Are you looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business operations? Streamlining processes with digital workflows is essential for any company that wants to reach its full potential. With so many different processes with manual tasks, it can be overwhelming to decide which improvements and business process workflows to focus on.
To help make things simpler, we’ve outlined eight important business process workflows that every company should consider implementing in order to increase productivity, reduce costs, enhance customer service , track workflows for owners and improve the bottom line. As you contemplate adopting a workflow management software take a moment to understand how these simple examples can help streamline processes.
By having a comprehensive understanding of these key automated workflows which will allow businesses better control over their data management while also ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Keep reading as we break down each of these key business process flows and how they could benefit each team member in your organization!
1. Employee Onboarding Workflows
Every successful company knows that employee onboarding is the keystone of their success. It’s not only important to have a structured approach to onboarding new people, but also ensuring that it’s an enjoyable experience so new team members feel welcomed from day one.
A good employee onboarding process helps staff understand the company culture, provides clarity around expectations and duties, and arms them with the information and resources needed for them to thrive. Having a thorough employee onboarding process can make all the difference in employee retention, satisfaction and productivity – paving the way for your business to be successful. One of the most impactful business process workflow every business needs is an employee onboarding process.
This is the process that you use to welcome new employees to your company and help them get acclimated to their new roles. A good employee onboarding process will help new employees hit the ground running and create cost savings for your team from day one.
2. New Item Creation Workflow
Making something new requires individual tasks, decent project management and multiple rounds of reviews and adjustments, of course. But creating a product or item shouldn’t feel like pushing a rock uphill, even if there are moments that might literally feel impossible.
The best way to approach any sort of new item creation isn’t through a random tasks but instead a series of repeatable processes that take your idea through all the steps involved until you reach the finished product. That way, it’s easier to handle issues, approvals, and feedback before everything gets signed off—in other words, it helps keep a process productive instead of just another wasteful task.
3. Compliance Business Workflow
It’s no surprise that businesses are under increasing pressure to ensure compliance with governmental regulations, industry standards and corporate policies. Having a series of tasks in place to handle all these processes can help your company stay compliant, reduce data entry and avoid costly fines or penalties.
A good compliance management workflow should include elements such as risk assessment, procedural rules, training programs, document control processes and periodic reviews of the procedures you have in place. This will enable management to identify the building blocks of improvement and take corrective actions when needed, thereby ensuring the company remains compliant at all times while keeping the work flowing.
Certification can be a great asset for businesses of all sizes, not just the ones required to have certification by law or contract. You wouldn’t think it, but certification adds an extra layer of credibility to products and services and increases trust between customers and vendors.
Additionally, certification can help streamline a business workflow; certification often means fewer inspections are needed for buildings, equipment and employees etc. Efficiency is the name of the game today, so certification should be part of every industrial success story. With certification making your operations look good in more than just one way, there shouldn’t be any question about why certification deserves its place in your business workflow plans.
Whether your certification needs for formal including ISO compliance certifications or an internal quality check workflow to keep your standards high, Cadynce workflow processes can help.
4. Collection Workflow
Managing accounts receivable is a automated business process workflow that could easily bring savings to your organization. It helps you keep tabs on who has yet to pay for your services, so you can act swiftly to collect any outstanding payments. With an efficient accounts receivable process in place, cash flow management will be easier and more effective, ensuring that you receive all the money that is rightfully owed and keeping your business ship afloat.
Some of the benefits for creating a collections workflow include:
Receivables are paid faster
Reduce bad debt and write-offs
Alerts all team members of a credit hold as well as a credit release
Become more agile while following guiding principles
Gain better information for the current and future situations
Sometimes the regrettable happens and customer receivables need to be collected. A good internal workflow process defined will handle altering the correct departments of the status to prevent. An automated workflow will help the entire team track action tasks that are communicated in a particular order to your customers. A good accounts receivable process will help you track the proper workflow steps for those who owe money and provide a complete understanding of the next action so you can keep your cash flow healthy.
5. Document Workflow Automation
Approving business documents can be a slow – and sometimes tedious – process. Without a proper organizational control, a business task can often take weeks for even the simplest of documents to be approved. However, if all involved understand the requirements from the start, getting an approval can be done more expeditiously and accurately by adding a repeatable process workflow.
A clear understanding of what is expected upfront goes a long way in any business process, especially when it involves sign-offs on documents. Many benefits include tracking versions and changes and the piece of mind knowing that the approved contract or document is being used in the business.
6. Marketing Campaign Workflow
Establishing and optimizing business processes like a solid marketing campaign workflow is essential if you want your marketing plan to be successful. Taking the time to map out individual tasks and evaluate each step is an important first step towards creating an efficient and complete process. Doing this will clearly show what kind of customer experiences you are delivering throughout the entire process – from planning, executing, and measuring campaigns.
A well-thought-out marketing campaign process allows for data-driven decisions that can maximize your budget and drive business growth with results in a cost-effective fashion in most organizations. If you want to grow your business, you need to have a solid marketing campaign workflow in place. Automation will prevent forgetting one of the needed steps in your campaign getting skipped because the crucial piece you delegated did not get completed. Make the most of your marketing budget and ensure that your campaigns have clear understanding and are effective in driving growth for your business.
7. Customer Onboarding Workflow
As your organization grows, you realize the value of a successful and complete customer onboarding process. A customer onboarding process workflow is more than just about introducing your business to the customer and explaining how it works, but giving you a chance to create value and loyalty.
Automating this process may sound too rigid, but what happens when someone on your team forgets to complete an important part of the process. Automating ensures every new customer gets a personalized experience that makes them feel valued. Creating an unparalleled customer experience should be the critical first step in creating a lasting business relationship Customer onboarding should be seen not just as an obligatory business procedure, but as an opportunity for building a successful long-term partnership.
8. Vacation Request Workflow
A business process like vacation or time-off requests can easily fall through the cracks when done manually. Without a unified workflow system in place, employees usually reach out via email and managers try to keep track of their requests with a spreadsheet.
However, this antiquated way of tracking leave can be difficult to maintain and doesn’t always guarantee clear understanding between business stakeholders. By automating these business processes, everyone involved gets a more streamlined roadmap for approvals that is both efficient and easy-to-follow and results in improves productivity.
Plus, having the ability to insert visibility into the approved vacations process for team members helps add efficiencies. Every employee can see a common schedule and know quickly if a peer has taken time off and more importantly who is covering for them in their absence.
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If you can’t seem to get ahead of the competition, chances are your business processes need an upgrade. Workflow automation is the key to unlocking higher productivity and profitability in businesses of all sizes. By automating eight crucial workflows, your company will be able to improve customer service quality, leverage owner visibility into performance, reduce errors, and most importantly — increase profits.
When you’re looking to really turbocharge your business’ efficiency, business process management and workflow improvements are the way to go. The idea is simple – a digital workflow process automates that mundane task to free up time for more complex business operations, ultimately boosting the effectiveness of your business.
But is it worth swapping traditional methods for a digital system? Absolutely! Streamlining processes with automation will give your business a competitive edge and make sure day-to-day operations remain running smoothly and efficiently. So don’t hesitate – look into business process management today and get ready for some serious changes in how you do business.
Why not start a 60 day trial of our workflow management platform today and see how automating business process workflows can improve your business. — what do you have to lose?
