Do you have the feeling that you never know the status of processes and workflows in your business? Do you wish you had greater control and visibility on all those pesky paperwork or excel related process forms? Ever get emails for purchase requests or leave requests and wonder - “what do I do with this email? Put it in a folder and forget about it?” Do you know that compliance just does not happen in your organization because processes that were documented many moons ago simply are not followed? As your business grows, the managing workflow might become intimidating and you might not know where to start getting things under control. You might not know if you need better procedures, better CRM, better ERP, better collaboration software, better email management, or you are missing something else. You may even have an idea that your business or department needs Business Process Management (BPM) or Workflow Automation, but you are not sure. Well, here are the five surefire signs that it is time to consider implementing a workflow management system.
Sign 1: You’re inputting the same data in multiple systems.
When the business was first starting out, it invested in a core system in an AS400 back in the 80s. In the 90s, the business acquired another business with SAP as its ERP, and in 2008 a new VP of Sales moved 400 sales and service employees onto SalesForce promising great increases in efficiency and sales. Does that history sound a little bit like what happened in the business where you work? So, how does work happen between these systems? Does an analyst in one part of the business enter data and then run a report for another part of the business so that a third area can then update information across a fourth system? This may have worked for the business at some point, but now it is causing a drag on the business. Data has proliferated and duplicated efforts mean more work to find the right data, more time and resources wasted and profits going down the drain. When each department uses a different system for data input, collaboration is tedious at best and downright frustrating at worst. You might not even realize duplication is taking place until it’s too late because so few people have access to every system.A solution brings people and data together in one system. People share data and can use it the way they need to even if other people need it for something else.
