5 Tips on Where to Start When Automating Manual Processes

Have you been shopping for a new car lately? The technology in cars has come a long way. Today, there are all kinds of cool gadgets and gizmos available that make it hard to determine what options to choose without breaking the bank.

Workflow automation is like new car technology. When you start to automate the manual aspects of your business, the opportunities are endless. There’s so many bells and whistles that you begin to question where to start. Here are 5 areas to look at when you set off down the road of automation.

Repetitive Tasks 

We all have repetitive tasks that we do every day. For example, you get up each morning and take a shower, get ready, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth and go to work. Nothing changes, same routine throughout the work week. In your personal life repetitive tasks are necessary to ensure that you are at work on time and presentable to your coworkers. However in business, they can be time consuming, inefficient, and boring, but necessary.

Take a look through your organization and find the tasks that are done the same way every day, every week, or every month. Do they have to be done by a person? If they were automated, you could increase throughput and reduce cycle times. Automation ensures that the same logic is used to make the same decision every time. Now that the system does the work for you, you and your teams are free to manage the exceptions to the standards.

Status Reporting 

How are you currently getting status updates?  Do you live and breathe Excel spreadsheets?  It can be cumbersome to rely on updates from emails, meetings, or walk-by chats.  The updates need to be applied to the spreadsheets.  The spreadsheets are then handed off as communication of updates or task assignments.  By the time you get everything updated and distributed, it’s out of date again.

Trash the spreadsheets!  When you automate your processes, you can get an aggregated view of all information configured to the needs of each role within your organization.  Each user has their own dashboard to review all work activities, alerts, exceptions, and documents.  Easily monitor all activities, in real-time, gaining visibility into all work and exceptions.

Escalations and Approvals 

Approvals can be a bit tricky in some organizations. Sometimes it’s not completely clear when an approval is needed or when it’s not. Then when an approval is required, the question becomes who can approve it. Workflow can streamline your escalation and approval process, ensuring all required approvals are achieved.

Workflow contains business rules that take the guesswork out of certain decision making situations. As the workflow receives input from data entered and tasks are completed, the business rules verify all required approvals are achieved and appropriate next steps are taken. Integrated business rules replace the need for manual decisions to move the process forward.

Gaps Between Processes

Do you have documents that are used by various teams to execute tasks?  Do you have data in one system that would make your job easier if it were in another system? Workflow can help with that.

Workflow fills the gaps between processes by moving around knowledge, documents, expertise, and information.  It launches what is needed from person to person, team to team, and system to system.  Each group gets what they need, when they need it, and in real time.

Document Management

How do you get the documents you need to do your job?  Are the images sent to you through email?  Or does Sally from the department down that hall drop off a stack of paper at your desk every Monday morning? Let workflow reduce the number of emails you receive and clear the clutter from your desk.

How awesome would it be to have all images and documents for an account in a single place?  A quick search by a unique identifier in your workflow solution is all you need for easy retrieval.  No more looking through emails or searching in various systems. If Sally drops off a stack of documents, simply scan them in. Let the system parse out critical data and distribute both data and document automatically. You now have access to all related data, documents, communications, and images across departments in one place.