Making the Right Choice: 5 Top Business Processes to Automate
Where do you start with workflow and BPM?
With so many processes to automate, companies often struggle with picking the right process for a pilot project when examining workflow/BPM. Organizations often choose the most complex, critical process as their first project. While these “whales” can drive massive return on investment, they are also filled with many minefields for an organization that is just starting to digitize their processes through workflow software (More on this topic here: The Whale or the Sardine?: BPM ROI).
Understand that with digital transformation, it is often the adaptation of the people side of the process, and the “digital” cultural change that can be an inhibitor to success. Often, it is a key strategy to start off with several smaller initiatives that can have a big impact. Here are some great use cases that are usually simple to implement, and can provide great efficiency and productivity gains:
- Document Approvals – Look at any company, and they currently have an untold number of document approval processes throughout every single department. Documents are built and routed, usually through email, to be finalized and approved. With workflow software, you can easily automated this process. Many Business Process Management Suites offer templates that can get you up and running quickly in any approval process (See K2’s Workflow Product).
- Ad Hoc Tasking – How many times have you received an email from your boss asking you to do something? Maybe you are on a team and have had several project tasks assigned. Managing and monitoring task process can be a major challenge for any organization. Providing a centralized and manageable system to assign, track and consolidate workflow tasks can have a tremendous impact on productivity.
- HR Onboarding – HR workflow is often laden with documents, tasks and cross departmental communications. Think of everything that is required to get a new hire assimilated: payroll, computer, benefits, building access, etc. Being able to get people on board and working quickly is often a key target for a first workflow/business process project.
- Contracts – Every organization deals with contracts in some way shape or form, and eliminating a paper-based process, and moving to digital can glean great benefits. Many of the BPM suites now offer integration with electronic signature technology, which keeps the whole process digital.
- Mobile – Mobile application development is expensive, even for the simplest of tasks. Leveraging a business process automation platform with mobile form and workflow capability can provide immediate ROI on any mobile app project.
So, this was just a handful of key use cases where workflow and digital forms can provide great benefits.
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