Streamlining workflows gives your business a shot in the arm

Technology is a force multiplier that enables your business to abide by the old adage of working smarter, rather than working harder. It allows you to do more with less, empowering small businesses to punch above their weight and large businesses to counter more nimble rivals.

One of the key ways in which technology can deliver benefits is in streamlining business workflows. For starters, it can reduce the amount of paperwork shuffling around your office, but to see the full benefits it’s important to look beyond the goal of simply swapping sheets of paper for PDFs.

Beyond merely digitising paperwork, the true optimisation benefits come from reducing and even eliminating some steps of the process. The idea is to streamline business workflows, using workflow automation and system integration based on defined business rules. Rather than swapping every paper form for an online form, for example, the idea is to eliminate the need for some forms completely.

Every business relies on a wide range of workflows every day, from generating purchase orders to following up sales leads and onboarding new employees. Process mapping allows your business to break down these complex workflows to identify those simple steps and tasks that do not require human interaction and could be handled automatically once your business systems are correctly integrated.

Removing redundant steps, minimising delays and eliminating bottlenecks can deliver efficiencies, as can standardising workflows across the business. This can improve turnaround times, resulting in a more nimble business that is better equipped to move quickly on new opportunities.

Remember, streamlining workflows is not a one-off process. Instead, best practice is to embark on a process of continual improvement and never accept ‘but that’s the way we’ve always done it’ as an answer for why a workflow cannot be improved.

Automating simple, manual repetitive tasks such as back office functions are the low-hanging fruit. It frees up your people to handle higher-value tasks while reducing double-handling and manual data entry errors.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) takes things to the next level. Rather than blindly following the preprogrammed steps, RPA is governed by business logic, which lets it make decisions on the fly. It can capture and interpret information and then decide the best way to proceed, such as triggering responses, communicating with other systems or processing transactions.

RPA can power unattended bots, working behind the scenes, but it is also underpinning a new generation of self-service robots that are capable of handling increasingly complex requests, which can be internal or customer facing. This includes trawling through unstructured data to retrieve and summarise relevant information from a wide variety of sources – such as assisting during the discovery process of legal proceedings.

The power of RPA can even be built into the desktop, monitoring workflows and looking for opportunities to lend a helping hand to users by automating processes such as copying data between applications and populating data fields.

This ongoing quest in search of new tasks to automate can deliver ongoing efficiencies, but these days tech-savvy businesses are beginning to take a more holistic view regarding automation.

It’s not just about greasing the wheels so things run more smoothly, it’s about looking at the big picture. Workflow automation is an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how you do things, adopt new methodologies and embrace new technologies to help the business be more productive and perhaps even tackle new opportunities.

Artificial intelligence and ‘cognitive computing’ are taking workflow automation and optimisation to the next level with technologies like IBM’s Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein, not by usurping the role of people, but rather acting as subject matter experts to help people make better decisions.

Rather than just crunch numbers, these AI assistants rely on deep learning to see the whole picture – using multiple processing layers to look at a problem in different ways simultaneously. This allows AI to find insight when wading through huge amounts of unstructured data.

Thanks to advances in machine vision and machine learning, these kinds of tools can train themselves by studying large data sets and constantly improve.

IBM’s Watson has been applied to everything from checking moles for skin cancer to monitoring power plant equipment for the telltale signs of impending failure, in order to reduce downtime. The technology can also assist information workers, with KPMG taking advantage of IBM’s Watson for audit and compliance work.

AI can be put to use in many different ways to optimise workflows and improve productivity. Technologies such as natural language processing allow for intuitive chatbot-style interfaces – virtual assistants that allow users to explain their requests in everyday terms rather than formulate complex queries or get their hands dirty in code.

On the factory and warehouse floor, AI and robotics are also progressing efficiencies. While some robots are removing people from the equation in order to optimise performance, other robots are learning to work side by side with their human colleagues.

Human-machine collaboration is a major industrial robotics trend, with the rise of ‘cobots’, which are designed for safe physical interaction with humans in a shared workspace. This allows for more flexible factory production workflows that are not constrained by fences and safety barriers.

Of course as artificial intelligence and robots enter more workplaces, it is important to remember that people are ultimately responsible for their decisions and actions. This means care must be taken when programming and training them, lest we inadvertently transfer human biases.

For example, vast historical data sets such as home loan data may seem well-suited to training AI to approve loans or chase debts, but machines can easily learn bad habits. A process needs to take care not to introduce unintended biases, such as decisions that inadvertently discriminate against applicants based on race or gender, due to historical prejudices.

Leveraging technology to optimise your workflows can take your business forward significantly but, at the end of the day, you need to ensure that the buck stops with a real person.