#31 Workflow Management 101 Part 1

Hallo und willkommen zu another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yeah, first of all, thanks a lot to all our listeners tuning in every week to learn more about process and automation. We have now recorded 30 episodes already, and we are really excited to keep going and to record more on the content of process and automation. Yeah, and thank you all for your feedback and your regular suggestions for new topics. So yeah, that's very, very appreciated. And from that feedback, we have recently received the question, what is workflow management? And today's episode is all about that. So let's, let's get that started. Arno, what is workflow management?

Yes, very good question. I think at the heart of automation, in my opinion, is still human-to-human workflow and the orchestration of tasks between individuals to achieve a specific outcome. And, you know, you could really look at workflow automation that, you know, if you look at the definition of it, it really refers to the identification the organization and the coordination of a specific set of tasks that produces an outcome. So, you know, workflow management, in my opinion, is all about optimizing and improving and automating workflows wherever possible to, to increase those outputs and to eliminate repetition and also to reduce errors and exceptions. And of course, a workflow can include any number of steps that might involve a combination of people, systems, or machines. You can even drag RPA into workflows. And the whole idea of it is an automated sort of orchestration to achieve those, those outcomes that you want to achieve. So those people that manage workflows really search for opportunities to eliminate bottlenecks and and to improve visibility into their flows.

And why would you say workflow management is so important right now? Or was it there always, like, was this always available, workflow management? Or why is it important now?

I think it's always been important, but I think as we sort of venture into this, this hyper-automation world, workflow management really underpins a lot of the automation initiatives that we do. So for example, if we want to do RPA, which is robotic process automation, where we perhaps use a robot to do specific automations for us, we always want to include that with inside a broader workflow automation, which is finance process. So for instance, if you have a cash allocation in finance, you might have an RPA bot that does elements of that, the actual allocation, that the sort of the high-volume transactions. But you might have a workflow process that there, that actually deals with exceptions where a human actually still have to look at something that perhaps when the robot failed, you need to look at that. Or there might be a human in the mix where that person needs to sign off the work a robot has done. So again, all of that stuff is governed by a workflow process, and these processes are really important with inside our business because although we, we do use RPA a lot in the sort of processes and projects we deploy for our customers There is still a very large requirement to have the human in the loop, have the human kind of still making decisions. What we want to do is ensure that that person that makes that decision has got the information at hand. You know, they don't have to go to a third-party system to download information or to raise a quote or to, you know, get information to make their job easy. We want the robots to do that, and all of that human interaction is still governed by traditional workflow processes, and that's why it's really, really important.

Yeah, and I think even with some technology in place, I think the flows are not really that efficient in most companies, isn't it? So it's just looking at really some subsets and not really how the whole work flows through the company, and that still leaves I think in some departments or generally everyone still was many manual and lots of tedious tasks. So I think, yeah, it's time to really improve that further.

Yeah, and I guess, you know, sort of coming back to, you know, why we think that is important, but I think there's a whole range of reasons, clearly. And we know that, you know, workflow management systems does increase productivity. Of course, when you increase productivity, you reduce employee frustration. It improves customer satisfaction because, of course, it reduces tedious tasks by speeding up response times, for example. You know, a key component of workflow management is the ability to automate as much as possible of a particular flow. And you know, there, there are a sort of a few ways, um, in which you do these automations. So for example, you would standardize your flows and this ensure that all of your tasks for a particular process gets done in the right way every time. So there's a standard way of doing it. Of course, also you empower your employees to operate autonomously, you know, by ensuring they know exactly what's expected. So a task will be assigned at a specific point in the process. You give the information to the employee and they will do that task. And that would be— they will know exactly what to do to achieve that outcome for that particular task. And of course, you know, you could, you could increase efficiency across workflows while removing bottlenecks to, to improve productivity and outputs. And you can streamline communications and the collaboration across your teams and your organizations with automatic notification, for example, when a task status changes. And again, you can build alignment by sending automatic updates, emails, deadline notifications. So these are all really, really good ways why workflow automation is important. And of course, also workflow automation provides an audit trail. And these these metrics are available to managers to measure performance of your workflow with the view to increase your work or to improve your workflow.

Yeah, absolutely. So, so I think there are some reasons. So all these benefits are really, really obvious as well. When you start, when should you actually start investing into workflows? This is a very, very big question for our listeners. And of course every organization is unique, but there are some really obvious signs that stand out that suggest your organization would be better off with workflow solutions, management solutions. And Some, some, some of business experience, for example, persistent cash flow issues, employees constantly indicating they're overworked or burned out, customers are complaining regularly. So that really shows something is not working so well and there's somewhere maybe an improvement to be, to be made. Recurring issues with things like scheduling and payroll. So all these, all these administration tasks in the, in the in the backend. So if they are starting to— yeah, it doesn't really work nice and in a good flow. Yeah, you have to address those things. Some other reasons are projects are often unfinished. Your team relies heavily on spreadsheets. I think this is a big one. So this is what you mentioned a couple of times here as well on this podcast. So you focus a lot— where are all these spreadsheets in the business and where are all the email based workflows really in the business and where still paper is in use. So if you pinpoint on— you see a lot of that stuff, it's a good point or good sign that you can— there's lots of potential for improvement here. Lots of data entry and repetitive tasks are happening, copying data from one screen to the other. You manage lots of teams of workers, contractors, and other external workers, and the main systems in your organizations rely on communication with other systems. So if you have plenty of that, and I think if there's some of those signs, there's workflow management there as a tool for you to pick up. And just a small list of things. There could be so many inefficiencies. You mentioned earlier standardized processes, and you can find out more of those signs. And these, I don't know, you mentioned it like rotten apples in your business and process. If you, for example, use as well process mining, you find lots of those kind of small issues. But if you have many of those small issues, they then yeah, come, yeah, that can multiply and becomes really a big problem for, for your customer service, etc., and, and for your supplier communication interaction and all that.

So yeah, yeah, so I think there are these telltale signs, and I think that, you know, if you look at how your employees work, um, there's a lot of spreadsheets around, there's a lot of workflow activities that takes place within site emails, where people start emailing stuff across randomly to people to deal with, shared inboxes. These are, you know, signs that, that workflow is really something that, that is needed with inside your business, you know. You have a small example where let's look at raising a purchase requisition. Now that in itself is quite an easy workflow, but if you don't have an automated process, there's a lot of emails that flies around in a very ad hoc fashion to drive those outcomes for a purchase requisition. So what we're saying is that if you introduce a workflow process that governs and orchestrate that process, So everybody knows at each step of that process what the involvement is. You've got visibility into the process, you've got a good audit in the process, and the process is standard. You know, everybody knows what to expect, uh, you know, what, what is the next step in the process. Um, that is really where the, the benefits and the values of, of workflow management, you know, comes into play. So You know, for me, it's, it's a, it's a really important element of automation. I think it still will be quite an important element, you know, in the future as well, because it is just that automation where even if you forget about all of the progressive technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, process mining, all the clever stuff you can do with chatbots, You know, this is still a way to move away from manual paper-based Excel over email-based processes, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, we shouldn't, shouldn't always look at the next, next shiny thing. Definitely have to get sort of the foundation right first, isn't it? So sure, chatbots alone will, will help with lots of stuff, but if the foundation is not even right, then yeah, what are we talking about? Yeah, so And it is difficult sometimes. So I can understand lots of businesses out there who always want to look at the next shiny thing out there because it might be, there might be the promise that just by bringing in that specific AI technology, it would solve all your business problems. But no, I think a combination of that will give you the biggest benefit. But the big one, as you said, Arno, is the, is getting the first steps done, isn't it? And to get that right.

Yes, exactly. And again, there are some best practices when you start with workflow and workflow management. And, you know, there are several ways to ensure that you successfully adopt a new workflow management system. And, you know, you need to still carefully plan and prioritize and communicate the goals of the system to all of the stakeholders. You need to choose your technology right, you know, that technology to achieve the actual outcomes you desire very quickly. So that's very, very important that you still apply these best practices. And, you know, and one of the best practices is to spend some time prioritizing and to set yourself some goals for your workflow management system. So, you know, before you spend any, any money on, um, you know, uh, creating, buying a workflow management platform or investing in, in, in, in, you know, sort of automating, uh, every task within site or business, you know, you need to consider what is your top priorities. And, you know, you need to gather the stakeholders around the table in brainstorming sessions to, you know, to figure out, you know, what is each team's biggest frustration and what's the worst bottlenecks within the business. And then you could choose the most common workflows that you think you could then take forward into your automation. So for example, if the majority of your time is spending responding to customer service requests, you know, you might want to find a way for customers to interact with your system, you know, without worrying about sort of access control and any of the other security issues. You want to make that really quite seamless for them, you know. If, for instance, you, you manage, I don't know, lots of contacts, uh, with inside your business, um, you, you probably want to fine-tune the workflows to streamline that process. So it's all about sort of, you know, prioritizing, setting yourself those goals and identifying those processes which is really important for your business. And of course, you know, what you want to do is also you want to document your current workflows, you know. So obviously the goal of of planning across your teams is to remove time-wasting repetitive processes for each of those teams, those various teams. And, you know, what you want to do is you want to study operationally how they work, and you want to identify the issues with the existing workflows. And, you know, you want those stakeholders to to sketch out really a flowchart of the things they do most often. And you want to take note of those sort of stressful, error-prone steps. And, you know, during that exercise, you know, it will be helpful to really think about how you might want to automate those processes. And, you know, a good way of measuring success of that automation is that if you expose somebody brand new to this process, and it's automated and they've got no knowledge of it, can they just be part of the system? Can they just literally, you know, start participating and do their work and the workflow orchestration will actually assign them their tasks, very, you know, that they need to do and it's very easy for them to do that.

Absolutely.

And of course, you know, when you draw out your workflows in a very visual way, it's quite easy to explain that to people as well. And it's also then very easy to develop that. So if you have a customer onboarding scenario, for example, you map out all your roles for your customer onboarding, you map out how the flow works, and then it's very easy to, to actually configure that with inside a workflow tool.

Yeah, these two points you just mentioned, I see as well, they're very, very important. Although I was saying, okay, don't look at the next shiny thing all the time, but once you maybe have covered your basics, I think these two points can be done with some of these new great technologies out there, like process mining, to really find out what are your candidates for automation and where you should prioritize, etc. Process mining will potentially uncover all these opportunities, and then you have a nice list maybe of 10, 15 different things you want to tackle. Yeah, and just mentioning process mining related to the second point you just mentioned, sometimes, yeah, I think every stakeholder should know about what's going on in their processes. But sometimes these processes are not— so they usually come down on paper based on the perfect world or the view of a specific person or a memory of a specific person within the department. But sometimes they are not even accurate anymore. So obviously there is the as-is and there's the to-be. Maybe the stakeholders should definitely be involved in the to-be. But sometimes the as-is is very difficult to identify. And in a large organization, it's also a very time-consuming exercise. You mentioned it a couple of times here on the podcast as well. Very traditional, we did this with just a stopwatch and observing people, isn't it? And then recording, okay, it takes 5 minutes here and it takes 1 minute there going through the process flow. But yeah, with these new technologies and if you have a bit of a bigger organization, it may makes sense to maybe get help of these technologies. And it maps out the as-is process as it actually happens throughout all your systems. That could be quite useful to actually decide what to automate.

Yeah, and I think if, of course, if you do struggle and you don't know where to start, tools like process mining will kind of be a pathfinder for you, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, I think, you know, let's not, let's not forget about the strengths of those progressive technologies that we always talk about. But I think for workflow management in general, if you look at the standard workflows within site, you know, finance, operations, facilities, and, and other teams there are standard ones which you probably don't need a process mining tool to create your first automation. And I think that's kind of like the point for workflow management is to really try and identify those, you know, those processes which kind of creates, I guess, or is really very inefficient and creates the most sort of friction within your business. And then from there on, you know, you can always evolve that and use things like process mining to actually uncover more things. I guess the point is, you know, you need to start somewhere. And within every business, I don't think you have to look too far to actually find these opportunities, you know, and I think if you, if you do talk to, to teams with inside a business, um, you know, it wouldn't take long for you to actually uncover some of these requirements. Um, you know, and again, like I said, whether or not you talk with inside finance, uh, operations, uh, HR, legal, um, you know, there's a lot of these opportunities that, that exist that you can start engaging these stakeholders ask them how they conduct their work, or maybe do a time and motion study, how they do it, and start mapping out, you know, some of these processes and automate them, you know, with inside a workflow tool.

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