To improve customer experience and stay ahead of the competition, today, every company needs to look for ways to manage its operations quickly and efficiently at all times. Adopting workflow automation can be an ideal step to achieve it.
According to a study, small and medium-sized businesses are expected to adopt business workflow automation on a large scale. By 2026, its market size is projected to be 1,600 million US dollars.
However, before any company moves to workflow automation, it should perform a self-evaluation with their team to know if they are ready to move from the conventional working methodology to an advanced working procedure. Automation helps a company deliver their products or services with better quality in little time and with a smaller overhead.
If you’re planning to move entirely to an automated workflow, you should consider the following five significant steps for a smoother transition. Let’s get to know about these steps one-by-one.
Your very first step should be determining the area of your business that has repetitive tasks. You can make visual representations to identify such tasks. With the help of flow charts, you can better understand your business workflow and specify the tedious jobs you’d prefer to automate.
Once you have identified the repetitive tasks, create a new workflow that improves the existing one by including the automated tasks.
Define your business goal using your existing manual workflow. Depending on your business type, your goal could be reducing cycle time for a process or optimising resources for more productive tasks. Your goal could be anything, but you need to determine how automation will achieve it and how you will assess it on an ongoing basis.
Once you have decided on your goal, it’s time to choose the right automation solution that you think can achieve that. Though there are a lot of options available in the market when it comes to workflow automation solutions, you should find the one that fits the needs of your organisation. Read the reviews of several vendors before finalising on one. It would be best if you go for a cloud-based safe and secure automation software that can improve workflow in as little time as possible. Also, make sure it’s user-friend so that your staff can easily configure it and manage it going forward.
A report concluded that when it comes to business operation, around 60% of workers could save 30% of their time with automation. However, for such results, you must provide your staff with the right training
In most cases, a new change brought to the company is seen as unnecessary and disruptive by staff. Consequently, you must involve end-users in the automation process right from the beginning and train them on how the entire new system is going to work and help them do their jobs better.
Once all the steps are done, and your automated system is running, you should seek feedback from your staff about their experience with the new system. If they encounter any issue, you should try to fix them at this point and continue to enhance your automation procedures to further improve productivity.
So these are five steps to effective business workflow automation. We hope they will help you implement automation frictionlessly. For any further questions please contact us at [email protected] and arrange to speak with one of our expert advisors.