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Increasing workplace efficiency is always a high priority, but are you considering the often overlooked role of collaboration? No matter what industry you are in, effortless collaboration between employees, teams, or departments can accelerate your business processes and promote success—and workflow solutions are the best way to do just that.
But what exactly are workflow solutions? Well, a workflow simply organizes your business processes in order. With a comprehensive workflow system, your activities can be easily tracked, monitored, and reviewed from initiation to completion.
Automating your company’s workflow allows you to streamline business processes and increase productivity. Here are some key reasons why you should be using workflow solutions to increase efficiency and improve collaboration.
Consolidate Your Processes
Many businesses defer process handling to each individual department. Sure, everyone in the department knows the next steps to take, but what happens when someone new steps in or it is time to move a task to a different department with its own set of processes? If anyone is out of the loop, the work might be forgotten, or its quality may suffer.
Creating a consolidated workflow across your entire business keeps everyone on the same page. Doing so allows you to define, standardize, and enforce business rules—including everything from reviews to approvals.
A standardized workflow solution means that no one is wasting time trying to learn or manage multiple processes just to get a single task completed. If everyone knows how the process works, collaboration becomes much simpler.
Automate Your Processes
Automation is essential for any modern workflow, as it helps you save time and money. But often, it is difficult to know where to begin with introducing automation.
In short, start automating repeatable business activities. Build workflows that automate your repeatable business processes first, and you will see the benefits almost immediately. Employees will have more time to work on revenue-producing activities, and there will be more visibility into the lifecycle of a task. With a good process in place, you can automatically route tasks, documents, or anything else you can think of through predetermined pathways to remove the ambiguity surrounding ownership of each step.
A customized workflow solution means that employees can focus on doing the tasks that they have been assigned, trusting that the automation will take care of the rest. Automation can distribute work across teams to those that have the most bandwidth as soon as a task appears. It simplifies procedures, saves time, and allows teams to seamlessly work together.
Boost Collaboration
Automating processes will make teams, and thus your business, more efficient. But that is just a drop in the bucket. Capabilities such as parallel routing and delegation models allow for easier collaboration between employees, teams, and departments.
Parallel routing ensures that tasks do not get bottlenecked at one team. Multiple team members across various departments can work on a task simultaneously without losing track of who is on the project. The result? You get more done without waiting for part of a task to be finished upstream.
The delegation model lets you distribute tasks across your business with ease. Delegate tasks for review and create mini-workflows within your larger solution so that work can be returned for review or moved forward to completion. You do not have to worry about whether delegated tasks have been completed — you can find that info right in the workflow system.
Final Thoughts
Automation, collaboration, and consolidation are key to running a more efficient business. Workflows bring everything under one roof so you can optimize efficiency, without sacrificing quality.
Interested in adopting a workflow solution? Check out how Optix can streamline your business processes and extend workflows to other systems through customizable program extensions.
Contact us if you want to improve employee efficiency or learn more about workflow solutions.
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