to automate many processes, the cost and effort of implementing them may prevent organizations from taking such a step. Instead, people cobble together their own workarounds without understanding the opportunity for automation.
Typically, companies try to automate their workflows by introducing email notifications. For example, when a person in one department completes a form, it may trigger an email notification to another person in the workflow. Unfortunately, this common approach creates a lot of additional email while still requiring the user to go to a separate system in order to take the next action, and these extra steps tend to cancel out the hoped productivity gains.
To achieve success, start by looking for ways to streamline or eliminate steps before trying to automate a process. Are all the steps necessary? Does your process really require as many approvals? Doing the process audit up front improves the effectiveness of your automated workflows, but many companies skip this step.
You may have what seems to be an overwhelming number of processes that could use automation. How do you prioritize? Make sure to focus automation around effort, cost and impact. Where would automation have the greatest impact for the least cost? A lot of companies set out to document all their workflows and get overwhelmed. Prioritizing helps you decide where to focus your efforts.
Your five best tips for automating workflows:
- Take inventory of current workflows and document the processes at a high level.
- Determine which processes could be reengineered or entirely eliminated.
- Prioritize the remaining workflows based on their importance, impact and the estimated cost to automate them.
- Determine which solution would be appropriate for automating the workflows, with preference given to solutions and platforms you already know and use internally, such as your CRM system, CMS platform or SharePoint. Familiar tools minimize the effort.
- Structure and implement a pilot program. Gather feedback and observe user behavior to test your assumptions about automation.
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