What Is Workflow Automation?

Let’s face it: Repetitive work is a drag. Manually entering data into business software, generating invoices, onboarding employees, monitoring inventory levels, answering customer queries — these are the types of monotonous tasks that can eat up an employee’s workday, leaving little time, motivation and brainpower for more value-added, revenue-generating work.

That’s where workflow automation can help. By employing software to complete a wide range of predictable tasks, companies save time and money while relieving skilled employees of mind-numbing, albeit necessary, work. Staff members can instead focus on more complex, creative and satisfying tasks, such as strategic planning and cultivating loyal client relationships.

Many organizations are increasingly embracing workflow automation to improve the speed and quality of their work. This article explores the different types of workflow automation and outlines 12 key steps businesses can take to create automated workflows.

What Is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation streamlines routine and repetitive processes and procedures within an organization by leveraging software to perform specific functions, such as data entry and document delivery. Among its main benefits, workflow automation reduces the need for manual work and increases accuracy, which ultimately means tasks are completed more quickly. In addition, organizations are able to realize significant savings in time and money, boost productivity and comply with predetermined rules and regulations.

In light of these attributes, all signs call for growth of the already multibillion-dollar market for global workflow automation. It’s little wonder why, given its widespread application across multiple business departments. Automation can assist with software deployment for IT, accounts payable for accounting, social media scheduling for marketing, quality control for manufacturing production and support-ticket routing for customer service, to name a few examples.

Key Takeaways

• Businesses are increasingly prioritizing workflow automation.
• Business leaders say the biggest benefits of automation include reduced expenses and improvements in quality control, customer satisfaction and employee experience.
• Artificial intelligence–powered automation can handle complex cognitive tasks, such as image recognition and natural language processing.
• Steps to build a successful automated workflow include identifying repetitive tasks, designing a streamlined workflow process and selecting flexible automation tools.

Workflow Automation Explained

Every business needs to find ways to organize its workflows if work is to be completed in a timely, cost-effective manner. Workflow automation can help accomplish that goal, leveraging technology to automatically handle functions that would have taken staff members longer to complete.

Even small businesses can use workflow automation to improve their operations. For example, a café with a small staff struggling to balance in-person and phoned-in orders could implement a digital-ordering system that lets customers place their orders online for pickup. Orders are automatically sent to the kitchen, order tickets are printed, inventory levels are updated and customers are notified when orders are ready. Automation ends up being a win for both the café and its customers, reducing order-processing time for the business, while minimizing wait times for customers.

In the past decade, organizations across all industries and regions have turned to workflow automation software to manage their workflows, focusing particular attention on automating tedious, repetitive tasks. And businesses show no signs of slowing adoption. In fact:

• Seventy percent of respondents to a global McKinsey survey released in 2022 said their organizations were at least piloting automation technologies in one or more business units, a significant increase over the 57% that were trying out the technology in 2018.
• Global companies surveyed by the World Economic Forum estimated that 34% of all business-related tasks were handled by machines.
• In that same survey, 80% of companies indicated that they plan to make automation a top strategic priority by 2027.

Types of Workflow Automation

Workflow automation has a multitude of applications; how organizations choose to implement it depends on their specific requirements. Here’s a closer look at three of the most common types of automation that organizations are using today to handle their workflows: business process automation, robotic process automation and automation powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

• Business Process Automation

  Business process automation (BPA) automates an entire sequence of functions underpinning an end-to-end business process, rather than individual tasks in isolation. For example, a human resources department might adopt BPA to streamline the employee onboarding process, which includes processing paperwork, scheduling orientation sessions, setting up email accounts and providing access to internal systems for new hires. BPA software can also track key metrics, including time to onboard, and generate reports that provide staff with regular updates on the status and success of onboarding tasks.

  A finance or accounts payable department could also use BPA to automate — and speed — invoice processing, from capturing invoices electronically and matching them with purchase orders to routing them for approval and initiating the payment process. BPA reduces errors and provides greater visibility into the status of invoices making their way through the system.

• Robotic Process Automation

  While BPA is a holistic approach to automating an entire business process, robotic process automation (RPA) focuses on smaller repetitive tasks that make up a single piece of a business process or workflow. RPA typically works with structured data — clear-cut information, such as inventory figures or transaction dates — and involves the use of software robots, or bots, that are programmed to automate relatively simple tasks, such as:

  • Transferring customer information from an online form to a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
  • Sending automated emails in response to customers’ frequently asked questions.
  • Extracting sales data from spreadsheets to generate monthly reports.
  • Pulling information from websites to assist with market research or competitive analysis.

• Artificial Intelligence–Powered Automation

  AI-powered automation is an advanced form of automation that uses AI and machine learning to analyze large volumes of data, recognize patterns, adapt to changing conditions, make decisions — and, in many cases, pave the way for greater innovation.

  AI-powered automation systems learn from unstructured data, such as text, images, videos and social media posts, and become smarter over time. As a result, they are able to handle more complex tasks, such as image recognition and natural language processing. These systems also serve as a decision engine, providing data-driven recommendations for human decision-makers to drive strategic initiatives and improve their processes.

  For example, a manufacturer can harness AI-powered automation to help manage its supply chain. By analyzing historical sales data and market conditions, AI technology can accurately forecast demand so that the business orders the right quantity of supplies, without running the risk of carrying too much or too little inventory.

Top Advantages of Automated Workflows

Workflow automation affords numerous benefits for businesses. Among the most significant are cost savings — the extent of which will depend on a company’s size and the specific processes automated — and quality control. Three additional advantages of automated workflows for all kinds of businesses are enhanced operational efficiency, improved worker satisfaction and innovation/growth.

• Enhanced operational efficiency:

  When employees get lost in minutiae, small but important work responsibilities can fall through the cracks. Documents may linger on desks without getting signed, emails from one department to the next can get delayed and customer inquiries might fail to get an immediate response.

  By making sure the ball isn’t dropped and work gets accomplished in a timely and consistent manner, automation technology quickly and smoothly checks repetitive tasks off the daily to-do list to keep things moving. Ultimately, workflow automation improves operational efficiency. According to a McKinsey survey, 95% of respondents said automation had a positive impact on the speed of their production and delivery, and 85% said it increased their operational uptime.

  Automation also lowers the risks of costly human errors and failure to comply with industry regulations, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming rework. This also helps businesses easily meet deadlines while keeping costs under control, thus boosting overall productivity.

• Improved workforce satisfaction:

  Nothing makes the clock move more slowly than slogging through tedious work. Asana’s 2023 Anatomy of Work global survey of knowledge workers found that 62% of the workday is lost to mundane, duplicated tasks. Lifting the burden of this work off the shoulders of employees by adopting workflow automation lightens their administrative load and allows them to spend time on more intellectually stimulating work. Not only can employees contribute more meaningfully to their companies, but they can also focus on their own career growth.

  After all, automation eliminates the need for “pencil pushing” and opens the door to opportunities for stretching employees’ skills, prompting people to learn new technologies and take on more creative, higher-level responsibilities they are likely to enjoy more. The end result: greater job satisfaction, which improves retention levels.

• Innovation and growth:

  When employees are spending their workdays using critical thinking to strategize and solve problems, more fresh, innovative ideas emerge, often leading to the development of new products, services and processes that support business growth. Meanwhile, automation hums in the background, speeding workflows, shrinking project turnaround times and shortening development cycles. This allows organizations to test new ideas and more easily shift course, if needed, to accommodate changing business and consumer needs.

  In addition, automation generates vast amounts of data on product performance, customer behavior and market trends, providing businesses with valuable insights that inform strategic decision-making and reveal opportunities to experiment with innovative ideas or even expand into new markets, potentially driving more growth and profitability.

How to Automate a Workflow in 12 Steps

Automating a workflow takes careful planning, but for many businesses, it’s a worthwhile investment of their time. Business leaders and managers can follow these 12 steps to successfully automate their workflow processes.

1. Identify Repetitive Tasks

Start by thinking about all the time-consuming tasks that bog down an employee’s workday and document those that could be accomplished more efficiently by a machine. For example, let’s say the sales and support staff at a car dealership are eager to automate the customer onboarding process because they are spending too much time entering information about potential buyers into the CRM system. Managers would begin the process by identifying repetitive tasks, such as gathering customers’ contact information, scheduling test drives and sending follow-up emails to gauge consumer interest in particular cars.

2. Define Your Goals

Once repetitive tasks are identified, business leaders and managers should ask themselves: What do I hope to achieve by automating this process? For example, perhaps sales managers at the car dealership want customers to be able to book test-drive appointments online to reduce the number of phoned-in requests. The dealership’s corresponding goal would be to roll out an automated workflow that responds more quickly to customer requests, improves the customer experience by reducing wait times and decreases the need for more time-intensive phone interactions.

3. Assess Your Capabilities

Now, determine whether your company has the technical skills, resources and bandwidth needed to execute automated workflows. Can the IT team implement online scheduling software in-house? Oftentimes, a cloud-based, vendor-hosted automation tool is the better option. It alleviates the need to purchase and maintain hardware, software and other types of infrastructure, and it provides the reassurance that the vendor possesses the necessary expertise.

4. Gather Input

Seek feedback from those currently involved in onboarding customers, including sales representatives and support staff, to understand their workflow and get a handle on any pain points that would need to be addressed in the automation process. In the car dealership example, perhaps gaining quick access to the dealership’s inventory system to locate available vehicles for test drives is problematic. How can automation fix that issue and save everyone time and effort?

5. Map Out the Process

Consider creating a flowchart that details each step of the current customer onboarding process. In the case of the car dealership, that could include capturing customer information in the system, scheduling test drives and following up with additional information about available cars via a phone call or email after a sales representative meets with a customer.

6. Select Automation Tools

Research the software that aligns with your needs, making sure to choose flexible, scalable tools that can handle critical tasks. High on the car dealership’s list would be capturing customer data and scheduling test drives, then integrating those capabilities with other existing technology, such as software that manages the dealership’s vehicle inventory and financing systems.

7. Design the Workflow

Sketch out the automated workflow, outlining rules and developing triggers for automated responses. For example, when a customer requests a test drive, a workflow could be triggered to suggest convenient times to take cars for a spin, followed by a confirmation email and appointment reminders. Internally, the system could also match the customers with a sales representative and trigger alerts to support staff to pull requested cars from the lot and get them ready in advance of test-drive appointments.

8. Train the Team

Give your staff plenty of advance notice about your workflow automation plans and provide reassurance that although their roles may change, you’ll be bringing them up to speed on the new technology and helping them feel comfortable with it. After all, the goal of automation is to make their jobs easier. Provide hands-on training that shows the team exactly how to manage and monitor the automated workflow, for example, by staying on top of alerts about online test-drive signups.

Change can be hard, so you might experience some resistance, but communicating a clear path from the current manual process to the new automated system and providing step-by-step training should help ease the transition. And don’t forget to let people know who to contact to ask questions about the new system or troubleshoot technical issues.

9. Implement the Workflow

It’s almost go time. Just before going live, test drive the workflow and iron out any bugs. Workflow deployment ideally should be integrated with the company’s other business systems, eliminating the need to manually transfer reams of data.

10. Monitor and Adjust

In the case of the car dealership, once the automated workflow is live, the company should monitor customer interactions, looking for hiccups in the system or signs that customers may be confused or frustrated with certain aspects of the online test-drive form. By using dashboards that track key metrics, like completion rates, processing times and customer satisfaction scores, the business can identify any bottlenecks and make adjustments to improve the customer experience.

11. Measure KPIs and ROI

Along those same lines, businesses should identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will determine whether the automated workflow is a success, including the time spent on customer onboarding, lead conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores. When calculating return on investment (ROI), the car dealership should consider the cost of implementing and maintaining the automation system, measuring that against the labor-and-cost savings from reduced manual effort, as well as any revenue increases that might result from faster onboarding.

12. Scale and Optimize

It’s important to choose an automation platform that can scale up as your company grows and your customer base expands, allowing your business to collect and analyze increasing volumes of data. By keeping a close eye on how the system is performing, business leaders can look for ways to refine and optimize their workflows on an ongoing basis.

Workflow Automation Examples

Workflow automation can successfully serve any industry and a variety of business departments, including marketing, customer service, human resources, accounting and more.

For example, social media marketers are constantly challenged to put out a steady stream of new social posts, while monitoring and managing content on multiple platforms. By leveraging workflow automation, marketers can schedule messages in advance, personalize content for different platforms, set up automated responses to common questions and curate content from multiple sources. As a result, marketers are able to gain back valuable time to draft new content, listen for feedback and actively engage online with their most loyal users.

In addition, automation is often applied in the food industry to identify food safety risks and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. For example, automation tools can analyze data to flag expired health certifications among suppliers or detect deviations in the maintenance of appropriate temperatures of transported goods to avoid potential food spoilage. In the event a foodborne illness occurs, automation tools can expedite the product-recall process by automatically generating and delivering notices to grocery stores, restaurants and other affected customers to get the word out quickly.

Automate Your Workflows Seamlessly in NetSuite

In business, as they say, time is money. If employees are spending most of their shifts wrapped up in the daily grind of mundane work, what value-added tasks are they then unable to focus on — and what business opportunities are getting lost in the shuffle?

NetSuite SuiteCloud Platform Process Automation takes time-consuming busywork off employees’ plates. The solution increases efficiency and productivity by automating a variety of workflow-driven tasks, from sending alerts about financial report deadlines to spotting safety issues in the manufacturing process. Its SuiteFlow intuitive point-and-click interface helps users visualize, streamline and fine-tune every stage of a business process, automating single- and multistep workflows while seamlessly integrating with other NetSuite business systems, including CRM, accounting, professional services and enterprise resource planning (ERP). SuiteFlow is flexible and can adapt automated processes to align with an organization’s needs and best practices. In addition, SuiteCloud Platform Process Automation enhances data quality by verifying that the information the system gathers is correct, applying data integrity logic to ensure accuracy before saving critical files.

Manual, redundant work is not only tedious for employees, but all it takes is one person calling in sick for a couple days, and, suddenly, work can stall in the pipeline and pile up. To keep mundane but crucial tasks covered and information handoffs moving from one employee and department to the next, companies can use automation tools to swiftly and effectively manage all necessary steps in a workflow process. When businesses eliminate delays and speed up turnaround times, the end result is a more cost-effective and efficient operation — as well as a happier, more productive workforce.

Workflow Automation FAQs

How do you create a workflow automation?

To build automation into your workflow, businesses should start by identifying repetitive tasks that are labor-intensive. Then they can move on to designing the ideal workflow process, selecting effective automation technology and training employees to use the new software, prior to launching it live. Once the software has been deployed, companies should monitor and measure its effectiveness and make adjustments as necessary to optimize the process.

What is AI workflow automation?

AI workflow automation leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze large volumes of unstructured data, such as text, images and videos. As the system gathers and analyzes an increasing amount of information, it learns more over time and gains the ability to recognize patterns, make predictions and assist with complex decision-making.

What is the difference between workflow automation and process automation?

Workflow automation focuses on automating individual routine tasks, such as document delivery and email alerts. Process automation takes a broader approach, automating an entire business process from start to finish.

What is automated process flow?

An automated process flow involves the use of software to execute a predefined sequence of activities without the need for manual human intervention. When businesses adopt automated processes, the workflow is accomplished more quickly and consistently, reducing errors and freeing up staff resources to focus on more strategic and creative work.