As organizations continue to grow and reach a certain level, operational efficiency, scalability, and accuracy become their primary focus. Enterprise workflow automation helps organizations strike that perfect balance by streamlining business processes from start to end.
Contents
What is enterprise workflow automation?
Workflow automation is the use of technology to automate and organize business processes. Work gets done faster as it eliminates human involvement and repetitive tasks. Automating time-consuming activities allow employees to focus on more value-adding tasks, such as problem-solving and innovation. A recent study by McKinsey stated that CEOs spend more than 20 percent of their working time on activities that could easily be automated with existing technologies.
For enterprises, workflow automation helps large groups of employees seamlessly coordinate and complete pre-defined or ad-hoc tasks effectively. Large organizations adopt enterprise workflow automation to standardize processes across multiple departments and branches, ensuring consistency and improving overall operational performance. In addition, the technology also provides real-time visibility into the status of business processes, allowing for better management and control.
Why do enterprises need workflow automation?
Workflow automation empowers businesses of all shapes and sizes. But why must large enterprises adopt the solution? What sort of advantages does the solution offer to large enterprises?
Organizations of large scale consist of many critically-functioning departments such as finance, HR, administration, procurement, marketing and sales, etc. The workforce involved in these operations is high, making room for errors, delays, and inefficiencies. In such a case, the key focus is achieving operational efficiency by eliminating costly mistakes while delivering high-quality products, services, and customer experiences.
A workflow management software can streamline simple to complex processes in minutes, reduce operational bottlenecks, and helps build a stronger foundation.
Benefits of an enterprise workflow automation
Enterprises deal with interconnected, complex processes across various departments and locations. By standardizing these processes and establishing data accuracy, enterprises can easily facilitate faster technological adoption, upskill employees, and accelerate digital transformation at the corporate level.
Enterprises workflow automation solution offers the following benefits:
- Promote consistency and accuracy by automating repetitive tasks
- Empower employees to focus on business-critical, value-adding tasks
- Analyze in real-time if processes are being performed according to pre-set standards
- Identify bottlenecks and their root causes with advanced reports and dashboards. Optimize workflows that connect various processes.
- Eliminate siloed communication and establish a collaborative culture among all the departments
- Enrich customer experiences by steering processes towards a customer-centric approach
How workflow automation drives sustainable efficiency in enterprises
Enterprises have been fast-tracking into the future of innovation by leveraging workflow automation to transform business models and operations. A study by McKinsey stated that two-thirds of the 800 executives surveyed revealed that they were increasing their automation investments to boost productivity in the post-pandemic workplace. Enterprises in today’s digital world are smart enough to understand that they cannot resist technological change as it puts them at risk of being left behind by their competitors and customers.
Here’s how large-scale organizations are leveraging workflow management system to boost their operational efficiency and future-proof their digital transformation efforts:
Minimize operational and labour costs:
Inefficient and disorganized processes cost organizations 20 to 30 percent of their yearly revenue. Large organizations cannot afford the unnecessary cost that can adversely affect their revenue. Workflow automation helps optimize cost and resources by empowering employees to perform more work in less time. This reduces overtime pay to employees, operational costs, and unwanted expenses on material resources. By automating repetitive, mundane tasks, organizations can easily eliminate excessive human intervention involved in accomplishing a single request.
Boost employee productivity and morale:
The most common issue that enterprises face is poor employee productivity caused majorly due to performing repetitive tasks. 85 percent of managers believe that, by automating repetitive workflows, employees can have more time to focus on important activities. The creative skills and cognitive ability of the workforce can be put to better use, contributing to organizational growth. Automation saves employees’ 10-50 percent of the time they previously spent on performing manual tasks.
Promote a collaborative culture:
Managing a large group of employees performing different roles and tasks might be tricky. Each department follows its own set of procedures which may not be aligned with organizational objectives. Workflow automation standardizes business processes across departments and ensures that everyone on the team works from the same set of instructions and uses the same data and tools. This helps break down the silo set-up, reduce confusion and miscommunication, and ensure that the team members work collectively to achieve one common goal.
Enable data-driven decision-making:
On a daily basis, leads and managers of large organizations tend to make critical business decisions. In such a case, lack of information and delays cannot be an excuse. Workflow automation captures details of processes from start to end and provides complete visibility into who did what at what time and date. When information is centralized across various departments, managing and tracking operational performance becomes easier. Teams can extract real-time data from anywhere and anytime, generate reports, and derive conclusions. This also helps top-level management make smarter and data-driven decisions based on facts and figures.
Where can workflow automation fit in an enterprise?
Almost every department in your enterprise can benefit from leveraging workflow automation. Whether it is finance, marketing, sales, human resources or information technology, all of these departments suffer from manual workflows in some way or the other. Workflow automation helps create and define department-specific rules and configurations, allowing the teams to work smarter and better.
Marketing workflow automation
The marketing teams can gain complete control over their marketing operations, track campaigns, leads, and event requests, set priorities, and drive better customer conversions. The teams can easily manage the requests from start to end and produce great creatives to captivate the audience. EmailMonday says marketing automation is presently used by 56 percent of organizations whilst 56 percent of marketers have seen an increase in conversion rates as a result of automation.
Sales workflow automation:
The sales departments can use workflow automation to streamline lead processes and follow-up so each lead gets the same service. You can also track customers, send drip and personalized emails with discounts or thank you messages, and take advantage of real-time reporting to improve your results. Sales automation is beneficial to organizations as it increases productivity within the department by 14.5 percent and lowers marketing expenses by 12.2 percent.
Human resource workflow automation:
The HR department can become more efficient and organized by automating its employee onboarding procedure, leave requests, employee data, employee offboarding, employee timesheets, payroll, and annual performance reviews. And organizations save 10-20 percent in general benefits and HR delivery overheads.
Customer support workflow automation:
Customer support teams can deliver excellent service using chatbots or a self-service library. This empowers customers to solve their problems without waiting for human-to-human support. This means fewer support requests, allowing the customer support team to attend to customer queries that cannot be resolved through the self-service feature. Organizations save 20-40 percent on customer service expenses successfully using automation software.
Administration workflow automation:
The operations team can use workflow automation to handle resource consumption efficiently and boost productivity without growing overheads. The team can enjoy more visibility into operational and regulatory compliance across the enterprise. Workflow automation has helped thriving operations teams to reduce expenses by 30-60 percent while boosting delivery quality.
Finance workflow automation:
Financial functions can benefit from enterprise workplace automation because they’re rules-based. An EY study on how automation is leading the digital transformation of modern businesses found that 80 percent of finance functions can be automated. This is higher than administration (79 percent), Learning and Development (12 percent), and all other study aspects.
Take away
Effective workflow management is crucial to managing and optimizing processes in your organization. Whether it is to enhance collaboration, offer compliance, reduce costs and errors, or increase accountability, workflow management allows you to improve productivity by turning manual processes into automated workflows. The automation speeds up different project processes such as boarding employees, sheet approvals, HR processes, compiling reports, and many other processes. It would help if you considered introducing workflow management to your organization because it optimizes how people work in your company. This value translates to real-time benefits in the short and long term.
