Workflow Automation Explained

Workflow automation is the organizational use of software to execute repetitive tasks and processes within an organization. The aim is to minimize the need for manual intervention at each stage in the process, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and flow. It can automate routine business processes, tasks, and workflows in your organization, freeing up teams to focus on tasks that require human intervention.

Business examples of workflow automation include:

• Employee onboarding – automating the process of onboarding new employees by automatically sending welcome emails, creating user accounts, scheduling training sessions, and assigning necessary resources.
• Invoice processing – automating the receipt, approval, and payment of invoices. The workflow automation capabilities can extract data from invoices, route them for approval, and process payments once approved.
• Customer service ticketing systems – automating the creation, assignment, and tracking of support tickets, with tickets routed to the most appropriate support analysts based on the issue type and priority.
• Email campaign management – automating the creation, scheduling, and sending of marketing emails. The workflow automation capabilities can segment the audience, personalize messages, and track campaign performance.
• Incident management – automating the logging, categorization, and resolution of IT incidents. The workflow automation capabilities can automatically assign incidents to the appropriate support teams and track resolution times.

Why use workflow automation?

Workflow automation can be helpful when an organization has many repeatable processes or ways of working with defined start and end points, with clear rules and quality criteria. Some common examples of business processes that organizations can automate include:

• Data entry and processing tasks
• Employee onboarding
• Document approval processes
• Change management
• Inventory management
• Ticket management for service desks
• Knowledge management and FAQs.

With workflow automation, organizations can:

• Increased efficiency
• Improve process accuracy and consistency
• Save costs
• Improve compliance and governance
• Enhance employee and operational productivity
• Provide better visibility
• Facilitate scalability
• Improve customer and employee experiences.

These areas are included in more detail in the section on the benefits of workflow automation.

Workflow automation works by orchestrating a series of predefined steps to accomplish a specific task or process. It can be viewed as an assembly line where tasks are automatically completed, guided by rules, triggers, and quality criteria.

The main elements that make up workflow automation are:

• Initiation – the workflow automation process begins with a predefined event or condition that initiates the workflow. This can be a time-based event, such as a scheduled task like a backup finishing, or a condition-based event, like receiving a form submission, text, or email.
• Task sequencing – the workflow then moves through a sequence of tasks. These tasks can be simple or complex, depending on inputs and quality benchmarks. They can include actions like data entry, notifying stakeholders of task status, or generating reports. If a workflow is more advanced, you can build in decision points to automated parts of the decision-making process based on predefined criteria.
• Conditional logic – incorporating conditional logic enables you to automate decisions within your workflow automation process. An example could be if an IT service request exceeds a certain price threshold, the workflow might automatically send an approval email to the requester’s manager.
• Data integration – effective workflows can use APIs to pull data from various sources, such as databases and spreadsheets, to perform tasks accurately. They can also update data across multiple systems, ensuring consistency.
• Notifications events and alerts – automation enables the workflow to send notifications to stakeholders and support teams at key stages in emails, messages, or push-based notifications.
• Escalations and approvals – in scenarios where human intervention is required, workflows can route tasks to the appropriate individuals. This ensures the process flows smoothly while involving the right people at the right time.
• Review and feedback loops – continual improvement so that your workflows continue to evolve over time.

Comparing workflow automation and business process automation

People can get confused between workflow automation and business process automation. The table below highlights the key differences.

Workflow automation offers numerous benefits to business processes that enhance efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. Examples include:

• Significantly reducing the time required compared to manual processing
• 24/7 operations, ensuring tasks are completed around the clock.
• Reduced human error because automation minimizes the errors associated with manual data entry and processing.
• Standardized processes, with tasks performed consistently according to predefined rules and standards.
• Labor cost reduction because automation reduces the need for manual intervention.
• Consistent compliance because automated workflows ensure that processes consistently comply with regulatory requirements and internal policies.
• Employees can focus on high-value tasks because automation frees them from mundane tasks.
• Real-time monitoring, with automated systems providing real-time tracking of workflow status and offering insights into process performance and bottlenecks.
• Handling increased volume because automated workflows can easily scale to manage increased volumes of work.
• Faster service delivery, with automation significantly reducing response times.
• Improved employee satisfaction because reducing the burden of repetitive tasks means employees can engage in more meaningful work.

The benefits of workflow automation in IT use cases include:

• Quicker, more efficient service delivery – automation can speed up processes like user account management, event management, incident management, and patch management, leading to quicker turnaround times.
• More proactive maintenance – data analytics reduces the potential for service disruption, and routine maintenance tasks can be automated to ensure they are performed consistently and on schedule.
• Improved focus – automating routine support tasks like software updates, backups, and monitoring can save time and resources.
• Self-healing technology – automated systems can detect and correct errors, minimizing service disruption downtime.
• More effective monitoring – automated systems can monitor IT environments 24 x 7 x 365, ensuring issues are detected, prioritized, and resolved.
• User account management – automating the creation, updating, and deletion of user accounts.
• Release management – automating the deployment of software updates and patches.

The benefits of HR workflow automation use cases include:

• A leaner employee recruitment process – automation can streamline the employee recruitment process by managing job postings, CV collection, and interview scheduling.
• More efficient employee onboarding – automated employee onboarding processes help ensure new hires have a more seamless experience, receiving all first-day information and credentials.
• Automated employee reviews – automating performance reviews and feedback sessions helps ensure they are conducted regularly and consistently.
• Goal and objective management – automation can track employee goals and objectives, supporting continuous performance management.
• A more effective employee exit process – key tasks for colleagues leaving the business can be automated, such as removing access credentials and processing payroll information.

Starting with workflow automation involves suitable planning, assessment, and implementation to help ensure successful adoption and maximize benefits. The steps an organization needs to follow include:

• Identifying the high-volume processes suitable for automation – these are likely to be repetitive and time-consuming, prone to human error, and rule-based with clear decision points.
• Defining clear objectives and goals – this is what your organization wants to achieve with automation, such as reducing process time, minimizing errors, or improving compliance. Measurable goals should track the success of the automation efforts – for example, reducing invoice processing time by 50% or cutting incident resolution times by 30%.
• Selecting the right tools – research the workflow automation tools and platforms that fit your organization’s needs.
• Mapping out the current processes – document them in detail, including the steps, decision points, and exceptions. Involve the business stakeholders directly involved in these processes to get their input.
• Designing and implementing the automated workflow – incorporating improvements identified during the mapping stage. Validate the workflow design with business stakeholders to ensure it meets business requirements.
• Training people on the new way of working – develop focused training programs to educate employees on the new automated workflows.
• Continuously measuring performance – assess the automated workflows against the defined goals and objectives. Establish feedback loops with users to gather insights and identify areas for improvement.

Workflow automation can be a game-changer for both ITSM and ESM use cases. Some common IT and business function applications of workflow automation are:

• Issue management (incident management in IT) – using models to automatically prioritize and categorize issues so they can be routed to the correct team.
• Request management – using automation to preapprove requests under a certain financial threshold. An IT example is automatically allocating available software licenses where available.
• Change management – using delegated authority, standard changes, and (in IT) configuration items (CIs) to improve change flow. The use of models helps, too. These are predefined steps that, if the nature of a change is known and understood, can be approved by the appropriate stakeholders via your service management tool. Standard changes take this a step further by having pre-approval in place for low-risk, routine change activity.
• Release management – in IT, automation enables the Definitive Media Library (DML) to deploy releases so that your organization knows the assets involved meet the required specifications, are secure from external threats, and are appropriately licensed.
• Event management – in IT, this is the use of continuous monitoring to detect compliance and security issues within your organization’s production environment. Trigger events and alerts mean that the appropriate action can be taken by your event and incident management teams in the event of an issue being flagged.
• Service level management – automated systems can continuously track key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, ensuring that services meet predefined standards. This facilitates more accurate reporting and provides stakeholders comprehensive insights into service performance and compliance with service level agreements (SLAs).
• Knowledge management – automated systems can schedule regular reviews of knowledge assets to help ensure they remain accurate and up-to-date and can flag or remove outdated knowledge and information.

How to automate enterprise workflows

There are several key steps involved in enterprise workflow automation. These steps include:

• Bringing your people together – your automated workflows will only work if the right people are involved. So assemble your team at the beginning of the automaton initiative, get multiple perspectives, and help ensure that nothing is missed. This collaborative approach helps ensure everyone is aligned on the goals and outcomes.
• Having a plan – gather your team to map out the entire process. Take the time to capture the tasks, decision points, approvals, and notifications involved in the workflow. Take your time with this because making changes or fixing errors is much easier before introducing the automation.
• Building the workflow in your tool – this step involves mapping out the steps that need to be accomplished and the order in which they should occur. Determine the approvals and notifications that need to be sent at different stages.
• Configuring the automation – here’s where visual mapping takes shape. Define and configure or code the triggers that initiate the workflow automation in your tool. You will need to specify the conditions that guide the workflow’s path and detail the actions that must be performed.
• Documenting everything – create documentation for training and future changes. It’s important to provide clear guidelines on how the workflows work, including their triggers, actions, and decision points.
• Testing the workflow – before deploying the workflow into your live environment, carry out testing to ensure your workflow is fit for purpose. The best way to do this is to have your team walk through each stage of automation to ensure each action works as expected.
• Going live – deploy your workflow and gauge feedback.
• Reviewing and improving – regularly review, update, and maintain your workflows to keep them aligned with your organization’s evolving needs and objectives.

Some of the key functionalities to consider when choosing a workflow automation tool include:

• Ease of use – first and foremost, your chosen workflow automation solution needs a user-friendly interface to make it easy for people to navigate and use.
• Integration capabilities – your workflow automation tool must integrate with your organization’s existing software, such as directory services. This will help enable people to collaborate more effectively and prevent data silos.
• Customization and flexibility – the ability to customize workflows according to specific business needs.
• Scalability – workflow automation solutions should handle increasing volumes of work as the business grows. This includes supporting multiple workflows, users, and data without compromising performance or reliability.
• Reporting and analytics – effective reporting and analytics are key to understanding workflow efficiency. These capabilities highlight areas for improvement and enable data-driven decision-making through access to real-time insights.
• Security – workflow automation tools must have solid security functionality such as encryption, role-based access, and audit logs to help ensure that the appropriate access controls and security protocols are in place.
• Support for mobile devices and apps – always make it easy for people to use your services! Mobile accessibility enables people to use workflows in a way that works for them.

The workflow automation space is constantly evolving, driven by emerging technologies, the growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) sectors, and changing business needs. Some key trends related to the future of workflow automation include:

• More focus on Customer eXperience (CX) – workflow automation tools will offer more personalized experiences, tailoring workflows to individual user preferences and roles.
• User-friendly interfaces – workflow automation platforms will become more user-friendly, with drag-and-drop interfaces and low-code/no-code solutions that make it easier for non-technical users to design and implement workflows.
• Integration with AI and machine learning – AI and machine learning will enable workflows to become more intelligent, learning from data patterns and improving over time. This will allow for predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and more proactive decision-making.
• Natural language processing (NLP) – AI-powered NLP will facilitate more intuitive interactions with workflow automation tools, allowing people to automate workflows using natural language commands.
• End-to-end automation – hyper-automation involves the comprehensive automation of all possible business processes using a combination of AI, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and other technologies.
• Greater integration – workflow automation tools will offer better integration with other enterprise systems to enable seamless data flow.
• Unified platforms – organizations will increasingly adopt unified automation platforms that combine various tools and technologies, providing a single interface for managing all automated workflows.
• Better support for compliance – workflow automation will include built-in compliance features that automatically ensure processes adhere to industry regulatory requirements and reduce the risk of non-compliance.
• Security enhancements – there will be a greater focus on securing automated workflows, protecting against data breaches, and ensuring robust access controls.
• More support for sustainability initiatives – so that workflow automation platforms have less environmental impact.