What is a workflow product? Features, benefits, and selection tips

Workflow products allow a business to automate tasks related to business processes. On the surface, this sounds very straightforward, but few business workflows are just a simple set of tasks to be performed.

Workflow products connect departments

For example, many processes cut across departmental or business unit silos, leading to disconnected workflows. In other cases, there are a variety of process decision points that are confined to one person’s purview. This institutional knowledge causes serious gaps when that one person is unavailable or no longer in the same position.

As discussed below, employees are more productive and administrators (HR, Finance, Operations, IT, etc.) spend less time managing information when a workflow product is implemented.

Finding the right workflow software product

Because workflow management should become a strength across all aspects of a business, every organization can benefit from the adoption of a workflow product. Consider the following areas when selecting a workflow tool:

• Ease of use and speed of implementation
• Resource needs for implementation and support
• Features
  • Visual tools for developing live process diagrams
  • A variety of task types that can be utilized in the process
  • A form design tool for data capture as part of the process (e.g. a request form)
  • Task assigning and routing
  • Alerts, reminders, escalations
  • KPI tracking and reporting
  • A self-service process portal where users can launch and view process status

Benefits of workflow products

• Provide a unified, personalized experience for employees.
• Give employees 24/7 access to approve and monitor requests and tasks.
• Better align tasks with the skillsets and assign tasks to the most appropriate staff members.
• Drastically reduce paperwork and associated costs and waste.
• Eliminate circumvention of organizational business rules.
• Identify and remove process barriers, bottlenecks, or redundancies.
• Identify performance trends (group and individual) over time.
• Improve compliance with audit trails.
• Monitor team progress against service level agreements.
• Provide staff members with reminders and alerts when tasks age.
• Streamline and speed up internal processes by reducing manual entry and request handling.
• Track request status (completed, pending, or in-progress, etc.) in real-time

Nutrient Workflow’s workflow product

Nutrient Workflow is focused on providing a platform for building the workflows that make the most sense for your business. Since no two companies are alike, Nutrient Workflow was built to be flexible and extensible.

Flexible — Start a workflow from scratch, start from a template, or have the experienced service team build what you need. The software allows you to decide how your workflow runs. Choose tasks from a wide array of options and put them in the order that your business rules dictate.

Powerful — Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Nutrient Workflow to reliably power their most critical workflows (think cybersecurity response, customer onboarding, capital expenditure requests, etc.)

Extensible — Connect to other systems and embed widget versions of your forms wherever you need them including intranets, Web pages, and other systems like SharePoint.

Ready to streamline your business processes?

Whether you’re just starting to explore workflow automation or ready to implement a solution, the next step is yours to take. Learn more about workflow automation to dive deeper into how automation can transform your operations, or contact Sales to discuss your specific needs with the team.

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