Category: Workflow Automation

Companies everywhere are embracing automation technology and transforming their tedious, time-consuming, manual processes into streamlined, easy-to-use, automated workflows. 

They’re doing this to reap the many benefits of automation technology. These benefits include reduced operational costs and increased productivity, as well as increased availability, reliability, and performance. In turn, this results in more satisfied customers.

Failing to automate your workflows comes at a cost. The average employee spends 20-40% of their time searching for documents and loses around 40% of their productivity to task switching. Meanwhile, CEOs reportedly spend some 25% of their time on tasks that can be easily automated. 

Every company has different goals and therefore different automation needs and priorities. For instance, a manufacturing company that frequently purchases raw materials might benefit from automating purchase order and invoice approval workflows. A temp agency that constantly recruits and onboards new employees may wish to invest in HR workflow automation to make the hiring and onboarding processes more seamless. 

In this post, we’ll dive into eight powerful examples of workflows at the workplace and discuss how to make the most of each workflow for optimal performance and efficiency. With the right business workflow automation software, you can automate these processes – and much, much more. 

Continue reading “8 Workflow Examples to Get You Started Today” →

Are you or your organization losing valuable productivity to repetitive, error-ridden, manual processes? 

Perhaps you often find yourself… 

• filling out the same information over and over again across multiple documents;
• emailing back and forth to correct errors, capture missing information, or speed up approval processes; or
• printing, scanning, and emailing documents just to capture a signature.

If you’re in this boat, you–along with many other organizations interested in improving efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction–might be considering workflow software.

Continue reading “What Is Workflow Software? Everything You Need to Know” →

Every organization has its own set of workflows for everyday tasks. These workflows used to rely on paper forms, ledgers, and inter-office memos.

Most teams have now “progressed” to using Excel and email. While it’s better than physical paper, email-based workflows are still manual and inefficient.

The good news is that modern, cloud-based software is now putting the power of automated, digital workflows in the hands of non-technical business users.

In this piece, we’ll look at exactly how to create a workflow without any coding or I.T. 

Continue reading “How to Create an Automated Workflow Without Coding” →

Workflow and process are common words in business process management (BPM). They’re similar enough that they’re often used interchangeably, which creates quite a bit of confusion — even among experts in the field. 

Nevertheless, there are subtle yet significant differences between the two. So let’s define “workflow” and “process” in a way that’ll help you precisely and clearly communicate your ideas around BPM at work.

Continue reading “Workflow vs Process: Understanding the Difference (+Examples)” →

What is Workflow Analysis? 

Workflow analysis is the process during which your business examines data about its workflows to identify trends and improve their efficiency. In turn, this improves employees engagement, customer satisfaction and the competitiveness of the business itself.

Quite often, if you ask people why a particular workflow is set up the way it is, they’ll tell you “That’s how we’ve always done it.” The design probably made sense years ago, but as the organization and its business environment have changed, the workflow was probably never updated.

Continue reading “Workflow Analysis: How to Improve & Optimize Your Processes” →

“You had me at hello.”

Is this how new customers feel about you? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could engineer this sentiment into every new customer?

After all, good customer relationships start with good customer onboarding. 

So, what kind of first impression does your business make on new customers? 

Chances are that if you aren’t 100% sure it’s a positive one, you’re leaving room for a poor experience. In turn, you’re increasing the likelihood of customer churn or poor conversion rates.

Take Groove, for example. The customer support platform conducted an audit of its own onboarding practices. They found that designing an onboarding experience that helped customers respond to an orchestrated series of prompts increased their free-to-paid conversion rate by nearly 80%!

With a carefully constructed onboarding process, you can win over your customers from the very first interaction. Even better, you can nurture customers into lifelong brand advocates that provide even more value to your business in the form of referrals, larger purchases, and positive reviews.

Customer onboarding drives revenue – period.

If you want to build a better, more consistent, and automated customer onboarding process, this article will help you understand how to pull it off.

Continue reading “Building a Better Customer Onboarding Workflow: How to Hook Customers from the First Interaction” →

Every organization has many moving parts. Just like an orchestra, it’s essential to make sure everyone is playing the same tune. Business process management (BPM) tools are designed to help you analyze and optimize your workflows, so that all sections work in harmony.

There are dozens of business process management platforms to choose from nowadays, each offering something a little different. To help you find the right solution for your organization, here is a closer look at what BPM is and the top BPM tools on the market today.

Continue reading “6 Top BPM Tools for Growing Businesses” →

Sharpen your pencils — we’ll have the contract over to you by Friday. 

Generally speaking, when the conversation turns to contracts, both sides are happy. A contract might represent a new job or employee, a new home or vehicle, a new vendor or customer, or any number of other legal relationships. 

Contracts are often accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and even relief. 

However, those who work with a large number of contracts — vendors, lawyers, property managers, education administrators, and any business that outsources work to contractors — know that reaching this stage is just the beginning. 

Continue reading “How to Automate the Contract Approval Process” →

Every minute counts. For small businesses vying for growth to stay alive and thrive, saving/losing time equates to profit/loss and the difference between success and failure. 

As a small business owner or manager trying to balance resource efficiency with growth, you may have considered cutting employees to save money as you grow. The problem with this model is that fewer resources can also result in being understaffed and hinder your growth, so it becomes a vicious cycle. 

If you need to cut costs and fuel growth, there is a plan C. Instead of hiring (or firing) more people, or figuring out where the money will come from, consider automating some of your tasks and processes. With even light automation, you can speed up operations, reduce labor costs and increase profits (in a matter of days).  

Small business workflow automation not only reduces costs, but also facilitates working seamlessly with remote work and teams. Even if your employees currently work in-house, events beyond your control may necessitate employees working from home temporarily. Being prepared with automated processes will make this transition easy and prevent employee dissatisfaction and decreased productivity during these times. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits of automation, what small business workflow tasks you can automate, and a step-by-step guide to automating a simple business workflow. 

Continue reading “Small Business Workflows: Five Everyday Tasks to Automate” →

What is Business Process Management?

Business process management (BPM) refers to the practice of streamlining and optimizing the various strings of repeatable tasks that need to take place in order for a business to operate successfully. Business process management takes a process and breaks it up into the smallest parts or steps possible in order to answer the question “Is this the best (and fastest, most efficient) way to do this?”

Business process management often leverages automation to simplify and streamline the execution, monitoring and optimization of business workflows and typically focuses on repetitive manual processes. BPM is not to be confused with task management, which refers to the overseeing of individual tasks as opposed to workflows.

BPM software that enables process automation is like a navigation system for your business, digitally routing information to the people who need it, when they need it. Because the software does this automatically, you don’t need to worry about who is responsible for performing the routing or remember under which conditions the routing takes place. For instance, business protocols may dictate that an additional approval stage is required when sums higher than $10,000 are involved. 

BPM allows you to increase efficiency, reduce errors, cut costs, and better serve your customers. 

Careful planning lies at the heart of successful business process management. While individual departments in any organization can certainly benefit from managing their processes, you’ll see the best return on your investment if you conduct an audit of all the processes in your business to determine which ones are most suited to automation and implement solutions collaboratively.

On the surface, BPM may seem like the domain of large corporate enterprises. The truth is that organizations of all sizes such as mid-size businesses, K-12 schools and higher education institutions like universities and colleges can also benefit greatly from proper business process management, freeing staff from the burden of administrative tasks and allowing them to finally achieve a degree of work-life balance.

Continue reading “Business Process Management: The Complete Guide” →