Any organization, small, medium, or large enterprises have different departments, and each of these departments has its own set of tasks. Many of these tasks are often repetitive tasks involving several hours of manual effort. This often affects the productivity of the employees, and many of them also feel demotivated by all the boring, repetitive tasks. In some cases, employees ignore these tasks and try to focus on more interesting projects. Though these tasks are tedious, they are important and cannot be ignored. One of the best solutions for this is to adopt workflow automation.
Find out how you can boost your team’s efficiency with these top 10 workflow automation examples.
Table of Contents
What is Workflow Automation?
Before we take a look at the workflow automation examples, let us understand what workflow automation is. In simple words, workflow automation can be described as the designing and execution of various automated processes which were earlier performed manually. It is an effective way to improve, simplify, and manage your day-to-day tasks. There are several workflow automation software available today that can help you improve and scale your business operations.
Top 10 Workflow Automation Examples
Here are the top 10 workflow automation examples that you can adopt to improve your team’s efficiency and productivity.
1. New Employee Onboarding – When it comes to onboarding a new employee, there are several details that you need to enter into your records. With the help of workflow automation, you can automate this tedious process by enabling the new employees to provide their details which can be directly submitted to the HR personnel. It also eliminates the risk of any mistyping of crucial information, such as salary amount, social security number, etc.
2. Automatic Data Procurement – Procuring data manually is an extremely time-consuming process, and it comes with several challenges when done manually. Apart from spending hours and hours on the same task, there is also a high risk of weakened productivity. By using workflow automation, you can automate the data procurement process and reap benefits like lesser risks, maximum efficiency, and better visibility.
3. Automated Task Creation – In most companies, tasks are often assigned via emails, and employees often lose track of the tasks in the sea of emails. This challenge can be overcome using workflow automation that creates an automatic to-do list from your emails. Thus, ensuring that you do not miss out on your tasks or deadlines.
4. Invoice Generation – Invoice generation is an integral task of every accounting department, and it is extremely vital to be highly efficient in this process. There are several processes that you automate using workflow automation, such as creating and sending invoices based on a set schedule. You can also use automation to connect various accounting software and payment platforms.
5. Better Expense Reports – When it comes to reimbursing employees for expenses, there are several manual steps involved and also risks of incorrect figures being entered. The entire process can be simplified with workflow automation, and you can also set up rules for recurring expenses. The automated expense report can be directly filled by the employee, verified by the manager, and approved by the finance department.
6. Legal Documentation – Writing legal documents manually can be a huge strain on your legal team. A quick and efficient workaround for this is to use workflow automation which can generate templates for routine legal documents like non-disclosure agreements, sales contracts, etc. Once all the data is populated in the template, the legal team can just review the details and make any changes if required.
7. Leave/Vacation Requests – Leave requests are part of every organization, and with workflow automation, you can establish a quicker approval process. Instead of having the employee send an email request to their manager, who then forwards it to the HR team, an automated system can eliminate the unnecessary manual efforts and directly feed all the information in the systems. The system will also alert if there are too many employees on leave at the same time.
8. Enhanced Customer Support – Providing on-time and efficient customer support is an integral process of every business. Automating this process to an extent can ensure that your customers find answers quickly and enjoy a better customer support experience. You can automate the ticket routing process, use chatbots for round-the-clock assistance, etc.
9. Improved Hiring Process – When it comes to hiring the right candidate, there is a lot of manual effort involved in terms of searching for the right candidates, verifying their skills and qualifications, etc. Organizations can use various HR workflow automation tools to automate processes like sharing job postings, scheduling interviews, sending automated reminders, etc. This will allow your recruiting team to focus their time and energy on other important tasks.
10. Better Handling of Incident Reports – Incident reports have to be handled extremely carefully as they involve several teams, and there is a need to quickly resolve the incident and share the details with everyone involved. By using workflow automation tools, you can avoid manual handling of the incident reports. An automated system can file all the data and send the report directly to the concerned parties within no time.
Conclusion
Workflow automation can be adopted by various departments within an organization, such as sales, human resources, IT, finance, legal, accounting, etc. We hope these workflow automation examples help you accelerate your team’s efficiency and productivity. You can also conduct a thorough review of your existing processes to identify the ones that can be automated, thus saving your time and efforts.
Check out SaaSworthy to know more about the best workflow automation software available in the market.