Workflow automation: What, when, why, and how

By SimWorkflow · 2024-07-26T15:10:33.816Z

In this page, we cover the what, when, why, and how of workflow automation.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation is the use of software to streamline and automate the sequence of tasks, activities, and processes within an organization. This helps to reduce the need for manual intervention, minimize errors, and improve efficiency. The key objectives are:

• Enhance business agility: Quickly adapt to changes.
• Reduce risks: Ensure accuracy and consistency.
• Save costs: Lower labor costs.
• Improve efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks.

This allows organizations to respond quickly to changes, ensure accuracy, lower labor costs, and improve overall operational performance.

When to use workflow automation?

Many business processes still rely on manual management, often through email and spreadsheets, which poses several challenges:

• Lack of visibility: Difficulty tracking team activities and process progress.
• Inconsistency: Reliance on users to know what to do, this leads to variations in how the process is executed. This inconsistency makes it challenging to improve the process as the flow cannot be guaranteed.
• Increased risk: The risk of missing or losing work, especially if we rely on emails.

Workflow automation software can mitigate these issues by having the process modeled and executed with the system. It provides a consistent user interface and presenting the necessary information for task completion.

Why use workflow automation?

Workflow automation offers numerous benefits that enhance organizational operations and performance. Key reasons to implement it include:

• Business agility: Quickly adapt to changing business needs through iterative delivery of incremental changes and value.
• Visibility: Gain insights from real performance metrics to identify issues and optimize processes.
• Efficiency: Ensure consistent, repeatable processes by encoding best practices, reducing reliance on individual knowledge, and lowering risks.

How to automate workflow processes

Follow these steps to get started with workflow automation:

1. Analysis:
   • Document and understand the current business process.
   • Identify potential improvements for future process models with active involvement from business users.
2. Modeling:
   • Engage business users in the development process for valuable feedback and insights.
   • Use graphical, easy-to-understand workflow automation software to model processes, user interfaces, and data models.
3. Execution:
   • Maintain a direct relationship between the modeled and executed processes.
   • Avoid coding or compiling, allowing for quick playback and adjustments based on user feedback.
4. Improvement:
   • Enhance processes based on performance data collected during execution.
   • Continuously optimize processes to adapt to competitive pressures, regulatory requirements, or newly discovered improvements.
   • Ensure the workflow automation software supports easy process modifications and captures performance data for ongoing optimization.

By following these steps, organizations can effectively implement and benefit from workflow automation, leading to more efficient and agile operations.

Automate workflows with SimWorkflow

SimWorkflow is a workflow automation tool that allows you to create automated workflows. It's also free to start.

There are many ways to build a business process using SimWorkflow. We recommend following these steps:

1. Create a new workflow definition:
   1. Define the workflow properties.
   2. Save the workflow definition. Always perform this step whenever you make any major changes to ensure that your work is properly saved.
2. Build the main workflow process map:
   1. Add tasks.
   2. Add routes.
   3. Define conditional routes if any.
   4. Define parallel routes if any.
   5. Validate the workflow process map.
3. Define the individual tasks in the main workflow process map.
   • Define User tasks--to capture user input, if any.
   • Define HTTP tasks--to integrate with third party API, if any.
   • Define JQ tasks--to process JSON data, if any.
   • Define Email tasks--to send email, if any.
4. Create and define any sub map used in the main workflow process.
5. Enable the workflow definition.