Workflow Optimization Examples, Strategies, & Best Practices

Workflow optimization involves implementing strategies and methods to enhance the effectiveness of administrative, industrial, and other organizational processes. By successfully optimizing workflows, organizations can decrease expenses, minimize errors, and reduce the time required to accomplish tasks.

In order to improve overall operational efficiency and gain a competitive advantage, an organization should have followed certain best practices when implementing successful workflow optimization. By understanding these practices, one can enhance their workflow and stay ahead in the market.

Every so often, we come across a noteworthy quote from Bill Gates regarding the automation of workflows.

He expressed that

“…automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency… (and) automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Bill Gates, when considering, goes through a logical process of thinking, breaking down complex problems into manageable steps.

It is evident that simply implementing an automation solution will not lead to immediate improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, speed, and cost reduction. To enhance your business process, the following techniques for streamlining workflows can be employed.

Benefits of Optimizing Workflows

Upgrades your operational efficiency

The primary advantage of optimizing your workflows is that it increases the overall efficiency of your procedures, resulting in increased productivity among your employees. This guarantees that your daily workflows are executed smoothly, saving time for employees who often have to deal with repetitive administrative tasks.

Improvement in work quality

By implementing workflow optimization, the frequency of human errors can be reduced. The feature of workflow mapping contributes to ensuring accurate placement of workflows, preventing confusion among team members. Additionally, this aids in delivering high-quality outcomes for your business, leading to an enhanced reputation and the attraction of potential leads.

Easy access to accurate data

By optimizing the workflow, employees can access relevant data that is up-to-date, which in turn enables them to complete tasks more efficiently and minimize costly errors. Ultimately, your company will achieve high levels of data security and ensure its integrity.

A more nimble organization

Workflow management aids in the standardization of your workflow procedures, thus enabling your team to promptly respond and adjust to changes.

Once you have identified new opportunities, you can refer to your workflow diagram to determine its potential integration points and the possibilities it presents. This allows you to maintain agility and stay ahead of your rivals. By having the capability to make necessary changes whenever necessary, you can effectively compete and evade any future threats or challenges.

More Transparency and accountability

Workflow optimization includes the crucial aspect of assessing the performance of individuals involved in the workflow, which ensures accountability. Accountability allows for monitoring of their performance, ultimately enhancing productivity. Additionally, the ability to share data across departments fosters transparency, ensuring that everyone is well-informed about task allocation, preventing miscommunication and task duplications.

Examples of workflow optimization

To gain a better comprehension of workflow optimization, examine the following examples step by step.

Inventory Management Workflow

If your business involves storing raw materials in inventories, you will need to keep track of the available stock, its usage, and the time it takes to place orders. Once you have mastered inventory management, you will need to devise the necessary steps.

This is an example of how a preliminary workflow might appear.

Low stock alert
Ordered Goods
Management approval
Getting in touch with the vendor
Goods have been delivered
Goods have been reviewed and stored.

Certain tasks such as order management, inventory management, and initiating purchase orders need to occur.

Onboarding new employees’ workflow

Hiring new employees can be challenging as it requires coordinating various steps across multiple departments. Effective communication between HR, teams, and managers is crucial to ensure the selection of suitable candidates. Additionally, new hires need to fulfill a series of tasks before fully integrating into their positions.

One possible format for a new employee onboarding workflow is as follows:

Role vacancy submission to HR
Create a job description
Get approval from the teams for the description
Post job description on relevant job portals
Asses candidates
Select the candidates for the interview
Hire the candidate based on their performance
Remove the vacancy
Collect their relevant documentation and store them
Ensure the employee completes their training

Top Workflow Optimizing Strategies

Efficiency is enhanced by well-designed strategies for optimizing workflows, which provide a pattern of streamlined workflows.

Keep it agile

When visualizing the creation of your intended workflow, focus on the step-by-step movement and highlight the aspects of interaction, collaboration, and adaptability.

Draft a business process improvement plan

After thoroughly examining your existing workflows, the managers at BPR will create entirely new workflows with the potential to yield improved outcomes.

Incorporate Lean

The purpose of using Lean is to enhance workflow efficiency by identifying and removing unnecessary practices, such as meaningless meetings, repetitive tasks, and documentation processes that are reduced after implementing Lean practices.

Take the help of Six Sigma experts

Six Sigma experts employ statistical quality management techniques to evaluate the probability of process defects and identify and eliminate any deficiencies.

Look for the factors causing the limitation

Identify the limitations in your workflows that hinder your organization from attaining specific goals.

Eliminate inefficiencies

Refine all processes thoroughly and remove any inefficiencies completely.

Workflow Optimization – Best Practices

To maximize the benefits of your workflow optimization, adhere to these best practices and approach the task in a systematic manner.

Connect with third-party services

In order to improve efficiency and minimize mistakes, it is crucial to have the capability to integrate the various systems utilized in a workflow. Numerous third-party systems such as CRM and ERP possess APIs that can be utilized to automate tasks. Your workflow automation systems need to have the ability to connect with these APIs, enabling seamless data exchange. Without this capability, employees would be required to manually undertake these procedures.

Embrace Conditional Logic

By utilizing conditional logic, the manual decision-making process can be automated. Users can now rely on intricate workflows to make decisions for them, following a predetermined logic. To illustrate, when dealing with reimbursement requests, a conditional logic can be implemented to automatically reject any request that surpasses the budget.

Notifying the stakeholders

The communication between different stakeholders is the most time-consuming part of the workflow. If there are multiple stakeholders, they must coordinate, schedule meetings, and ensure completion of the work. This can be automated by setting up alerts within the workflow. For instance, if the workflows involve individuals from different departments participating in various stages, automatic notifications can be set up to inform them about approvals, changes, and follow-ups.

Get rid of manual data entry

Feeding data manually is a time-consuming process that is susceptible to human error, leading to delays and backlogs. While complete removal of data entry is not possible, it can be minimized in crucial areas. By ensuring that workflows obtain data directly from original sources and through integration, manual intervention can be eliminated. Furthermore, incorporating automation systems that synchronize data from databases is also essential.

Track relevant metrics, report analytics and enable workflows

After optimizing your workflows, gather relevant data and monitor the metrics of the workflows to identify any possible inefficiencies and determine how to resolve them. If the metrics show a decline, you can activate alerts to notify management and take appropriate actions.

Best workflow management Automation Software

Pipefy is a platform that enables users to automate and streamline their workflows, enabling them to effectively manage their processes and tasks.

Pipefy, one of the most popular workflow management software options, makes it easy for businesses to automate and manage their workflows with its intuitive and extensively utilized features.

Offering an array of highly effective features, Pipefy serves as a central hub for creating, automating, monitoring, and adjusting workflows. It provides all the necessary tools to elevate your business to new heights.

Features of Pipefy

Pipefy allows you to synchronize tasks at every level, making it easier to adapt to the changes and measure success.
It lets users create custom workflows, eliminate unnecessary elements from their workflow and only work on important tasks.
Pipefy is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes. Whether you’re a small team or a big enterprise, Pipefy has something for you!

Pipefy provides a range of plans to cater to different needs, including a complimentary workflow management plan, a small business plan, an enterprise plan, and a personalized plan for large enterprises.

Monday

Monday provides a straightforward solution for effectively managing workflows, projects, and work teams. It offers a range of essential tools for organizing work, such as workflows, projects, task and time management, file sharing, reporting, and a contemporary alternative to email.

If your business is a large enterprise with complex systems, Monday may be the ideal choice for you.

Features of Monday?

This software stands apart because it provides a complete package for all your management needs.
Monday’s workflow management software allows setting up individual goals for your team and lets them do their work without you micromanaging everything.
It helps you beat the roadblocks with the help of imported visibility into your workflows. Mondays let you know what’s working, what’s on the way, and what needs your attention.

Monday provides flexible workflow management plans for various businesses. Additionally, they offer a complimentary plan. Their paid subscriptions start at just $8 per month/user and can be as high as $16 per month/user, allowing for customization if desired.

Wrike

By using Wrike, teams can eliminate the unnecessary stress of manually overseeing everything.

Wrike enables the creation of smart, private, and collaborative workflows with easy add-on functionality, a drag-and-drop interface, and easy customization features to ensure the storage of your data.

Features of Wrike?

It lets you assign, monitor, and review tasks of your team anytime from anywhere at your convenience.
Pin important to-do lists . Wrike allows you to align tasks as per their priority levels and enables you to keep a check on them regularly.
Streamline every level of the workflow management process with the power of AI and free up time from your busy schedule

The main advantage of using Wrike is their free plan. In addition, they have four paid plans designed for different business sizes. Furthermore, Wrike provides customized plans for enterprises.

Kintone

Businesses are fond of using the Kintone workflow management software due to its convenient customization option that it offers.

By allowing you to outsource repetitive tasks to the software, Kintone helps you enhance your work-life balance and work environment, enabling you to focus your energy on more crucial aspects of the business.

Features of Kintone?

Kintone gets integrated with several applications.
It’s an end-to-end toolkit to fulfill all your management needs.
It provides ultimate productivity with the help of 1,000 pre-built applications.

All types and sizes of businesses can purchase Kintone’s paid plan, priced at $24 per user/month.

Zoho

Zoho remains at the forefront in terms of providing unmatched workflow management software solutions.

The solution encompasses various management features, making it a comprehensive option.

Zoho is the ideal choice for businesses seeking cost-effective software. It offers a workflow driven by approval, eliminating unnecessary back and forth. It also provides project overviews and actionable reports.

Features Zoho Workflow Management Software?

Zoho’s fully customizable workflow management services allow building the solution according to your needs
Zoho also helps reduce chaos and improve efficiency with its data on people, processes, and reports.
It can handle multi-level approvals, back-and-forth communication, and manage everything without doing much.

At Zoho, you have the option to select from two paid plans: Standard and Professional, based on your business’s specific needs.

Kissflow

Kissflow is an uncomplicated and user-friendly solution that assists businesses in managing and monitoring processes and workflows, providing complete visibility of the work.

A highly collaborative dashboard that is suitable for teams of various sizes makes it easy for project managers and teams to manage the entire workflow.

Features of Kissflow?

It has a user-friendly UI making it easier for newbies to navigate and utilize the software for their business
It allows codeless management.
Kissflow equips you with real-time insights that help monitor and understand progress regularly.

Kissflow provides businesses with three paid plans that start at $10 per user/month. Additionally, they offer tailored workflow plans to suit specific business requirements.

Beslick

Beslick is a clever software designed for the purpose of aiding businesses in streamlining their workflows through efficient management.

This software, which is an excellent workflow management tool, allows you to attain efficiency, accuracy, and consistency in your processes. It includes solutions for every aspect of business procedures.

Features of Beslick?

It provides visual reports and data export features for continual advancement.
It delivers deeper insights and visibility into the workflows.

The aspect we admire the most about Beslick is their transparent and generous approach to pricing.

Beslick has one paid plan available which has a price of $10 per user/month and provides unlimited workflows and resources.

Aproove

Aproove offers a comprehensive solution for managing workflows related to any business objective or process. This software enables businesses to streamline tasks more rapidly, reduce the need for manual work, and complete tasks based on their own preferences.

Features of Aproove?

It has a custom form feature that allows you to insert the forms anywhere between your workflows.
Aproove provides a very intuitive dashboard that projects the data and helps you track success through real-time insights.
It makes interaction with the team easy and allows collaboration with everyone in one place.

Aproove offers two plans, namely the classic plan designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the Aproove Enterprise plan which provides additional advanced features and flexibility intended for large-scale businesses.