Three fundamental elements of business success are getting the high-level strategy right, getting the operating model right, and getting the right people on board.
When these fundamentals are in place, you’re in a much better position to take steps to maximize efficiency and extract the greatest ROI from your technology investments.
For example, the right workflow software is immensely empowering, allowing companies to streamline and automate processes that used to be clunky and inefficient. But it’s also important to prioritize workflow automation for the best, fastest ROI. Here’s how to make sure you’re getting the most return on your workflow software investment.
Articulate and Communicate Goals
Knowing your goals, being able to explain them, and being able to communicate them are essential to getting the most from your workflows. If you don’t know what your goals are, how can you separate the important tasks from the less-important ones? And how can your team members know where to focus their own innovation efforts if they don’t understand the goals the organization is working toward?
Maybe one of your goals is raising productivity by 10%. If you communicate this goal and why it’s a goal, you may pique the interest of someone on the team who has an idea for significantly accelerating a workflow and making progress toward that productivity goal.
Learn to Prioritize
With the right workflow software, people will want to create automated workflows, because they see the power of workflow automation and want to apply it everywhere they can. But it’s important that everyone on the team understands priorities.
Suppose one of your organization’s top priorities is increasing the efficiency of the document management workflow to cut costs and free up manpower for other tasks. If you don’t emphasize the importance of this priority, a team member might be spending some of their discretionary time developing a workflow to make sure the coffee-making rota is fair. While there’s nothing wrong with such a workflow, perhaps they should be using their ambition and talent on something with a higher priority.
Developing a workflow for the office Foosball tournament brackets
probably isn’t as important as developing the workflow for next year’s budget.
Regularly Reevaluate How You Use Technology
Workflow ROI today might not be the same as it is next year. Technology is such an important variable in business processes that workflows often need to be modernized to take maximum advantage of technological advancements.
Say one year your warehouse workers use portable barcode scanners to initiate certain workflows. A year later, all warehouse workers are issued company smartphones. They may no longer need those portable barcode scanners, because their smartphone can scan the barcodes and kick off the workflow all at the same time. Using the older workflow would hold back your efficiency.
Workflow automation isn’t something that happens once for all time. Automated workflows must evolve along with changing needs, changing marketplaces, and changing technologies. The right workflow software is the key to being able to do this with minimal upheaval.
PerfectApps is workflow software that provides the flexibility, power, and scalability businesses need to create workflows that are right for right now. And when circumstances change, PerfectApps allows workflows to be updated, tested, and re-deployed quickly.
Because PerfectApps is no-code workflow software, the people who actually use the workflows can have significant input into workflow design. After all, they know the workflows inside and out, and they can offer good insights into where bottlenecks occur and how workflows can be modified to work better.
Getting the maximum ROI from your workflows requires knowing and communicating organizational goals, prioritizing goals and tasks, and being prepared to take advantage of technology advances. PerfectApps is the ideal partner for doing all this. We invite you to watch the demo video to see PerfectApps in action. And if you have any questions, we encourage you to contact us at any time.
