How Can Prioritising Workflow Automation Projects Increase Productivity?

In today’s fast-paced business environment, organisations face a constant balancing act: increasing output while managing limited resources. Workflow automation offers a solution — but with so many potential areas to automate, deciding where to start is key. By strategically prioritising automation projects that streamline high-impact workflows such as invoice processing, onboarding, and supply chain management, businesses can unlock exponential productivity gains.

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What Is Workflow Automation?

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When it comes to maximising productivity, there are many tasks that can be more mundane and time consuming, taking aware effort and time that is better suited to other tasks and projects. For example, when handling payroll management, sorting out employee data and details across large numbers of employees can be very time consuming.

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That’s where “workflow automation” comes into play. By utilising workflow automation projects within this example, your chosen system can handle all of the employee data before you even have to look at it, leaving you with time to focus on everything else that needs to be looked after!

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However, when it comes to more complex automation projects, it’s important that they don’t interfere with each other, as that can create more problems than it solves.

Why Prioritisation Matters in Workflow Automation

When you have multiple different automation projects running simultaneously, especially if they touch the same parts of a system or overall project, it runs the risk of disaster. For example, two different automation programs may attempt to edit the same data at the same time, causing the data to become invalid.

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At that point, someone will then need to go back and fix the data before running the automation again. This not only increases the time it takes to complete a specific task, but also adds in a layer of risk in terms of human error as well. And if the task in question is one that has to be completed on a regular basis, this risk becomes exacerbated further.

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All of this builds up to negatively impact your business’ time-to-value ratio, decreasing productivity rather than helping it.

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By using a prioritisation system on your workflow automation projects, you can help alleviate this significantly, if not eradicate the issue entirely. By assigning a priority to the various automation tools that you have in place, you are able to define which one goes first and what order they are allowed to access data, projects and other elements of your business. All of this combines to show why workflow automation has been a part of digital transformation in different industries over recent years.

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This ordering means that you have far more control over how each part of the automation in your projects work with each other, improving the outcomes of your automation projects vastly.

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Use Case Scenarios: High-Impact Areas to Automate

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To help explain how prioritising your workflow automation can help improve the time-to-value ratio of your business, here are a selection of use case examples.

Invoice Processing

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Processing invoice data can often be exceptionally time consuming, and if you are relying on manual data entry, it becomes prone to human error without excess time being used to allow for additional care and effort.

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By using prioritised workflow automation, you can automate the extraction of the data, as well as the validation and approval processes too. This can then lead to faster payments and improved cash flow, whilst decreasing client conflicts brought on by incorrect data processing.

Employee Onboarding

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In regards to HR and onboarding new employees, there is often a lot of repetitive paperwork as well as community and coordination between different departments required. This can lead to confusion and miscommunication, making life difficult for all involved.

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Using a prioritised workflow automation system for employee onboarding can reduce the admin workload, leading to a faster onboarding process and a better initial experience for the new employee too.

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Compliance Management

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Managing your compliance to industry regulations is another aspect of your business that often requires a lot of documentation and audit trails. These can be hard to keep on top of, especially when you are also handling all of the other areas of your business.

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By implementing a prioritised workflow automation project, you can more towards automated tracking of your records, alerts for any compliance issues and immediate reporting of vital information. With such systems in place, you speed up the audit process and decrease any potential compliance risks.

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How To Get Started With Workflow Automation

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By not only implementing automation, but ensuring that you are prioritising workflow automation projects across your business, you can boost productivity and improve your time-to-value ratio. This, in turn, helps to grow overall ROI and increase cashflow within the business.

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If you are looking to find out more about workflow automation and how it can help your business to grow, feel free to contact us and we would be happy to discuss your requirements.

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