Enterprise Workflow Automation: What It Is & Best Tools

Why Is Enterprise Workflow Automation Important?

Enterprise workflow automation is important because it helps enterprise organizations manage things like labor costs, approvals, and how team members spend their time.

Using automations, one person may be able to handle the work that two or three people previously did. It can also help reduce the margin of error on manual tasks, take the tedium out of repetitive tasks, and help organizations scale and manage their workflows by increasing the impact a small team can have.

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Examples of Enterprise Workflow Automation

Here are a few examples of enterprise workflow automation in action.

Creating Employee Schedules

Location managers used to spend hours piecing together employee schedules and staffing plans for their locations. Working out a schedule could require advanced decision-making skills and complex logic that took into consideration business needs, employee availability, and labor budgets. 

Now, organizations can plug these inputs into an automation tool and let AI workflow automation software or a scheduling app do that manual work. This frees you up to focus more on managing the location and coaching the team. You’ll still need to review the output and make adjustments, but it will take significantly less time than building it from scratch.

Onboarding New Clients

When it comes to onboarding new clients, the process is generally the same every time:

• The client signs a contract
• The account team is notified
• The onboarding lead generates a welcome email and schedules a kick-off meeting
• The onboarding lead creates and shares the work plan
• The service delivery team and the client work through onboarding tasks
• The team syncs periodically to check in
• Onboarding is completed, and the client is handed off to an account manager

There are many places in the process where bottlenecks and inefficiencies can stall progress. For example, scheduling a kick-off meeting could take 3-4 emails back and forth, and setting up a new work plan in your project management platform could take an hour or two.

With automation, the entire process can run itself. Your contract management software can automatically send a welcome email when the contract is signed. Scheduling software can help with the coordinate schedules for the kick off call. The work plan can be created from a template to reduce the risk of missing steps and other issues resulting from human error.

Managing Project Work and Repetitive Tasks

For teams that work on standardized projects or repetitive tasks, workflow automation can help you get more done, faster.

Some examples use cases for this include:

1. Configuring software for new users where the workflow and steps are the same every time
2. Finance teams that do daily, weekly, or monthly reporting
3. Salesforce admins configuring the CRM to send appropriate follow up tasks
4. Customer experience teams sending follow up emails to users at specific intervals like 30, 60, and 90 day milestones; release notes; and contract renewals
5. Auto repair teams that need to complete the same series of steps after completing a job, such as notifying the customer their car is ready or sending an invoice (automotive project management software can also help with this)

Enterprise workflow automation can make setting up and implementing these complex project workflows seamless and automatic to save team members time and manual effort. It may take some focused effort and a digital transformation to get there, but it is well worth the effort to automate your workflows to save precious time and budget and keep employees from spending hours on repetitive data entry.

Benefits of Enterprise Workflow Automation

The main benefits of workflow automation include:

• More time for other skilled work: Project managers can use the 6 hours a week they no longer spend doing manual tasks like updating project management tools or status sheets to instead focus on coaching the team and managing quality and risks.
• Reduced risk of errors: Typos in marketing emails can become a thing of the past—proofread once and let the automation handle the work for you. You can reduce the risk of sending one email to 10,000 people when it doesn’t have to be retyped and customized each and every time it goes out. (That said, if there is a typo, it would scale, but once the content is set the risk goes down).
• Increase scalability: Using automation for business operations lets your enterprises reach a broader audience than you could with manual processes. Announcing new initiatives to 105,000 employees or 1.2M customers? You can do it with the push of a button.
• Reduced costs: If the hourly rate of your project managers is $35 an hour and each project manager saves 6 hours a week by using automation, this saves your company $210 a week or about $10,500 a year per project manager on labor costs! Scale that across your enterprise organization and the cost savings are many times greater than what you invested in automation software tools. 

Challenges With Enterprise Workflow Automation

Even though there are some clear benefits to enterprise workflow automation, there are also some challenges. These can include:

• Budgetary constraints: Investing in automation tools can be expensive. Even at just $10 per license, if you need thousands or hundreds of thousands of licenses, this can add up quickly. Scale that across multiple tools and you are looking at some fairly big expenses. There is also the challenge of making sure each employee’s hardware is compatible with the automation tools. This might mean upgrading laptops, tablets, cell phones, or other equipment so automations will work across your entire organization.
• Training and change management: Once you have licenses in place and workflows built (including any custom workflows), you will need to train your team on how to use them. This becomes particularly challenging if you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in different locations, especially if you have international teams that work in other languages.
• Adoption and feedback loops: Make sure the automations are adopted and provide feedback loops. What happens if the automation breaks down? What happens if it needs to be tweaked? What if employees have ideas for improvement or new automations? Set up a governance structure—if employees are allowed to abandon the tool or go rogue, you’ll lose the benefits of enterprise workflow automation.

Tools for Enterprise Workflow Automation

From marketing automation to project management and even accounting, there are many workflow management tools and enterprise workflow software on the market that can help your enterprise automate your workflows and save time and money. Here are the best options currently available:

1. 1. monday.com — Best for standardizing processes
2. 2. Smartsheet — Best for dynamic workflows
3. 3. Screendragon — Best for customizable automated workflows
4. 4. ClickUp — Best for workflow automation flexibility
5. 5. Adobe Workfront — Best for comprehensive project oversight
6. 6. Wrike — Best for scaling organizations
7. 7. Qntrl — Best for cross-functional processes
8. 8. Miro — Best for drag-and-drop workflows
9. 9. Nanonets — Best for custom LLMs
10. 10. Jotform Workflows — Best for no-code workflow building

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How to Choose Enterprise Workflow Automation Software

Here are five simple steps you can take to get started on choosing the right enterprise workflow automation tool:

1. Identify your needs: Consider your requirements for a software tool. Talk to as many stakeholder groups as possible to make sure the solution you ultimately choose addresses as many needs as possible. While a solution may not be 100% perfect, you don’t want to end up with egg on your face because you forgot to consider the needs of a key user group.
2. Determine what features you need: Once you’re clear on your needs, pair those needs with software features. You want to right-size the list so that you aren’t paying for features you can’t or won’t use and you aren’t missing critical features to make the tool work for your needs.
3. Shortlist tools: Using your required feature list, make a short list of tools that will fit the bill. Once you have a list, do a deeper dive into each of the tools and compare them based on functionality, ease of use and onboarding, price, contract length and any other variable that will help you determine a frontrunner.
4. Assess security, compatibility, and scalability: Since you’re looking for an enterprise solution, security, compatibility, and scalability are considerably more important than they would be for a smaller organization. Make sure the tool you select will be secure, compatible, and able to scale with your needs as they evolve. The tool will likely be used by a wide variety of users on different systems and in different countries, which means additional technical and legal considerations to make sure the tool is compliant.
5. Plan implementation: You can’t just tell everyone across the enterprise about the new workflow and expect them to do it consistently. You need a good implementation plan to streamline the process of getting folks up and running with minimal disruption to the business. It may involve a kick off demonstration, some hands on training, and adoption support. Keep an eye on how frequently the automation is used, troubleshoot issues, and provide encouragement to the team as they adapt to the process automation.

Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise Workflow Automation

Here are some best practices for implementing workflow automation in your enterprise.

• Pilot before you scale: As I mentioned, enterprise workflow automation can come with serious costs. Before you invest in it at scale, start with a pilot. Whether you have one team test things out or a small handful across the organization, you will know before you invest if the automation works. While this isn’t a guarantee, it does give you some valuable data before you invest too much time or effort into the automation.
• Consider your change management plan: You already know that handing users new software and workflows without training or change management is a recipe for failure (yes, even if the tool has drag and drop or user friendly interface). Good change management involves generating awareness. Provide information about what is changing and how, as well as additional support along the way. Set up some metrics to check on like daily logins or the number of workflows completed.
• Be proactive about risk management: Any time you bring in expensive, new technology, there is going to be a risk. When implementing new workflows, be especially proactive about risk management. This might include ramping up IT service agents, making sure there are audit trails, setting up additional notifications to make sure the workflow automation tool isn’t failing, or doing additional validation on business rules. The more you stay ahead of potential issues, the more likely you are to be successful.

What’s Next?

If business process management and workflow automation are your jam, The Digital Project Manager’s active community of experienced PMs might be the right place for you. Nerd out on automating processes, workflow management, and related topics with us!