Up to 40% of productivity is lost to task-switching, according to Workato. In fact, most project managers and professionals agree that managing workload is the biggest issue they face. When it comes to managing business processes, there is no doubt that automation is leading the way in streamlining tasks, boosting operational efficiency and ensuring smooth workflow.
As a business, ensuring that all teams, departments and the entire company run smoothly is key to ensuring sustained growth and success. Collaboration is key to achieving this, and one of the best ways to support modern teamwork is my making sure everything is on the same page, simply through workflow automation. Why should you automate your business workflow?
Automation Improves Project Planning
The average enterprise uses around 900 cloud applications to manage workflow processes. It’s easy to see why automating the workflow process can help improve project planning, workflow efficiency and productivity. According to Kanbanize: Online Kanban Software, a well-integrated workflow management tool can help you improve project planning for current or future projects.
Automation is expected to play a bigger role in helping companies implement and integrate multiple workflow and project management tools. When crucial information, and the right data remains easily accessible to everyone on the project team or across the enterprise, from anywhere, your workforce can truly enjoy the benefits of an automated workflow process.
Automation Helps Scale Efforts
Smart project managers know that automation can easily help them grow their teams, streamline their projects and improve their output, without having to increase their headcount. Automating your business workflow improves your team’s operational efficiency 25% faster. The good thing about most workflow automation tools is that they allow you to customize your workflows to suit project needs, allowing real-time tracking of tasks and processes.
The unprecedented visibility into your project management and production processes helps scale your efforts across the entire organization. With so many failed projects, businesses need to look at ways they can improve their workflow management processes through automation, according to a CIO article on common project management mistakes businesses should avoid.
Automation Streamlines Feedback and Review Processes
One of the areas where project management typically faces delays is the review and feedback process. With deliverables attached to multiple points of communications, teams communicating through multiple platforms and key workflow tasks going ahead without proper supervision, smart businesses invest in workflow automation so they can optimize these processes.
Automation of the entire workflow process ensures that approvals are given, reviews are done and feedback provided all in one place, organized chronologically. Workflow automation tools come with alerts that help teams know when an asset has been reviewed. Approvals and feedback are also clear and time-stamped for clarity.
Automation Helps Offload Busy Work
Automating your workflow helps you offload busy work, so that the menial work of sending status updates and assigning job tickets can be done automatically. This way, you and your team can focus more on the valuable tasks without struggling with requests and work processes that have to be done manually. While workflow automation makes project coordination easier for everyone, ensuring the right approach to workflow and project management is crucial.
With a more streamlined business workflow, you can easily identify redundant activity. The level of visibility that workflow automation offers can help you assess whether a series of tasks, activities or steps are really necessary. Eliminating any redundant steps in your workflow speeds up your processes and greatly improves efficiency.
Conclusion
Even with well-established workflow processes, you may not have a full picture of what’s going on across the entire enterprise. Businesses should understand that workflow automation requires a thorough understanding and mapping out of all processes, and in doing so, they can gain a much more accurate picture of what is going on. This level of visibility is what provides the ability to establish metrics and KPIs which then form the basis for process improvement.
