Efficient Operations: How Workflow Automation Benefits Your Business

All across the UK, productivity levels in the workplace are falling. In fact, over a quarter of British office workers admit that they're unproductive for at least 2 hours every workday

When added together this results in 40 million hours of lost productivity per week.

Clearly, there's a problem with the way most business operate in the UK. It's a major issue that needs resolving quickly to stop the loss of ridiculous amounts of time and money.

One of the best ways to ensure that your employees remain productive and that your business grows is by using automation to time-consuming but unproductive tasks.

Properly implemented workflow automation could save your firm weeks of lost time and thousands of lost pounds.

But you're probably wondering: what exactly is an automated workflow? How does it help to streamline business processes and save you money? Today, we're going to dive into these questions and take an in-depth look at workflow automation.

Read on to learn how to boost your productivity to new heights!

What Is Workflow Management?

Before getting into what workflow automation is, it's crucial to first understand what workflow management means on its most basic level. Read on to glean some insight into this process and why each and every business needs a good workflow

Defining Workflow Management

In the most basic sense, the 'workflow' of an organisation refers to all the tasks that the company completes. Generally, having a workflow means that there are a series of tasks that must be completed in sequence with one another - it is more than just one task that needs to be done. Workflow management, therefore, is the coordination of tasks that constitute what that organisation does.

When a company analyses the management of their workflow, they're going to need to pay attention to a variety of different factors. One of the main ones is the way that tasks must coordinate with one another. Often, one item will need to be completed before another can begin. If you're mapping the workflow of your organisation, you'll need to take into account that some tasks are prerequisites for the completion of others.

When looking at and managing a workflow, you'll also need to consider the ways that individuals and departments within your organisation interact with one another. You'll need to look into the professionals that will need to collaborate on any given project in order to achieve results.

Business Process Mapping

Creating workflows can be a trying and time-consuming task. Having to write down and organise this information is a huge challenge. You can easily spend hours documenting every single aspect of what you, creating and updating complex visualisations before having start all over again because you missed a stage.

Our Whitepaper will help you learn how to effectively create workflows and how to focus your efforts on the aspects of your business that require the most attention.

Questions that this guide will answer include what business process mapping is, the steps you'll need to develop these maps, and how you can secure employee engagement when changing the workplace to be a digitally automated arena.

Before you can consider workflow automation for your business, be sure to download this guide and consult it whenever confusion arises.

What Is Workflow Automation?

Workflow software is the key to streamlining business at any company. Still, you probably have some questions. What exactly is workflow automation, anyway, and how does this software work? Here, we're going to discuss the basics of workflow software that you can use to ensure that your business operates at an efficient and effective rate.

The Basics of Automated Workflows

Earlier, we talked about how difficult and draining it would be to create a workflow map by hand. Workflow automation is the alternative to doing this, and it will save you and your employees a lot of time and energy.

Generally, automation is the computerised completion of simple, repetitive tasks. All that an automated workflow is, is a simple set of tools that are embedded within the software that your company uses to perform its day-to-day functions.

Workflow automation may sound like a challenge to implement, but it really isn't. You'll just want to talk to your employees, ease them slowly into the new system, and make sure to have the correct tools under your belt to make this modernisation a success. Browse the best tips to implement workflow automation strategies in your office so that you and your employees can make the most of new technologies!

How It Works

There are numerous ways that workflow automation can work for yourself and your company, but the most effective is to install new technologies onto your existing computers and software programmes. In fact, you likely already use automated work processes that you aren't even aware of!

A common example of an automated workflow is sending emails automatically at certain times of the day or week. Posting to different social network from a queue is also another commonly used automated process. These are very simple programmes that require very little effort to install and setup.

You also may be interested in automating customer service functions. Chatbots are a growing trend in customer service. These are basically computerised messaging systems that can assist people with simple questions about your products and services with no wait times.

However, you are likely here because you're interested in streamlining more complex business processes by using workflow automation. In these cases, you would require software that is more specific to your industry and the type of work you do.

Our conveyancing workflow automation software for example can help reduce the amount of work lawyers need to do by removing a lot of repetitive rekeying. It reuses the information inputted on matter creation to populate SDLT submissions, client letters and even completion statements.

Automation doesn’t have to be complicated to make a big difference to a business. While there is a lot of hype around machine learning and AI, these often require specialist resource and large amounts of time/money to get right. The end result often doesn’t justify the investment which is why is important to use a workflow automation tool designed to meet your specific needs.

Why Is Workflow Automation Great?

Now that you know what workplace automation is and how many varieties exist, it's time to learn more benefits of using these technologies. Read on to learn some of the main benefits that your business will reap when you begin to use automated workflows for your daily tasks.

It's Affordable

Workplace automation is generally a pretty inexpensive process. You'll basically only need to pay for the software that you want to use to streamline your various processes. Set-up is something that you can do on your own, which means that you won't be wasting any money on installation.

When you consider the time that you'll be able to spend on more productive aspects of your business, you'll be saving a lot of money.

It Works Well With Other Software

Choosing to automate your workflow management doesn't mean that you can't use any other software. In fact, integration with other system is a form of workflow automation. Tools like Zapier and IFFT have made workflow automation between different systems accessible. Other systems like CRMs will also have built in integrations with a wide range of platforms.

If you want more information about how to use multiple software systems to make your business as effective as possible, check out our knowledge hub. Our professionals will use this space to help you gain insight into common questions that you may be wondering about.

It's Customisable

As we talked about before, there are a lot of ways that you can use workflow automation. You can route the systems to be used in conjunction with specific software. You can also route data and files to be used by the bots to ensure that they have all the information that they need to organise and initiate the processes that you want them to make easier.

Getting Started

While there are a lot of challenges in the workplace, workflow management with automated processes can make many of them infinitely easier to manage.

Now that you know all about workflow automation and why it's necessary for your business productivity, it's time to get to streamlining your organisation's processes.

Download our Whitepaper on-process mapping and start identify parts of your workflow that would benefit from automation. Together, we can come up with a strategy so that you can effectively move your office toward automated workflows and their many benefits.

Good luck!