You have many different options for workflow automation that you can choose from today. These options range from email and spreadsheets all the way to complete company-wide solutions like Paperwise. Unfortunately, with so many workflows, steps, data pools and people in a typical business many companies fail to get started in the first place.
That’s why we dedicate a team of solution experts to help you identify areas for automation as well as work toward constant improvements in efficiency, time-savings, and return on investment.
Here are seven ways your Paperwise team of experts takes you to your finish line in workflow automation.
1. Determine what needs to be automated.
One of the easiest places to get started is to ask what is getting done outside of your management system today. Look at things like email threads, spreadsheets, sticky notes, interoffice envelopes and more. Our experts can also lead your team leaders in some brainstorming exercises to identify processes you may not even be aware of in your own company. Sometimes workflows pop up spontaneously in response to business needs and grow from there. We can help you make a list of workflows to target with automation.
Every business has critical processes that make your company run and your customers happy. These are the areas you want to pay the most attention to and get the experts involved in crafting a perfect solution. Other areas of your business are more contextual, and you can probably use one of our hundreds of process templates to download and deploy in a matter of minutes.
2. Work with our experts to outline the steps in your workflow.
Your employees are operating inside of workflows today, whether you’ve mapped and cataloged them. Unfortunately, if you haven’t done the work to outline and define the steps in these workflows, how can you know the work is being done in the correct way, with high accuracy and on time? How can you become more efficient in your organization if you don’t even know the steps involved?
If you haven’t started this process, you’re not alone. According to a recent survey by Gallup, about half of employees don’t know what is expected of them in their day-to-day work. By working with Paperwise to identify the steps in your workflows, we can help you eliminate unnecessary steps, automate meaningful but mindless steps, and measure everything along the way to improve your workflow and employee satisfaction.
3. Identify the participants.
Who is going to use and benefit the most from your workflow solution? Will the entire company use it or just a team? Do you need to expose the workflow, data, and information capture to outside users like clients, partners, and vendors? For example, you may want to improve your customer satisfaction using online forms.
Many of our clients are surprised by how many people a workflow can touch in their organization. You might think that only HR managers need to be involved in hiring new employees. But from the very first interview, multiple people are collaborating in evaluating candidates. Then when a new employee is hired it kicks off a cascade of events throughout your company from HR to IT to management to training and beyond. We’ll work with your team to identify all the audiences affected by each automation.
4. Identify the data we need to collect.
When thinking about the data around a workflow, it really comes down to two main areas: what data goes into the workflow and what data do you need to know that you’re keeping on track?
There is a lot of data that drives your workflows. Your business gets a little more complex every day. Your team is living in a constant stream of data – paper, management system fields, EDI documents, emails, spreadsheets, and more. With Paperwise, as soon as content enters that stream, you can begin scanning, digitizing, integrating, indexing, and storing that data for use in streamlining your workflows. Think of all the steps in paying an AP invoice from receiving the invoice, to matching it to the right vendor and PO to getting the necessary approvals around your company. When you identify all the areas of content and data you need to complete a workflow, it makes it easy for Paperwise to step in and automate it for you. In fact, many of our clients are eliminating about 80-90% of their manual data entry tasks.
After you’ve determined which data you need to get your work finished, you need to identify the areas you want to measure to make sure you are staying on track. These could things like statuses, timelines, completion dates, accuracy, support tickets, deliveries, maintenance requests and more. One of the biggest benefits of using Paperwise for workflow automation is being able to manage all this data so you can stay on top of your most critical processes.
5. Set an ETA for deployment.
If you want to get started with a simple, prebuilt but valuable process (employee onboarding, anyone?), Paperwise can start improving your work in a matter of hours. Other workflows will take longer depending on the people, steps, and integration points in your business. Either way, you want to get started as soon as possible to get to a return on investment, happier employees and customers, and greater efficiency. Paperwise gives you a fast and proven implementation path and video training to make it easy to get moving quickly.
6. Get serious about measurement.
One of the most important ways Paperwise helps you to constantly improve your business is through measurement. That’s something you won’t get through emails and spreadsheets. We can measure all the elements of your workflow to keep you on track and identify areas for improvement. We do this from day one as we’re designing your automation solutions to make sure we’re designing toward greater efficiency right away. We start with three basic questions:
- How would you measure success? This might be something as simple as the number of hours it takes to complete the paperwork for onboarding a new employee.
- What do you think is the baseline success measurement today? You may not know because you may not have ever measured this before. If this is the case, it’s OK to make your best guess.
- What is your target for improvement? Our experts can help you set goals for automation and improvement based on our experience with over 20,000 users.
7. Get the support you need.
With Paperwise Symphony, you not only get a complete solution including everything you need to run your business, you also get an experienced team to realize your vision. You have access to our developers, workflow specialists, cybersecurity analysts, integration specialists, network engineers, business process management experts, and technical support. You’ll always get fast answers and share in the benefits of the best practices across all our clients.
If you’d like to learn more about the many ways you can identify and improve the workflows inside your company, please contact us for a private consultation and we can get you started right away.
