The success of a company can’t be attributed to a singular factor. But, being the connective tissue tying all the different activities together, no one can deny that workflow management has a huge impact on all these different business facets. If the entire system is not set up properly, the issues that occur at one instance can bring the entire organization to a grinding halt.
If you want your company to survive the harsh business environment we are experiencing right now, you need to create a streamlined and efficient workflow that will be able to survive these common issues. Let us take a look then at a couple of useful practices and strategies that should help you meet these goals.
Give employees more autonomy
Essentially, your goal is to make your company compartmentalized and make these individual blocks as independent from each other as possible. These qualities should be brought down to all instances of your organization so every employee should be able to go through its daily tasks without relying too heavily on the help of co-workers. To do that, however, you will need to streamline the processes as well as create the boundaries where workers will be able to express freedom of choice, encourage the culture of transparency and accountability and provide incentives for proactive thinking and initiatives.
Break down complex tasks into simple blocks
Trying to build an entire workflow in one run can be more than overwhelming – putting these plans into motion even more so. That is why you should use the compartmentalized infrastructure you have just made to break up the workflow into individual blocks, break these blocks into even smaller pieces, sort them according to their urgency and complexity and finally use these pieces to build the workflow from the ground up. Of course, the tasks that demand more work and concentration should get the highest priority. The only exceptions are the duties necessary for the seamless functioning of other blocks.
Leverage the benefits of workflow automation
Achieving the optimal workflow efficiency means being able to quickly process endless sets of data and perform complex operations that human beings are simply not capable of doing efficiently. That is why you should put these duties under the supervision of AI and introduce a higher degree of automation. Even if your company uses various IoT-powered data sources or relies on the existing operational systems like CRM or ERP, experienced IoT companies will be able to perform data fusion and set up an integrated workflow platform. This solution is much faster, safer, more efficient, and leaves fewer things to chance.
Pay attention to the equipment
Equipment failure can be one of the biggest workflow obstacles your organization will ever have to endure. That is why you need to take such events into serious consideration and create contingencies that will minimize the impact. This can be achieved through proper handling, tireless maintenance, and thorough first-response strategies. While you are at it, you can use this equipment inspection to see if you can improve the equipment efficiency through hardware redundancy, spare parts, or improved repair procedures. All these things can have a tremendous impact on overall workflow management.
Start with an end goal in mind
All sensible business moves should be made with a tangible, measurable, and achievable goal in mind. In that manner, performing a workflow is really no different – every initiative you take should produce a clear and quantifiable improvement. For instance, workflow automation in itself means very little if your business is not able to reap the operational benefits from it. Having these milestones in mind will help you to easily backtrack the steps you need to take to get there. Also, these objectives are absolutely necessary to set up relevant KPIs you will later use to measure how effective your strategies were.
Make audit a perpetual process
Last but not the least, all the measures you have taken in the previous steps are not a one-time fix. If the changes you are going to make produce any kind of results, the entire set of values you started the overhaul with. That essentially means you are back at square one. Look at this as an advantage for further improvements, fresh observations, and additional refinements. So, use the KPIs you have set up in the previous steps to measure the workflow performance and take new actions whenever you see any variations. Alternatively, you can schedule these examinations and fixes for the end of each month.
Final thoughts
We hope these few suggestions will help you devise a strategy that will make the workflow of your company leaner, faster, and more optimized. When all is said and done, workflow is the glue that keeps all the facets of your company together. Any eventual issues in this regard can send ripples across the entirety of your organization. Don’t allow that to happen and make the workflow as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Written by Mike Johnston