#32 Workflow Management 101 Part 2

[FOREIGN] Yeah, and when we look at the, at some of these departments in more detail, um, there are definitely some processes which stick out, and some of you listening today, you probably can relate to it because you're working in the finance department or an operation, an ops department. So yeah, the first one we come across a lot is the finance and procurement workflows. And yeah, and most, most organizations out there would address, for example, creating and tracking financial requests with workflows and automating sending out purchase orders, for example, or streamlining and automating like travel expenses and approvals. So these are very, very typical and high-volume activities, accelerating the end-of-month closing tasks. Yeah, very, very important in every organization, month-end and quarter-end. And yeah, automating that will yeah, will speed up the process immensely. And first of all, it will be more accurate because we sometimes do mistakes. And yeah, that would, that would help operational workflows. Yeah, ops departments, yeah, they really want to increase their agility, although they have to really take compliance into consideration.

Yeah.

So So in ops departments, very often, yeah, the whole integration of ERP, CRM, HR systems with a workflow management solution is what we see and where we see huge benefits. Yeah, you hear lots of statistics from McKinsey and Forrester and Gartner, but in some of those departments you can increase or you can automate up to 80% of these typical things. It's just much faster. It doesn't really make sense to copy and paste stuff from ERP to CRM systems and so on. And with these customized automated workflow systems, these departments can use to automate their workflows. So they can really address very specific and unique requirements. So yeah, very popular with every manager in operations are for sure dashboards. So we start conversations just with the dashboard. They're not necessarily care about all the one, all the levels beneath that. So as long as the automation is making sure that, that all that stuff is done and everything is visible on the dashboard is happening and data is transferred and KPIs can be calculated, and these systems can tap into all the other data silos which might be available. Yeah, that's key for them. And this is how operations uses that technology, workflow management, to get stuff done.

Yeah, I mean, another example is, let's say, facilities management, where we might have, I don't know, maintenance requests or generic requests for workstation setup, any types of requests that facilities managers have to deal with. And I think if you look at workflows within site, that particular department, a workflow management tool makes it really much easier for these professionals to to manage their processes and also, I don't know, multiple teams of people and contractors and subcontractors, you know, to do their work. And you can configure automation based on, I don't know, conditional logic. So you automatically assign tasks to specific team members if certain conditions in the workflow is true, right? You know, you could automatically send out messages to contractors, subcontractors, or colleagues using the workflow automation, you know, without opening up Outlook and knowing you have to send out an email to request them to, you know, go and do a maintenance call, for example. And of course, you know, you eliminate all the paperwork when you digitize these processes, and you know, you increase efficiency drastically by doing so. And of course, you know, we look at other departments like human resources. You know, we recently spoke quite a lot about the HR department and how important it is to introduce automation within Cypress department. But, you know, of course, when you look at an employee onboarding journey, for example, it's really easy to use workflow management to improve that journey and also to optimize it. You know, it's, it's really important that your HR operations are, are very streamlined and, you know, very optimized for that employee satisfaction, just to start that employee on a really good foot. So they feel like, you know, their onboarding journey was very, very efficient. You know, they need to start their job. And, you know, that process is standard, it's repeatable, it's, you know, predictable. It assigns tasks to the right people at the right time, you know, to drive those outcomes. And of course, you know, you can accelerate the time from when you actually put out a job advert to when you actually onboard that person quite drastically because that's a very optimized streamlined process if it's automated. And of course, you increase your productivity of your HR department quite drastically because It is the same process. Again, it's predictable. People know what they need to do because they get the task assigned at the right time for them to do their work. So, you know, in all, it creates a very positive experience for a new employee when this process is automated. And, you know, I think that that's a really important element of this, you know, with InsightHR.

Yeah, the HR is a very vast, vast area as we uncovered on our recent podcast episode with Thomas Schilling. And yeah, so automation of all the different areas makes absolutely sense. And there's so many different systems involved in HR. And yeah, so you touched on recruitment or the onboarding and finding candidates. Yeah. I think that the actual, just the recruitment part of that is also already an interesting one to really go through all the resumes and just to actually kick off job advertisement everywhere. And yeah, I think that the whole recruitment process as an area of HR is very, very manual because you need to screen a lot. With AI, you potentially can save a lot of time again. Filtering out maybe unwanted candidates. Yeah, so next to recruitment, there are so many other areas when it comes to performance and promotions and contracts related to that. It's very vast, and when you get it right, the automation results can be huge. 80% of time can be saved and/or freed up to your team to actually deal with the real HR issues there and/or speak with your remaining candidates more often. Or you can go a bit deeper into the candidates than you usually would do because maybe you're growing business and you only have so much time. If half of it is already automated, you will not miss an important information when you go through the screening, which leads then to better candidates in general. Yeah, it's, it is definitely time to look into workflow management. Everyone who is not using it at the moment should also have a look at this next to all the other things we are talking about. Low-code is then part of workflow management because some of these systems will allow you to build that stuff without really in-depth technical knowledge. This is the beauty of the current market. There's a lot of low-code and no-code technology out there to get you really started. Yeah, what is the best workflow system out there? So it's very important that you choose the right system. So many different directions you can go. There are very flexible and affordable platforms out there. You don't have to be like an enterprise to afford that. So you can start very small, then you scale. And I think the main thing here is, yeah, you can get started, but you have to do the other things first. You have to do a bit of your homework. What is the best process to automate? Then potentially after a while we're not speaking too much about costs too much because it's already so valuable. It doesn't really make too much, yes, maybe not important what platform you're actually choosing. It's just a tool like a hammer effectively at the end of the day, it produces results. Yeah, so investing in the right tool is is the right step. I think it doesn't matter in what, in what tool you invest.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's, there's a lot of automation technologies out there, and I guess part of our job here at The Automation Guys is really to also be available to, to prospective people that's in the market for, for these types of tools. To, you know, to provide some advice, you know, what is the best tool possibly for your needs to get started. But I think the bottom line is that, you know, it is time to invest automation. You know, there's no sense in making your employees do routine tasks that can be taken care of by technology. You know, they say as much as 30% of an average employee's workload can be automated. And, you know, by using automation more effectively, you know, you, you can allow employees to reclaim some of their valuable time, you know, as much as a day and a half a week. So, so it is really important to, to consider this. That automation is really something that, that is something that you need to look at. And, you know, the ultimate goal here is to unlock the potential of your business by automating these repetitive tasks. And, you know, as a result of that, you will need fewer resources to manage these processes because you'll obviously not just automate the processes, but you'll also remove errors from creating the outcomes of these processes. So, you know, it's really important to, again, to invest in automation for these reasons. And again, if you look at sort of processes across your business to find the potential sort of candidates for candidate processes to be implemented, I think you'll find inefficiency pretty much everywhere because there's a lot of processes within side businesses, as you can imagine. And it doesn't take long to, you know, to find these sort of manual processes that, you know, are quite cumbersome. They don't provide flexible functionality. And, you know, this is a great place where you can bring in a workflow management system to improve that, you know, and to eradicate the sort of the higher cost that's associated with these manual processes.

Yeah, when you invest in some of automation, it is really important that you're not We're putting sort of really big monolithic things in place. So most of the business already have the inefficiencies sort of in most part in old legacy systems and big legacy systems. Nothing against SAP, but sometimes there are some really large legacy SAP systems in place which are very difficult to maintain. So yeah, and also these old systems, and they have— yeah, they don't have that flexibility you need. And because of they are very, very established, sometimes they're not even affordable in comparison to maybe some other workflow management systems out there. And big systems, if you go with new or bigger systems, so they're very expensive upfront. Very often they require generally a long implementation period. Yeah, same even with a new big ERP system from different vendors. You look at implementation times which are going beyond a year, and sometimes you read as well Yeah, it wasn't successful, it was too much, and projects are cancelled as well. So it's just a waste of time sometimes. So it would be good to really go with modern lightweight applications. They are still powerful, but you can make— you can start small, you can put your applications out there, and in no time, sometimes in a couple of weeks, you have a system going in going live, easy to deploy. The infrastructure very often is already in the cloud. So one thing is, yeah, there are all the legacy applications out there, very often very monolithic. There are also new systems out there which can be quite difficult to maintain. Yeah, our advice would be to start with some really innovative automation platforms out there and get results very fast.

Yeah, and then of course, you know, you can integrate with your existing tools, you know, without altering your technology stack too much. So it's really critical to, to look for a workflow management platform that supports integration with your existing tools and software you've got. And, you know, this, this really allows you to integrate with those technology stack that you've already got, because obviously you don't want to just retire that, you want to reuse that. And of course, a good workflow management tool will allow you to integrate with that legacy stack. And, you know, these integrations would, would help you to build very seamless processes, you know, for example, for your onboarding, HR onboarding processes, because you can actually integrate with your HR platform. Or if you have an automated vendor payment process, that could easily then integrate with your accounting platform that might be cloud-based. So I think what we see with these workflow platforms is that You can still leave your legacy applications in place, but you can connect those applications using this workflow process and provide a very easy-to-use front end for the users to still assume that these applications will be in the background, but you hide all of the complexities that is associated with, with sort of navigating those, those applications. So it's really providing a very thin facade that kind of hides those complexities of those third-party or your existing technology stack by, you know, creating really modern user interfaces that, that sits in front of that using these, these low and no-code platforms, you know, that workflow vendors provide.

Yeah, this allows you to put maybe a very, very stable large ERP system in place. It is really good in what it does. Very often, yeah, these ERP systems don't come with the most innovative user interfaces. By putting this layer sort of on top and around it, yeah, you can make these applications sort of configurable, customizable, without actually changing too much in this very monolithic core system. So yeah, there is a trend currently there to just take a Dynamics or an SAP system as it comes, just do the basic configuration. Everything else when it comes to customization will be all on the low-code layer on top of it. And yeah, I think that's a great great way of working. It gives the speed and agility you need to change your processes when something happens like COVID or so. You need to change within a week. You would not be able to do that with your core system.

Yeah, and also I think what you want to look out for is, you know, to create these processes and use a workflow management platform that allows you to enable collaboration amongst all of the stakeholders. So this is not just employees of your company, but also your vendors, your customers, and any other partners that, you know, need to be part of your process. So you always want to create your process in such a way that you have a customer portal, or you have a any sort of access for external stakeholder that participates in the workflow, you need to enable that. So that person can also be part of that process. So it's not just for internal use, you know, you want to kind of bring that out.

Yeah, end-to-end, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. And of course, you know, you want to have very good reporting and dashboards with inside your workflow management tool. You want to design those intuitive dashboards and reporting capabilities that, that makes it easy to share information with the right people. And this includes, you know, sort of company leadership, project managers. These people should be able to, to look at customer reports for their needs to get a very clear picture of how the work they oversee is progressing. And again, you know, everybody in the company should really be able to see these metrics to, to drive good decision-making. And, you know, you want to look at historical trends, uh, for example, and dashboards help you look at this and say, you know, how was our throughput of, of work, um, in the past? And, you know, what, what's our current trajectory? Are we understaffed? So, so the right workflow management tool will include this ability to create these dashboard and very flexible reporting options to, to really keep your fingers on, on, on the pulse of your operations at all time.

Yeah, and all that, as we mentioned earlier, doesn't need to be put in place just once and then it's just working. It is a process, it is a journey, it is a cycle. Yeah, so the advice would be to keep iterating, keep improving, start small, scale up, come up— you test ideas, you make changes because you can be agile, you can be really fast and react to everything and to new ideas. You can make mistakes and correct them very quickly. So yeah, there is no, no, no need to really over-engineer the approach when it comes to workflow management. As Arno mentioned, once when you have all your dashboards in place, you see all your metrics, you can then see what we are doing here. Is this really working or does it need some further tweaking? And yeah, I think there's this constant reviewing and improving. Your company over time will will be, will work smarter, will be more efficient, will be more satisfying for everyone to work with and work for. And yeah, this is a good start. And when it works, it's a really, really enjoyable journey. And it was lots of benefits as well on the bottom line. And Yeah, so for everyone who's listening and likes to get some advice on how to get started, we have plenty of material. We are happy to share that with you and have a discussion. Yeah, it's definitely the right time to look at this. Automation will be huge over the next 10-15 years. And yeah, you can make it a success as well for your business. The automation guys are here and very happy to help.

Yeah, and I think the benefits for adopting these types of platforms are quite large and, you know, it has got the power to transform your operations. And, you know, once you are up and running with workflow automation, the benefits really become very clear. You know, again, you, You gain really great control and visibility into your workflows, and you've got more efficient process management. There's rapid return of investment on your, uh, investment within site and workflow management tool once those efficiencies start, starts to come through. Um, you're flexible and agile, so like Sascha said earlier, you can change your processes very rapidly because these tools allow you to amend your workflow processes almost on the fly. You're scalable because your processes are orchestrated, and you know, it doesn't matter if you've got 1 process a day or 100 process a day, it's going to execute in the same way. So you could really throttle your resources according to that. And again, you know, there's improved productivity inside your business for that same result, and of course improved profitability for your business.

Yeah, so if this is not a reason enough for all these 7 points, then I don't know. But for me, that sounds really good. I would jump on that straight away. I would start building my workflows with workflow automation platforms, and yeah, I would really look at automating every workflow I can and where it makes sense, obviously. So, and free up as many people we have in the business to do the really, really valuable stuff. Yeah, I think that's, that's it for today's episode. I hope you could take a few of those bullet points away and maybe one or two are really useful for you to, to get started. And as I mentioned earlier, And Arno mentioned earlier, we are here to help. Visit us on our website, theautomationguys.net. Lots of good content there, over 30 episodes already on all the areas of, really all things process and automation, RPA, chatbots, low-code, HR automation. So we cover it all. We're very keen on hearing your thoughts, getting your feedback on how we are doing. And if you are interested in other topics, please share that all on the website with us. And otherwise, reach out to myself and Arno whenever you like to hear more and like to have a one-on-one. And yeah, thank you very much for listening as always, and let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it! [MUSIC] [MUSIC]