#92 Long-term Workflow Automaton Benefits

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. So this is the podcast where we talk about all things process and automation, and as always, brought to you by the Automation Guys. And with me Here as always is Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hi, Sascha.

Yeah, with the pressure of never-ending to-do lists, workflow automation can help reduce the time spent on repetitive processes, repetitive tasks, making, yeah, as you know, with automation, teams more productive and efficient. And yeah, Everyone wants to get work done faster. And yeah, with automation, people are freed up to spend more time on strategic and higher-value tasks. That's what we always want really for our employees. Instead of being like a robot in the office, we want to take that robot out of them, isn't it? So yeah, and then many organizations, workflow automation already saves thousands of manual hours of work. And yeah, of course it has an impact on the bottom line. It will save millions of dollars of unnecessary costs every year. So that's, that's in a nutshell what the benefit is, but we will dive deeper into more benefits. And Arno, do you like to kick off with the first one?

Yes. So again, just to summarize what we, what we're trying to achieve is really in this podcast is try and convey some of the long-term workflow automation benefits. And, you know, they are numerous. I think this list could go on forever. So choosing sort of the top 5 is really hard. And I guess that the first one that we want to focus on is we want to reduce the amount of errors. Human error is obviously a part of, I guess, everyday life, you know, and sometimes it's impossible to anticipate these errors. And, you know, sometimes it's errors that's unavoidable. So, and again, for companies out there, you know, it is a costly thing to fix human errors. And, you know, again, you can't really totally eliminate human errors, you know, from your workforce. But you could certainly make it more avoidable. And, you know, when we bring workflow automation into the picture, you know, for example, as part of an orchestration, it could send specific requests predefined requests as per your business process to a group of people, you know, perhaps a team that require, you know, sort of human input. You know, somebody needs to look at something and respond to it in order to move the process forward. And again, this could be simple, I don't know, accept this leave request or accept this document, reject this document, add a comment, move on to another colleague. And again, if that's, if that's properly orchestrated in a workflow automation, it reduces the chance of human error because the steps are all lined up as part of a sequence of steps that needs to happen. The workflow drives it. It sends it to the right people at the right time. Once the people have actually looked at it, the workflow actually takes ownership again. And send that to other people that perhaps needs to do more work in order to conclude the case. You know, so it's things like, you know, so if this process was manual, you know, somebody could perhaps forget to send an email to a customer, for example, or they send an email and I forgot to attach an attachment. So when you do Workflow orchestration, that's the sort of things that you eliminate because at that point the workflow understands that it actually needs to generate an invoice or purchase requisition and actually send it out. So, so, so, so, so again, that provides scalability as well. So if people actually look at workflow tasks, the workflow system actually presents them with the right tools to look at perhaps a document or if there's a specific record that needs to be approved, it's presented to the actual person. They then look at it and make a decision, say, yeah, this is approved. Of course, there's things like business rules that can be integrated as well to provide guardrails. So by looking at the workflow data, for example, or the line of business data, if it's an invoice, for example, you know, to make the flow behave slightly different, differently. But all of these things count towards reducing errors. And, you know, and again, you know, it's never going to be eradicated, but it certainly sort of minimizes it. And then on the long term, you know, fewer errors means more satisfied customers or satisfied employees. And this drives growth, right? And also introduces scalability inside your business.

Yeah, very good points. And errors also mean risk, right? So when something goes wrong, it could suddenly increase the liability of that company and introduces that risk. So yeah, with workflow automation, you can reduce risk and you can ensure compliance, compliance very specifically for your industry and also for compliance introduced by government regulations. So when employees follow documented automated processes, yeah, there is less risk of things are going wrong. So like you mentioned, so if maybe an email had to be sent out, that's an error, but it is At the same time, if that email meant to be to the FCA or so, suddenly you have a huge risk, a compliance risk here. So that's fully then eradicated when you have an automated process and you follow that structured process. So yeah, industries such as government, banking, financial services, healthcare, These are all industries where we have higher risk. So because they are more process-heavy, more document-heavy, data-heavy, regulation-heavy in general. So that's why within those industries it makes sense to get more and more going with workflow automation. And lots of them already using it. So definitely financial services, banking, Yeah, they all started already using automated workflows, but there's still a lot to do here. Yeah, workflow automation can really automate a lot of these processes and therefore streamline the processes. Helps with that, well, I know you mentioned the document creation and also information capture, data extraction, all that stuff. And that makes sure we We follow those regulations and follow those regulations every time, and every member will follow them in the same way because the system, yeah, will guide you, give you sort of a structured process. So long term, yeah, this will help a company to avoid penalties because when there's compliance risks, very often there's a penalty attached to it. So yeah, with that in place, less penalties. So, yeah, it's important to look at.

Yeah. Another sort of, I guess, a benefit is just that the time-saving workflow automation brings. I mean, if you have a, if you look at sort of workflow and what it does, it really sort of handles repetitive processes. And, you know, when you automate a workflow, you actually save employee time because if we look at an example, for instance, within Site Finance, if a new invoice arrives in the finance accounts payable inbox, it might be picked up by somebody, an admin assistant. They then look at their invoice, and in a manual world, they would perhaps forward that on to a financial manager. A finance manager might look at that and say, this is above my threshold, I need to send this to the finance director. Finance director then gets an email, writes back to the finance manager and says, can you request this information from the customer? Or there might be a discrepancy. So it can quickly turn into a very, very costly process if it's manual. And of course, it adds a lot of time to be able to process that invoice and pay it. And obviously, all of that administrative costs comes off the bottom line, right? In a sort of a scenario where you adopt Workflow, and this is where the time saving comes, is you could automatically pick up that invoice from an inbox, for example. You you could do some preprocessing on it. We talked in previous podcasts about intelligent document processing by using sort of AI-driven data extraction. You could pre-prepare the approval of that invoice. You could perhaps in certain instances, the workflow could, based on the business rules that you've configured, auto-approve it if it's below a certain threshold because if the invoice is really low, you know, if it's a $50 invoice or $40 invoice, but in order to send this to various people manually, it costs $80 to process and pay the invoice. Why would you do that? So that, you know, there's a sort of a minimum threshold where you say, well, we'll just pay that invoice because we've done all the checks on it. And effectively from a supplier perspective, they really love working with you because, you know, you, you pay their invoices on time. From a time-saving perspective, you know, humans probably doesn't even have to be in the loop in a scenario like that. If it's above a certain threshold, perhaps then it could create a workflow task for the administrative or accounts administrator or assistant to look at that. Perhaps the workflow system already loaded some additional context, maybe the purchase order to make sure that there's a company purchase order presents that information. That person can then make a decision very fast. And again, there might be 20 of those invoices in the queue, right? So it's sort of using that same blueprint in a repetitive way so that employee doesn't need to know for this invoice, I need to raise or escalate that to the financial manager or to the financial manager. You need to remember to actually send that to the finance director. All of that stuff is all part of the orchestration, and that's where the time saving comes. You don't have to think about what to do next. You can actually just use the workflow to drive the process and people know what they need to do at specific points in time. And that's just, that's just kind of one example, but it just means that, you know, it's less waste of time on all of the administrative sort of tasks, repetitive tasks, manual tasks that needs to happen. And I would say, you know, sort of a key reason why, what key sort of long-term benefit of workflow automation.

Yeah, that's very good. Yeah, and at one point as well, if everyone knows what to do next, I think even you save time during onboarding as well, isn't it, of new staff? So because they don't have to keep everything, they learn everything over a long time and they just go on to this tool and yeah, they know exactly what to do here.

Yeah, and I couldn't agree more because I think that the, the fact that you can also process things in batches, right? If you have a manual process and you have one invoice coming through, then you have to deal with it and you have to track it and maybe another one. The workflow systems are pretty sophisticated, so you could batch invoices up as well.

Yeah, managers love that. Yeah, they approve in the afternoon 20, 30, 50 invoices. The system has pre-approved them or pre-checked them, so they have confidence that things are okay, isn't it?

Exactly.

Yeah, with that time saving, of course, comes cost reduction. I think that makes immediate sense. But also, for example, yeah, so there are different, different ways how we see that cost reduction. So because we are maybe get more productive with existing team members, we touched on that earlier. So 20 invoices, 40 invoices, 100 invoices doesn't really make a huge difference anymore. So your existing team members are more productive.

Exactly.

Yeah, at the same time. Yeah, so you basically, you can grow your whole company with process automation or workflow automation without hiring additional headcount. So that's very good, especially when we have certain budgets. So maybe you're growing startup or whatever enterprise you are. So of course, if you don't have to hire more staff, hiring more staff anyway is not that easy anyway these days. So So yeah, you want to be more productive to grow your business, and everyone has to grow the business, isn't it? So on the other, the other side of it is also with, with better processes, you can also look at team size reduction or reallocation of team members to other projects. So everyone, of course, from our perspective says, yeah, We do not use these technologies to get rid of people in the workplaces. But of course, in some cases, companies have to reduce the team sizes, and then technology, of course, can help to reduce team sizes. But sort of the main driver for lots of companies is the growth. And of course, if in some teams you have now technology in place, maybe you can reallocate people to other activities where they can actually add more value because there we need the, the human, the human touch, which is not easily replaced by technology. So maybe when you think of a service center within local government, for example, technology could really reduce the costs on data handling, document extraction, all those kind of things. You don't need manual labor for that, but then maybe you can reallocate, retrain people within that organization to actually speak with other people to sort out problems. So that's what we see with workflow automation, or workflow automation actually gives you the option. Before that, you probably can just let people go, or yeah, so it's difficult. But with that technology, you can actually do that. Yeah, so that's where we reduce costs in a grand scheme. But of course, yeah, if we reallocate people and we don't have to do that boring work anymore, people are generally more productive because they're more motivated. So that, yeah, it's very beneficial for the business in the long term.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we touched slightly on scalability, but I think that Scalability is a natural byproduct of workflow automation, and the benefit of it is tremendous. You touched briefly on it earlier, Sascha, where you talked about increased volumes of perhaps caseload to employees. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go and hire more people. In the manual world, yeah, of course, because if you're going to get thousands and thousands of invoices arriving every week, and your business is growing, you would have to go out and actually hire more people to deal with that. With workflow automation, of course, the scalability element here is the fact that you can actually start queuing work up. And as long as you're within sight of your SLAs for processing invoices, nothing's going to go missing, right? So you could be very surgical in saying, well, we're coming up to a very busy period of time. We know we can trust in the workflow system. We can actually perhaps have temporary workforce that's going to process backlog. And, you know, with the workflow system being what it is in terms of orchestration, it means that the user training is minimized because it's the system actually orchestrates the process and guides people through the process. You know, you don't have to tell people at this stage you need to contact that manager or at this stage you need to send that email. It's just there. You know, it's, It's easy to use. And again, you know, when you kind of start with your first automation, can be a bit daunting because you might look at this and say, you know, why automate this process? But as you actually get more volumes through, that's when the benefits gets realized because, you know, you could process more transactions. You know, you could throttle the sort of workload to different team members. You know, you could distribute work between team members, or maybe team members that does kind of seasonal type work where, you know, quarterly end work and they get quite busy. They might be assigned those types of tasks. And when they're done with their, you know, financial quarter, end of financial quarter work, they might be, you might be able to assign them sort of accounts payable tasks. So it kind of just gives you those options. And again, you know, once you kind of get started with process automation, you know, whether it's sort of automating sales contracts in the legal department or, you know, employee onboarding, for example, and HR, that's when you sort of see that across the organization, you see the real benefits in terms of scaling because, you know, the bigger the business gets, the more sort of transactions you generated, the sort of more workflows, instances that get sort of pushed through the business. It sort of gives you that sort of scalability then. And again, if you have the workflow automations, you could look at your process metrics, you could look at caseload trends, you could look at problematic areas, what's taking long to process, troubleshoot problems, perhaps look at tasks that is taking too long, you know, to process by a human. Maybe that's an area that you want to explore plugging, you know, a robot, a software bot into to perhaps do some of the credit checking elements. Or, you know, in terms of if we look at an onboarding scenario in HR to sort of do background checks, you know, in the background using a software bot and just present that to an HR representative. To really sort of optimize that task. So again, sort of start with automation. You know, it could sound like, again, like I said, a daunting task. But once you have your workflow process, at least you can measure it, right? You can see what is taking too long, where are areas that we need to optimize it, where are areas for additional automation, AI automation, intelligent automation we can plug in, like I mentioned, the software bots. You know, even, even things like APIs instead of sort of, you know, sending an email out to a third-party provider to ask them to do something. Perhaps that could be a direct, you know, API call, you know, and again, that's where the sort of, you know, it provides you that ability to scale easily, right? You know, an extremely, extremely powerful thing. And I think that's at the heart of the workflow automation still, you know, that ability to say, well, regardless if we process 100 cases or 500, we do it in the same fashion. We can understand and have sort of faith in the orchestration automation that is going to take us through the process the same way, if you know what I mean. Yeah, there might be busy periods where people have more tasks to do, but that's where we sort of have the ability to perhaps assign tasks to different teams or temporary teams or, you know, move sort of resources around. You have manual processes, that is incredibly hard to do because how do you do that? You know, if processes are sort of embedded and in people's heads and people have tracking spreadsheets that we see a lot where they send an email and they put a tracking sort of entry in the Excel spreadsheet to say, well, make sure we follow up again with this person to make sure that they send that response back.

It's the horror, isn't it?

It's zero scalability in that, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, many use cases, probably when it comes to workflow automation and businesses, departments, there's is a list. Absolutely. We can compile a list and make that available, Arno. That would be a good idea, I think, to give you more inspiration on all the use cases you could look at within IT, within HR. Sometimes we have spoken here on the podcast about different use cases, very popular episodes actually. Yeah, listen back to some of our previous episodes. Because we haven't done a use case episode for a while. But maybe we compile maybe a document you can download or go into more use case episodes very soon. Because workflow automation for many companies is already part of our day-to-day and it's absolutely something which is here to stay. I think, yeah, was it was the power of AI and other technologies enriching our workflow automation capabilities. Yeah, it is it is a thing you definitely have to look at when you're in control of your business. So yeah, as a summary, workflow automation reduces errors and risks, saves time and costs, and is easy to scale across the whole business. So that's what everyone really wants for business to grow. And yeah, so we will most likely have, most definitely have lots of use case episodes coming up. And yeah, if you, if you'd like to know more about workflow automation and the other topics like RPA, yeah, join us at theautomationguys.net. There we have a community for you to join. Would be very exciting to see, see you in there and exchange your ideas and ask questions, feel free to join us there at theautomationguys.net. Yeah, we will be back with another episode very soon, and until then, let's automate it!