How web technology can streamline your workflow

Have you thought about streamlining the workflow through your organisation? Do you know ways of doing this and the advantages? In this Q&A article, we’ll provide you with some information to help kick start your thoughts.

Streamlining the workflow in your organisation is a way of automating processes and steps to complete specific tasks that are continually repeated and currently being undertaken manually by employees.

In every department! IT, Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing and more. Streamlining is typically used to automate repetitive tasks and to automate a process which doesn’t need human, intellectual decision-making.

• Increase productivity – which can lead to a boost in turnover.
• Boost efficiency.
• Decrease errors.
• Reduce human involvement on low-level, mundane tasks – could save money and increase outputs in other areas where human intellect is required.
• Speed up processes.
• Ensure consistency. 
• Enable automated reporting on the performance of the workflow which can be used for further analysis and improvements.
• Increase customer satisfaction.
• Enable the workflow to run 24 hours a day, enabling tasks that were previously undertaken during specific human working hours, to run continuously.

• Responding to customer queries.
• Bookings and reservations.
• Appointment/booking reminders.
• Document approvals.
• Invoicing.
• Sales reporting.
• Staff rotas and shift organisation.
• Employee holiday requests.
• Data collection.
• Data monitoring.
• IT service requests.
• Scheduling of social media posts.
• Direct mail marketing campaigns.
• Timesheet approvals.
• Onboarding new customers, clients or employees into your organisation.

This step can be daunting – it can feel like a big shift in current processes and it may be better to approach an expert. We as technology experts work with many clients on workflow related projects and work together to reach the right solution for now and for the future.

Firstly, we need to thoroughly understand an organisation’s objectives. What is it they are trying to achieve with a different approach? What problem are they trying to fix or what opportunities are they trying to create? Next, we look at the current workflow and associated processes – the how, the why and the what if. We engage with people across the organisation who are actively involved with the process to ensure that we fully understand how it all works at every step as well as identifying the current pain points.

We then analyse our findings and make a recommendation for the best technical approach. Sometimes, we can find solutions out of the box that suit the needs of the organisation. For example, if it’s a simple e-commerce store that is required, we might suggest Shopify. However, in some cases we will need to create something that’s bespoke and tailored to the specific needs of the organisation and the end user. This will require us to carefully map out the architecture.  This is a critical stage where we consider all options and approaches before pulling this together to ensure that nothing is missed along the way.

With the objectives understood and the technical pathway locked in we then implement the new solution. Our development team are rigorous in their approach to carefully craft each aspect of the solution. We test, iterate and improve until the solution is ready to deploy. Collaborating with our clients along the way to ensure that they’re ready to seamlessly integrate the new workflow solution into their process.

There are 5 useful steps for an organisation to take post implementation:

1. Establish KPIs to ensure you see the results of the new workflow processes.
2. Regular training for employees.
3. Communicate to everyone who is affected by the new process – employees, clients, customers etc.
4. Collect data on how the workflow performance in accordance with KPI’s and act on it where relevant.
5. Schedule in regular improvements and updates.

We’ve recently undertaken some work for an organisation looking to modernise their Summer Programme offering for students. Together with the client we evaluated every aspect of the current programme and we quickly discovered that there was a reliance on manual processing. To improve the speed and efficiency of the workflow we suggested ways in which we can automate some of the steps through a bespoke piece of functionality. We’re actively developing this functionality and looking forward to implementing very soon.

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down-to-earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been developing websites and designing tailor-made tech solutions for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years.