Workflow (workflow management) is one term that many people much have heard. However, how many people really know what this means, specifically managing information in any organization?
The challenge with the technical term is it will be used for describing many use cases, and often overlap. Additionally, many adjacent “terms” exist and overlap – and disciplines like business process management, process automation, process optimization, as well as task management being some classic examples. Thus, let us try and keep this simple as well as describe workflow in the real-world terms, and with the view on what it will do for the business.
Define Workflow
Workflow can be defined as coordination of various tasks that will make up the work done within the business. It is called the process, thus overlap described earlier. One example of this will be steps needed to arrange the vacation day. The process will begin with the employee requesting for vacation that will need either approval or refusal from the manager, and will have to include responses and feedback at different points.
Obviously, it is one simple situation and a lot of business processes are highly complicated than this one. The electronic workflow management software allows the organizations to map the processes, identify the potential problems, as well as optimize this process to optimize the scheduling and resources.
Workflow & Information Management
From the information management perspective, the workflow is about how you can digitize the set of tasks, with a goal of automating many of them. The classic examples include processing and management of the incoming invoices, management of contracts and employee on-boarding.
Feature prioritization of workflow
Writing down several steps isn’t exactly the workflow, but this is the good start. Visualizing and formalizing the workflows can help others to know such processes as well as make the business efficient.
Eliminate redundant activities and processes
The startup companies are generally small and have lesser activities and processes in place compared to mature enterprises. Making use of the workflow diagrams or updating them as company grows will help you to easily detect the redundancies as well as eliminate the waste better than just observing or trying out to track the workflows with eyes.
Conclusion
Thus, implementing the workflow management in your activities will allow you see the whole operation from starting to end. This becomes simple to incorporate any changes to improve the workflow as well as get totally rid of the unnecessary steps, activities and roles.