Can you imagine riding a horse-drawn carriage down the Autobahn?
The idea is downright absurd – even dangerous. And, in an emerging age of self-driving cars, it seems ludicrous to flog a poor horse to try to keep up with cars zipping along at top speed.
Many enterprise processes today give an equally absurd picture. Managers refuse to turn their manual processes into an automated system. The business world is flooded with cutting-edge technology, and enterprises are at each other’s throat to get to the market first. Even within enterprises, different functions have to continually show how well they can operate.
If you are a department head looking for a way to give your team the edge, you really need to think hard about automated processes.
Why manual processes break down
Take the case of Denise, CMO at a large corporation. She is a stickler for processes and likes to keep a close hand on everything that’s going on in her department. She has approval processes lined up for everything, from AdWords campaigns to blogs to media buys.
But no matter how stringent her processes are, they all have little holes in them that frustrate her to no end. For example, she’s likely spending most of her day going through emails asking for approval. One person is asking for approval for a new set of keywords, another for travel approval for the upcoming convention. All of these emails get stuffed together with her other work as well and her inbox is beyond overflowing.
Denise also has trouble getting her team to take any responsibility when there is a mistake. One display ad went out with a mistake in the headline. The copywriter said it was changed somewhere later in the process. The designer said she got her artwork approved by another manager, and everyone was pointing fingers at everyone else.
Denise keeps begging and sometimes threatening her team to just follow the process, but it seems that she’s always fighting an uphill battle.
Searching for help
While searching for ways to make her processes more efficient, Denise came across workflow automation software. Workflow software is perfect for managers like Denise who like to run a tight ship, but rather than controlling every detail, a cloud workflow system like Kissflow lets you set it up once and then everything runs as it should.
When you automate your workflows, you reduce a ton of paper from the processes and clear out the many confusions around them. Having workflow software is not just about speed – although that’s a big plus. It also gives process managers full control over the workflows.
Denise always imagined that having efficient processes meant keeping a strong hand on them and forcing people to follow a process they were prone to break. However, after talking with other managers who used software to take their workflows online, she realized that she could still have her efficient processes and relax at the same time.
Frictionless and fun
Denise decided to pilot some workflow software just to see what would happen. At first, most of her team was worried that this was another scheme to get them to follow more procedures. However, after seeing how easy it was to complete the tasks, they soon asked her to automate other processes.
Best of all, the blaming soon melted away. Now, it was obvious who was responsible for a given task, and sometimes the problem could be solved by a tweak to the system with an extra approval or notification.
Give automation a try
It can feel comfortable to continue on with manual processes in your enterprise, but they are not the best way to strengthen your team’s bandwidth. You can definitely try hiring new people to the team, but that will only incur more cost and maintenance than actually making your processes more efficient. Speeding things up doesn’t always mean increased efficiency.
If you’re looking to take your workflows online, try Kissflow Workflow for free. It’s extremely easy to use, highly customizable, and much more affordable than other solutions in the market of cloud workflow system.
