Benefits of Conducting Workflow Analysis for Businesses
If organizational efficiency is your key goal, you would have already started considering process management, workflow management, and enabling innovation like business process automation. But before jumping into implementing these technologies, it is important to do complete research, like workflow analysis.
A boost in efficiency
You need to take a broader look at your business processes to identify the steps that you need to automate and digitize. Through this, you can find inefficiencies and the areas that you need to upgrade from the existing technology. After finding and correcting these places, you will see your business scale and open new areas for profit and revenue. You will find your business operations running more smoothly than before, and getting a lot of tasks done quickly and efficiently.
Happy and satisfied employees
Who likes being struck with old and outdated technologies? If your employees are aware of the technological advancements and have given you suggestions for changes, yet they feel nothing has changed, they only end up getting frustrated. This will lead to lesser engagement with their work and sometimes they might even quit. You will also end up losing a lot of your money when you choose to leave these unchecked.
Only when you put a good deal of effort and money into implementing workflow analysis, you can show your team members that you care and are taking the right steps to make their jobs easier. When employees know that they are being heard, they feel motivated, which boosts their overall morale, leading to more productivity and engagement.
Flexible physical infrastructure
Through workflow analysis, you can help the floor managers to make the most out of the physical space. For example, if printers and scanners are at a distance from those who use them often, you can move things around to make their lives easier. Using a workflow monitoring tool, managers don’t need to break their sweat when it comes to locating office equipment or assigning office space.
Easy to achieve and manage regulatory compliance
With a workflow analysis tool, you can ensure that all the steps are rightly followed for regulatory compliance. Industries like healthcare, banking, and finance, have too many regulations and reporting requirements that need to be followed. By bringing a sense of accountability and step-logging the workflows, you can create audit trails on demand. Furthermore, you make it easy to locate the information regarding compliance whenever needed, making it easy to create annual reports.
Workflow Analysis Examples with Use cases
Use case - 1
Companies undergo various phases of growth, and as they grow their size also increases. When the company just had 5-10 employees, it would have been easier to operate with a time card, where the employees stamp their login information and that is transferred to a spreadsheet. But when the company has grown fourfold and is at 100 employees, it is impossible to stick to old practices.
It could be extremely daunting and time-consuming. Here is when you need to adopt a workflow management tool to automate your manual workflows.
Use case - 2
Another practical example is the time spent on reimbursement requests. Say the finance used to look at reimbursement requests through emails initially when the company size was as low as 10. But once the company has grown, and stands at say 200 employees, the inboxes of the finance departments end up getting flooded. There are chances for emails to even get lost, causing unnecessary friction between the finance team and other departments.
Using a workflow management tool, you can eliminate the manual processes and establish an organization-wide practice that can make it efficient and save tonnes of time.
4 Simple Steps to do Your Own Workflow Analysis
Here are a few steps to help you do your own workflow analysis.
Step 1: Collect Hard Data
Take a report of the workflow you want to examine. Analyze the statistics and see which ones are performing as required and which ones aren’t.
What kind of data do you need? Start with this list:
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Number of items in that workflow initiated over a period
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Number of items completed
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Number of items rejected
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Average, min, and max time is taken to complete each task
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Number of times a task is sent back or rejected
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Number of times an item requires extra clarification
Look for comprehensive workflow analysis tools that can give you all of this information, facilitating you to take actionable insights before the issue gets out of hand.
Step 2: Collect Soft Data
For workflow analysis, just numbers aren’t enough. Interact with people who use the workflow tools most frequently. Start with those who fill out the form. Your sales team is responsible for 80% of the expense report submissions. Understand the following:
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Are they pleased with the ease of the form?
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Do they have any complaints about submitting their requests?
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Are their reimbursements getting approved on time?
In a few cases, your Sales VP may not have all the data they need to approve the request. Sending emails to the sales reps to get more details may usually take time to get a response.
Since workflow analysis tools usually only focus on the hard data, this approach gives you a chance to take your analysis to the next level.
