In order to stay competitive and grow, a business must optimize its processes to minimize inefficiencies, preserve resources and ultimately increase revenue. Today, we will be highlighting on how automating your business processes can help eliminate mundane tasks that can slow down your organization’s daily operations so that your employees can focus on more strategic tasks.

Workflow is a sequence of tasks that processes a set of data, or simply put, is the way how people complete a task followed a sequence of steps. It occurs across every type of industry and whenever information is routed through humans or system, a workflow is created.

In a manual workflow, a human is responsible for pushing each item from one task to another. For example, when a worker wants to fills up a reimbursement claim, she needs to fill up a form and email it to her manager. After approval, she needs to email the financial department in order to complete the claim.  

Often, we still manage to get our work done by utilizing a manual workflow, but when it comes to completing tasks fast, workflow automation is a business’s best friend to reduce inefficiencies caused by repetitive tasks.

To compare the effectiveness between automated and manual workflow, let’s take a look at how Patricia (infographic) manages her organisation’s policy creation and implementation using a non-automated approach in contrast with Panton Business Process Automation solutions.

Based on the example above, we can note that Panton Business Process Automation (BPA) simplifies and discard many redundant business processes, streamlines communications and gain control for each step of the policy creation process.

We hereby breakdown the differences based on the following factors:

Task Distribution

By using Panton BPA, the entire policy creation task is programmed and set to auto-assigns tasks. By hitting on the submit request form button, each user involved will be notified regarding their task and it will auto proceed through the entire system based on the business rules set. However, by using a manual way, Patricia needs to push out an email to every user involved and response to the comment whenever there is an incoming email.

Document Management System and Security Control

With Panton’s extensive document storing and retrieving system, or known as Multi-Content Repository Engine (MCRE), all digital forms and documents are kept in the same place, properly indexed and versioned so that it can be searched easily. As the drag and drop feature makes uploading and retrieving documents of any type comes in handy, Panton’s powerful security system also enable users to set security access to certain documents and to protect their confidentiality.

Communication

With Panton, all communication remains within the software where ideas can be exchanged right in the software itself without depending on third party communication platform such as email and text messaging, which is slower and hard to keep track.

Reminders and Notifications

The system can send emails and messages via mobile at specified times whenever certain task is being carried out or routed to the user. The powerful Panton Messaging can keep everyone on the same page as they are able to keep track on the task progress without needed to trace through cluttered email, enabling efficient follow-up or opportunities for process improvement.

Audit Trail and Tracking

The system logs every action and status of every item as the workflow progresses, such as which user uploaded a file and the location of the file stored in the repository, or even checking on their request status.