When you’re setting out to create a business process that makes the most sense for you, you might have a few questions on your mind: What should that process look like? How should it act? And what the heck is workflow automation? What’s more, you might feel like you can’t find the answer for beginners, the breakdown that gives you a basic summation — and for that, we have an answer. Read on.
What Is A Workflow?
Businesses of every shape and size provide a product or service of some kind. What is the end result? Not important. What is important, though, is how you get there. We call it a business process or a workflow, and it’s the pathway that a certain job takes from beginning to end to produce that end result. The job itself, with specific information or materials passing from step to step in such a process, is called the workload. This workload travels from step to step, all interconnected as one workflow (a mostly linear network of these steps), and eventually performs a service or creates a product that a business will provide to their customers.
What Is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation is when the workflow steps, each individual subprocess, is brought under the guiding hand of machines which are given rules to automatically follow. With sensors in place and information received, workflows can be automated to turn a bunch of manually executed steps into an easy process wherein less hands-on work is required from the business itself. Workflow tools often offer this automation service because automation is an optimization of the workflow — after all, the less effort spent on the menial tasks within a process, the better, right? That’s what workflow automation offers.
What Are The Benefits?
Apart from making it easier to spend less time and effort on certain repetitive or unskilled tasks within the process, there are other benefits to having an automated workflow. One of the biggest benefits to name is the fact that this time and effort can be spent elsewhere, effectively creating more chances for productivity in your workflow overall.
More than that, though, machines are incredibly precise, and when treated well, they’re also very accurate — more precise and more accurate than humans by a long shot. This is why automation is so useful today: not only does a machine do the work that can be shrugged off by a person, but it also does certain work better and more consistently than humans can, making it possible to improve your consistency of products and services with your customers in the long run.
Apart from this, you also have the ability to work and make business decisions based on rules and logic alone, without the human elements of assumptions or feelings getting in the middle of it: and imposing a whole new meaning to the KPIs and business rules that would help decide your process’s success.
How Do I Start?
You might be excited to get a hold of these new benefits and to begin using an automated workflow. You might even be itching to start automating. But you need to set the groundwork so that your process automation is set to be successful from the beginning. Here’s how.
Define Your Workflow
Automating a workflow first needs the complete workflow to be planned out, with each step defined in a way that helps you decide what tools to use, and how to use them. Without this in mind, you risk automating without every step of the process in place, making your workflow produce subpar end products. Worse yet, it could even result in the loss of your workload in the flawed or incomplete workflow, as information generally travels blindly through a microservices-based process.
You’ll also want to be sure that as you’re planning out your workflow structure, you are taking note of the needs for optimal performance. You need to implement optimizations accordingly, making sure that even without automation, your process can flow from step to step without a hitch at the best possible measurements of performance.
Automate What Makes Sense
There are times when it’s better to automate a task — and times when it makes better sense to handle that task manually. For example, a task that requires checks against business logic is easily executable for a machine and therefore is perfectly suited for automation. Skilled labor, though, will not always be suited to this, since certain specialized executions by a person are usually necessary with these tasks in particular. Additionally, you should be looking at what will save you the time and effort to spend elsewhere. Whether you’re a solopreneur or you’ve got a full team behind you, improved productivity is sure to follow when you give time-intensive tasks over to automation.
Use A Good Tool
It’s imperative when you begin workflow automation that you utilize one of many robust workflow tools to accomplish the best possible environment for your business process. Choose strong contenders for each individual microservice that you need within your process, but also choose a great platform that can orchestrate and manage all of the automation and microservices together. Once you’ve found that tool, you can start to really see the benefits of workflow automation in full force, with plenty of time and effort saved, and many ways to view, optimize, and scale your business process going forward.
