Every business wants to save money and increase efficiency, but some remain skeptical of using workflow automation. We understand the instinct that humans can perform better, but the results suggest otherwise. Believe it or not, 88% of SMBs say that automation allows them to compete with larger enterprises.

While there are many likely reasons for this, the benefits speak for themselves. Here are some of the key benefits of workflow automation for small businesses and what the right program can do for you!

1. Cost-Efficiency

Automated business processes are far more cost-efficient than paying more skilled-employee salaries or outsourcing to expert freelancers and agencies. If you can automate a process correctly, it will always work out in your favor financially. Machines don’t need salaries and benefits, and their ability to scale with your business (and workflow) is effectively unlimited.

2. Worker Empowerment

When employees are swamped with busywork, you can lose a lot of money through lost wages. If you have 100 employees who spend 15 hours a week doing nothing productive, that’s 1500 hours of lost work each week.

Conversely, when workers have enough time to manage their daily responsibilities, this leads to less stress and more productivity. It also empowers workers to find solutions to existing problems. The right workflow automation will also delegate and convey specific tasks to employees, again leading to less wasted time.

3. Improve Efficiency

John Henry may have beaten the steam engine at laying railroad tracks, but nobody can beat modern AI at digital processes. 

For example, if you sign up for a new account on a website and receive an email right after hitting submit, do you think a human could mimic that level of instant gratification? Moreover, workflow automation can help improve the efficiency of your:

• Communications
• Multi-tenant platforms management
• Archival and logging
• Forms design
• Business analytics
• Platform synchronization

There are plenty of other examples, but they all have one thing in common; machines can complete these tasks more efficiently. With the right platform, you can always continue to program your automation with new rules, users, microservices, and more.

4. Quality Improvements

It’s not just that machines can handle tasks faster than humans, but also much better in most cases. Humans are notoriously prone to errors, whereas machines can achieve 100% accuracy on many processes and tasks.

Think about it this way. If your employees make mistakes 1% of the time, that adds up to 100 errors over the course of ten thousand tasks. Closing that error rate could help deliver more quality results to your customers, in-house team, or business partners. Estimates show that data errors alone cost businesses $3.1 trillion each year.

With the right AI and machine learning, your workflow automation can adapt to all of your existing processes. After initially programming the system, it will continue to learn how to better manage your tasks and services, constantly improving itself.

5. Integration

We mentioned that some tools work across multiple platforms. With the right automation, you can manage data across multiple users and tenants on your cloud, design, and even social media platforms. This can help you integrate your entire workflow for all of your employees to use and synchronize.

From there, you can receive detailed reports and analytics about your strategies as they relate to all of the platforms included in your workflow automation. This combines all of your business processes for one cohesive workflow.

6. Increasing Accountability

Again, the right platform will provide users with clearly-defined tasks and duties to complete. This will help eliminate excuses among your staff as they will know exactly what work they need to complete.

Moreover, this will help improve turnaround time, increase employee efficiency, and limit the stress of communication and delegation among your team.

7. Easy-to-Use Platform

With the right workflow automation tools, you won’t have to worry about setting up or managing the system. Using a low-code graphic designer, you can customize your workflow to meet your needs similarly to a DIY website builder. You or your team can even take a 4-day training course on how to use the system effectively and have 24/7 access to technical support if you have questions.

Set It and Forget It

Now that you know some of the key benefits of workflow automation, achieve them in your enterprise today. With the right workflow management system in place, the sky is the limit for improving efficiency, quality, and your bottom line.

Stay up to date with our latest tips for your business, and read about FlowWright’s features to see what we can offer your enterprise!