Developing your first business process automation system is similar to learning how to ride a bike, it will take you ample time to find your balance. But once you acquire the flow, nothing can stop you to ride as you want.
Many business owners and entrepreneurs are inspired by the latest corporate tools and technological features and want to acquire a practical experience within no time. But when we talk about a cloud workflow management software, you don’t need to obtain a rigorous engineer-level training or a large staff equipped with advanced technical skill set to make the most out of it.
If you have never incorporated a business process automation in your workplace processes ever, then it’s about time you do so. For starters, businesses should pick the easiest processes to automate first. So how do you do it?
Here are three simple steps use can use to add the workflow automation process in your organizational culture.
- Employee onboarding process
Selecting the right people for the right job calls for some serious investment in both time and effort from the management. But how do we know the people selected are the right fit for our company’s specific culture? Consider the process of employee onboarding: do you decide to just hire and isolate a bunch of employees only to answer them on periodic basis, or have a proper plan for their onboarding process to help them blend in comfortably with the company and its processes?
Obviously, the latter one is a better prospect, but the case is not easy when it comes to giving the same attention to each hire on equal level. Well this is where process automation steps in!
A typical employee onboarding process goes through the correspondences in offer letter, forms, entry in employee database, and so on. The process can be also quickened and made more effective than ever through an automated workflow. Management needs to ensure the ‘manual work’ elements should be reduced as much as possible when designing the relevant forms, constructing the workflow, and creating approval routes.For instance, you can use a basic drag-and-drop interface in cloud-based workflow apps to generate dropdown fields, built-in pre-filled buttons, time and date ranges, attachments for various doc formats, etc.
- Expense processing
Travels claims and different reimbursements are some of the most common automated workflows, but the extending use of paperwork and other manual correspondences complicates the overall efficiency of the processing time.Manual work also restricts the seamless flow of two-way communication.
However, automating workflows in this regard is what you want in order to lessen the number and magnitude of errors as the process helps you set defined validations when designing the form. For instance, if a field recognizes the particular submissions for months that have gone past due date, then it won’t accept any payment and employees won’t be able to proceed with a request as it would violate the validation instilled in the online form.
Further the automation also allows you to include conditional elements in the process. For example, the employee can seek the approval of the department head in case a client submits a payment that is well below the minimum limit set as per company policy, rather than rejecting the request and complicate the matters further.
- Service request process
Any admin team employed at a top software development company rightfully deserves credit for the way they acknowledge and manage service requests. When the workflow process can so easily be automated, why ask all the rigorous and time consuming efforts?
All the teams in a company depends on the admin team to facilitate their processes smoothly, let it be getting a floor HVAC unit fixed, arranging a quarterly team lunch, or booking tickets for an abroad business trip.
When the workflow is taken online, teams are given the convenience to fill their request and forward it to the concerned department. For instance, registering a bus for a departmental outing through an online form will only show you the dates from which the company can avail the service. The point is to employ business process automation in the simplest organizational processes that can potentially save employees a considerable time and effort along with eliminating the human vulnerabilities.