Skip to content

Skip Ahead to Success: How automating workflows can help cut costs and labor so you can skip to the results

We’ve made it past the aughts of the 21st century, and while the Jetsons’ promises of flying cars and personalized androids have fallen through — mostly — our technology is smarter and faster than ever. This means business is accomplished smarter and faster as well, and businesses unable to keep pace in the current economy are quickly finding themselves falling behind. In recent years, software and technology have even begun to outperform manual input labor, making it harder for companies to keep up without automating workflows.
For a rocket to breech our atmosphere, a tremendous amount of fuel is required, but as more fuel is added, additional fuel is needed to propel the extra weight of the rocket. The same can be considered when it comes to manual input workflows in the modern economy. To keep pace in the global market without automating workflows, companies must continuously increase labor forces to accomplish manual tasks. But what if the rocket could skip the launch sequence and just pop up in space? It’s not exactly that simple, but it’s a helpful analogy to the benefits that automating workflows can have for your company’s margins.
As companies in the modern economy continue to grow, the industrial and technological workflows become increasingly complex. This only compounds the already heightened possibility of errors made by performing these procedures and processes manually. These mistakes can translate into real losses for your business. This introduces a real risk of incorrect payments to vendors, late fees and potential liability issues when these vulnerabilities aren’t addressed. This is where automating workflows comes in — to dissolve these vulnerabilities and save the day.
This isn’t just optimism, either. Automating workflows has the track record to back up its promise. In one case study, a global manufacturing company completely automated its accounts payable workflow and cut down on thousands of dollars’ worth of manual labor hours and paper inventory without any changes to their global offices. Before workflow automations, this manual process wreaked havoc not only within the accounting office, but also negatively affected client relationships by dragging out the payment process to a near glacial pace.
Due to frequent invoice disputes with the paper inventory system, the automation system focused on sub-processes designed to handle exceptions to the norm and integrations with SAP. The entirety of the accounts payable workflow was converted to an automatic system that required only marginal updating and auditing. The chances of mistakes and missed time margins were eliminated and the company saved untold amounts of capital simply by switching this single aspect of their overall workflow to automated systems.
How can your business accomplish comparable positive results? Plan focused meetings with the administrative staff and representatives at all levels of the departmental process you see has the potential for automation. Your team can then define the workflow process and, with the help of a process automation expert, design the software system you’ll need to streamline your workflow process. Automating workflows is a proven system of business management and processing that allows companies to keep pace in the modern economy. In the lightning-fast market we find ourselves in today, outdated, cumbersome workflow processes only hold us back. It’s time to make the switch and consider how automating workflows can help your business avoid the pitfalls and mistakes characteristic of manual input processes and skip ahead to success.