Workflow Automation: What Is It & How To Implement It

According to research, small business owners work twice as much as regular employees, clocking in more than 60 hours per week. That is a lot! And you can bet that it’s more of the same stories with employees in small enterprises and agencies.

More often than not, small businesses are fighting to stay afloat, so simply hiring more people is not an option. What is the solution, then?

It comes in the shape of workflow automation, which can not only help you take pressure off your employees but also save money and shift your focus toward growing your business. Keep on reading to find out what workflow automation is and why you need it.

What Is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation refers to the process of automating repetitive manual tasks inside your business, agency, or organization. The process involves the use of automation software in order to create a sequence of automated actions that require minimal human input.

For example, suppose you are onboarding a new lead or client to your marketing agency. In that case, you can automate the process of sending them a welcome email, instead of having you or one of your employees put together one manually, as well as sending them follow-up emails.

The idea behind workflow automation is to free up your team from doing all the tedious work that needs to be done, so they can focus on their core competencies, whether it’s creative thinking, problem solving, or providing excellent customer service.

What is a Workflow?

A workflow is a sequence of tasks that follows a logical order. By definition, a workflow cannot be random because its purpose is to introduce efficiency and better results through an optimal order of execution.

Furthermore, the order of tasks within a workflow should align with your team’s daily routines and best business practices.

Workflow Types

Because each company is unique in terms of activities and processes, so are the workflows they implement. However, most workflows fall into one of the following workflow types:

• Sequential Workflow: This includes a linear series of steps done in a certain order. Sequential workflows are usually implemented for processes that require you to stick to a strict series of events, as in the case of quality control, for example.
• State Machine Workflow: This type of workflow is ideal for complex processes that use the state of the process in order to proceed, skip, or return to tasks depending on conditions and events.
• Rules-Driven Workflow: This workflow type follows a set of predefined rules where tasks are routed based on a given business logic, as in the case of loan approvals or KYC procedures in banks.
• Collaborative Workflow: Just like their name indicates, collaborative workflows are based on collaboration among your team members and include parallel task completion.

Why Workflow Automation Is Necessary

This is probably the case where the clichéd phrase “in today’s fast-paced world” actually makes perfect sense. Today, customers expect fast results, the competition is stiffer than ever, and the margins for error, as well as profit, are very small.

In other words, every little bit helps, and automated workflows can help your businesses save time, resources, and money while minimizing the room for errors. Fast and accurate delivery might just be the edge over your competitors that you are looking for.

Workflow Automation Examples

Seeing as nearly every industry can benefit from workflow automation, there is almost an infinite amount of implementations. However, we will focus on a handful of workflow automation examples where working smarted beats working harder:

Marketing Workflow Automation

There are plenty of repetitive tasks in marketing that you can streamline with workflow automation. Some of the most common implementations include:

• Starting a drip campaign for users who have signed up on your website
• Scheduling your social media calendar
• Reminding customers to revisit their shopping cart and go to checkout
• Sending out welcome emails

Sales Workflow Automation

Sales also involve a lot of tedious work, such as entering data. With sales workflow automation, you can enable your reps to focus on selling by :

• Removing non-responsive leads from the pipeline
• Move those who are responsive to a different stage of the pipeline depending on their actions
• Sending out an introductory email to your lead from a sales rep after they’ve downloaded your ebook
• Creating sales rep tasks after a lead has scheduled a meeting

Customer Service Workflow Automation

Customer services can benefit from workflow automation in several different ways. Workflow automation can be used for:

• Launching of surveys
• Creation of tickets and cases when your customers reach out via email or social media
• Onboarding your customers by sending out a series of emails
• Resolving tickets once they have been completed

Human Resources Workflow Automation

With workflow automation, you can free up your HR team to solve actual problems within your company instead of having to do repetitive tasks, such as manually entering information for every new employee.

Examples of automated recurring tasks in HR include:

• Deleting inactive candidates from the database after a period of inactivity
• Sending emails to potential hires that haven’t made it to the next/final round
• Collecting employee feedback periodically
• Filtering interviewees based on keywords in the resume

Benefits of Workflow Automation

Implementing workflow automation can benefit your business in multiple ways and have a huge positive impact on both your bottom line, as well as your team members.

Here are the most obvious advantages of workflow automation:

How to Implement Workflow Automation

Now that we have established what workflow automation is, why it matters, and how it can benefit your organization or business, let’s take a look at 5 steps you’ll need to take in order to implement workflow automation:

Step 1: Analyze What Needs Improvement

The first and most crucial step in workflow automation is to zero in on the area with repetitive tasks and start from there.

To identify the problem more clearly, you can create a visual representation of your existing workflow, using flow diagrams for example, and understand the workflow’s shortcomings.

Step 2: Define Business Goals

In order to make the most of workflow automation, you need to set a business goal. Your target can be anything, as long as your business goal is measurable and able to justify the implementation of workflow automation.

For instance, you may want to reduce the task turnaround time by freeing your team members from data entry. Or you can simply opt to save money on resources by automating actions instead of hiring additional personnel.

Step 3: Describe the Steps and Get Everyone Involved

Break down your workflow into a series of steps. This means listing all the tasks and their possible outcomes depending on the action taken while eliminating activities that are repetitive or irrelevant to the process.

Make sure that the specific logic of your workflow and tasks are on the same page with your organization’s objectives and that the appropriate team members are involved in each activity.

Step 4: Design the Workflow

Once you have all the tasks, routines, and interconnection mapped out, create an ideal version of the workflow that fixes your existing one and automates repetitive manual tasks. This process should involve not just stakeholders, but actual users of the process as well.

Define the start, end, and all the steps in between steps that are necessary in order to reach your goal. Take into account all possible actions, their outcomes, as well as potential deviations, as well as how they relate to other processes.

Step 5: Choose the Right Tools

Last, but certainly not least, is your selection of software you will use to automate your workflow. In this case, there is such a thing as too much choice, as there are plenty of workflow automation tools available on the market.

In order to help you narrow down your choice, here is a list of all the features and characteristics your workflow automation tool of choice needs to have:

• Low-code/no-code interface – This enables you to create or customize workflows using drag-and-drop functionality without having to code.
• Templates – With pre-built automation templates, you can get started immediately.
• Integration with third-party software – The list should include your database and applications you are currently using.
• Rules and conditional logic – This allows you to automatically route workflow items, introduce mandatory or optional fields, and send notifications based on status.
• Ease of use – The tool needs to user-friendly so that it can be used by anyone and without extensive training.
• Reporting and analytics – This helps you track KPIs, identify legs in the workflow, monitor tasks, and make appropriate adjustments.

With its features and functionalities, ActiveCollab ticks all of the aforementioned boxes. Let’s take a closer look at how you can implement workflow into your organization with our help.

How to Implement Workflow Automation with ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab can help you save time and resources by automating the tedious but necessary tasks, from onboarding new clients or employees and generating detailed reports to pre-defined templates and automated payment and invoicing.

Project Templates

One of the most time-consuming and laborious manual tasks is having to create a project template from scratch. ActiveCollab comes with pre-built project templates that cover the needs of most marketing agencies, sales teams, and organizations in the service sector.

If you are running a similar project for different clients, you won’t have to waste time entering every little project detail, such as project statuses, labels, and so on, because ActiveCollab takes care of that for you.

Automation of Recurring Tasks and Task Dependencies

Every project comes across unpredictable events and obstacles, that is pretty much a given. ActiveCollab enables you to break that pattern by connecting the tasks in a parent-child relationship.

Once you have connected all the dots between tasks, defined their connection, and given them a time dimension, you won’t have to labor over adjusting your projects and their time schedule. ActiveCollab shoulders most of the burden for you with automatic rescheduling of task dependencies.

Also, you can select multiple tasks and batch-edit their properties, as well as create recurring tasks, and save additional time in the process.

Daily Email

ActiveCollab generates and sends a daily email that contains all the relevant info about the project and the teams that are working on it. This includes upcoming meetings, tasks that are due, in progress, or completed, as well as who is in or out of the office.

This comes especially handy once come back from a vacation since you won’t have to sift through your tasks and try to remember where you left off. Everything will be presented to you at a glance.

Generating Reports

Keeping an eye on all the ongoing tasks within an agency or business can be a nightmare, but it’s also crucial since it enables you to keep track of your goals and KPIs and see how close you are to reaching them.

ActiveCollab has a powerful reporting feature that lets you create custom reports of all tasks. Simply apply the filters that you want and export all the task to a CSV file when you need them.

You can also connect ActiveCollab with your favorite apps, such as Zapier, Slack, or TestLodge, and create your very own automated system in no time.

Invoicing and Payment

Invoicing and payment are not only repetitive but also awkward, as you need to constantly remind your clients to make a payment.

ActiveCollab takes repetition and awkwardness out of the equation with automated generation and sending of invoices at regular time intervals, as well as system reminders.

Simply track projects and tasks and then invoice them through your favorite app. You can also connect your payment methods of choice, such as Stripe or Paypal, and charge your projects from the app itself.

Common Questions About Worklflow Automation Answered

What’s the difference between workflow automation and business process automation (BPA)?

The main difference between workflow automation and business process automation (BPA) is in their scope. Workflow automation is focused on automating a specific task or process.

BPA has a much wider scope. For example, its goal can be to automate the entire supply chain process of business, and all the business operations involved in the process, from inventory management to document management.

What’s the difference between workflow automation and robotic process automation (RPA)?

The difference is in their scope and automation level. Workflow automation has a broader scope, as it aims to automate entire business processes, from tasks to decision-making.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is more specific in its scope, as it focuses on specific tasks and activities and the use of software bots to handle repetitive tasks.

Workflow automation can involve RPA.

What should a good workflow automation software have?

The best workflow automation tools have low-code interface, integration capabilities, rules-based logic, pre-defined templates, as well as reporting and analytics functionalities.

It should also be user-friendly so that it doesn’t require extensive training in order to make the most of its automation features.

What tasks can you automate with workflow automation software?

Workflow automation can automate a wide variety of tasks and processes across different industries. It can be used to schedule a social media calendar, subscribe newly signed-up users to a drip campaign, and onboard new leads or hires.

Expense approval, subscriber segmentation, HR filtering of candidates based on keywords in their resume, as well as ticketing routing for customer support are just some of the tasks that can be streamlined with workflow automation.

What are some challenges of workflow automation?

The most common challenges of workflow automation include:

• Resistance of employees to change and new systems
• Integration of workflow automation tool with existing systems
• Security concerns
• Scalability
• Technical limitations of automation

Conclusion – How Workflow Automation with ActiveCollab Helps You Grow

Workflow automation is not just a nice thing to have, but an essential tool in your organization’s arsenal. It helps you to speed up your processes, automate the most monotonous and repetitive tasks, and run a more efficient operation.

Most of all, it enables your teams and their members to focus on their core activities, which is the creation of cutting-edge solutions, providing superior service to your clients, and ultimately, improving your bottom line as a result. With ActiveCollab, all of that becomes a possibility.

Want to streamline your tasks, free up resources, and make your business more productive?