Do you find yourself constantly putting out fires at work? Or are you continually tackling menial tasks when you’d rather be working on the important stuff?
A proper workflow will take you far. But it’s not enough to have that workflow floating around in your own head, or even written down on paper.
Your team needs to know what to do, and it would benefit them if they could review workflows on their computer through an easy to access platform rather than continually having to ask the boss.
Enter workflow management systems. These nifty software platforms can make a world of difference in day-to-day work.
Let’s set out to define what a workflow system is and why you should get one for your team. We’ll then explore one of the best workflow systems on the market today.
What is a workflow management system?
To better understand what a workflow management system is, let’s break the term down into separate components.
First, workflows.
A workflow is any set of steps you need to take to accomplish a task. It consists of 3 main components.
- Input: the resources you need to complete each step
- Transformation: how the input is used and what change occurs as a result
- Output: the product of each step. The output can act as the input for the next step or be the final delivery
Now, management.
Management involves planning out and coordinating each business process and delegating tasks to achieve a goal. It also involves tracking progress and making adjustments.
Therefore, workflow management involves mapping out, monitoring, and improving the ways your organization gets things done.
Each time you make a change to an existing workflow, you have to reconstruct it. You can do this manually, but that takes precious time and effort.
This is where workflow management systems come in.
A workflow management system — also referred to as a workflow engine — is simply a software platform you can use to visualize and streamline your workflows.
Workflows are hardly ever as simple as the image above. There are often multiple branching paths at many stages, more backwards steps/loops — such as the “Rejected” arrow in the image above — and other things.
Workflow systems are the answer.
By visualizing your workflow, you can more easily follow the proper procedures and look for areas where improvement could be possible.
Plus, many workflow systems offer a variety of features that can streamline your workflows and improve efficiency (like the automations we offer here at monday.com).
Why do I need a workflow management system?
Workflow management systems lay your processes out for everyone to see, offering plenty of benefits for the whole team.
Increases productivity
Workflow management systems tend to come with plenty of workflow automation capabilities for those boring and repetitive tasks. This saves you a lot of time and money.
For example, creating legal documents like contracts can take time, whether you’re working from scratch or a Word doc template.
You can create an automated workflow for this.
A workflow system might be able to generate the contract and populate each field with the right information. From there, your legal team just has to scan the document before giving the thumbs-up.
So, how much time and money does this workflow automation save you?
According to McKinsey, about 60% of all occupations can automate at least 30% of their activities. Imagine how much more your organization can accomplish with a workflow system doing all that work.
Your system won’t be able to automate every task or business process. But it can still help you reduce steps and find other ways to streamline the overall process flow.
You can also find tasks that are wholly unnecessary and cut them out.
Helps with process improvement
Without workflow management systems, you have to remap your workflows by hand any time you make a change.
But when you do have a workflow system, the software handles it for you. This saves a lot of time, reduces errors, and makes it much easier to map out different potential solutions to figure out what works best.
Improves decision-making
Workflow software reduces the need to rely on manual decision-making, which is prone to human error and bias.
It shifts decision-making over to a system that relies on hard rules. People in the organization won’t feel as much pressure to make the right decisions.
The result is decisions that are made with cold, calculated logic. You know, the best kind.
Optimizes resource allocation
Workflow systems can help you optimize your resource allocation — or how you spread resources around to complete projects in your organization.
If projects always slow down at a certain phase in your workflows, then you might need to allocate some more resources there.
Alternatively, some of your resources may be tied up in redundant tasks that you can either automate or cut out completely.
For example, your sales team might manually record new leads. If you had a form for each lead to fill out, you can free up many hours of grunt work to keep them focused on selling.
With a workflow app, you can find and address these tasks fast.
Aligns the team and cuts micromanagement
A visualization of workflows creates transparency — helping people see which step a project is at so they know what they can and can’t work on.
The transparency gained from workflow software cuts down on micromanagement. You can delegate tasks much more comfortably when you can monitor project progress with your workflow management software. Peering over employee shoulders is no longer necessary.
Improves collaboration and document management
Team members can share files and communicate through a workflow management tool and make sure documents end up in the right place.
Team members can also take the initiative to keep the project moving. If a task is taking too long, an employee without much to do can help the employees responsible for that workflow stage.
Delivers a better product, faster
Thanks to more productivity and collaboration, your organization can ship a finished product faster. Quality tends to be better, too.
When everyone is aware of the standard processes in your organization and quality checks are automatically built into the workflow, every product you ship should be of similar quality.
This leaves you with a happier customer and a satisfied team.
Helps with scaling
The key to scaling is having repeatable processes and workflows. The easier it is for employees to learn your organization’s processes and workflows, the quicker you can teach new employees how to do their job.
By keeping your workflows stored in your software, it’s much easier to show them to new hires and train them on the right processes.
Plus, it’s easier to adapt to workflow changes while scaling when software is handling the remapping for you.
As a bonus, onboarding new employees is faster and less expensive.
New employees learn faster — and become productive in less time — while current employees spend less time away from their jobs training the new people. It’s a win-win.
What to look for in a workflow management system (psst, monday.com has all of these)
So, you’re looking for a workflow management system to get the benefits discussed earlier.
How do you pick one?
Well, you have to look at a lot of factors. Let’s examine them one by one.
Design
Obviously, your workflow system should be able to map out workflows visually. This helps the workflow feel more uniform, and it helps you see project progress.
But designing your workflows also has to be straightforward. If it’s clunky or hard to use, how much time are you really saving?
monday.com has a design that catches the eye, offers plenty of workflow management functionality, and stays simple while doing it.
In fact, there’s a monday.com template dedicated to process management.
This template is perfect if you’re looking to set your workflows in stone. Or, rather, in software.
Integrations
Almost every business uses several tools to handle all their work. Accounting, marketing, CRM, you name it.
If you want the full advantages workflow software brings, get a platform that can integrate with all your other business tools. That way, information can flow seamlessly between your workflow system and your other tools, saving a lot of time in the process.
monday.com integrates with plenty of big-name apps for CRM, communication, e-commerce, payment processing, marketing, software development, and project management.
If you use a tool for business, there’s a good chance you can connect it to your monday.com account.
Analytics
The only way to find areas of improvement in your workflows, let alone know if your optimization efforts are working, is to check out your analytics.For example, the time it takes to complete each step in a workflow is a fundamental data point to focus on. Better workflows help you do better work in less time.
monday.com lets you view the analytics of your workflows so that you can make improvements and streamline your operations.
You can take a quick glance at analytics from your workflows, such as the sales pipeline example below.
You can also dive deeper into your workflow numbers by looking at charts, such as this bar graph.
Automations
We’ve said it several times now, but pick a workflow system that comes with automation capabilities.
The whole point of workflow software, aside from digitizing your workflows, is to speed things up wherever possible.
monday.com offers plenty of automation. You can create your own based on a variety of criteria, but many monday.com templates come with pre-made automations, too.
Forms
Forms help streamline the often-tedious data collection tasks. For example, your old process might involve receiving information from a client and inputting it manually. But if your workflow system has form creation capability, you can make a form and send it to your client.
Your client enters the information, and it goes right to whatever database you need it to go to (perhaps your CRM).
In a few button clicks, you can create a form in monday.com and share it with anyone by sending a link.
Cloud Capabilities
You want to be able to access your workflows from anywhere with an Internet connection.
With cloud-based software, you don’t have to be in the office to check out your workflows or address any issues. You can do it from your couch.
And yes, of course monday.com is cloud-based.
Conclusion
Having workflows is a first step, but in the digital age, you need a workflow system to survive. They drastically increase individual productivity, foster collaboration among teams, help you scale, and lead to a better product.
You have a lot of options, though, and there are several criteria to keep in mind when hunting for your workflow system.
If you want one that adapts to your needs, instead of the other way around, try monday.com.
Get started today by using the sales process template to map out, automate, and streamline your sales workflow.
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