What’s Workflow Automation? How It Works, How It Helps & What Software to Use

Whether it’s marketing, sales, finance, or customer service, tedious, manual tasks are a part of everyday jobs in any team. According to the state of business automation report by Zapier, 94% of workers admit that they perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

At the same time, 74% of managers and employees think their jobs could be partially automated. Realizing the need to streamline workflows, executives and business owners are increasingly pursuing new solutions such as workflow automation. Their goal: save time, money, and effort spent on manual tasks to redirect resources to higher-value tasks.

But as with all new solutions, adopting automation comes with many questions. What’s workflow automation? How does it work? How do businesses use it? This article has you covered.

Workflow automation refers to using technology and software to streamline and automate sequences of tasks. Users define a series of actions that must be performed to achieve that. As a result, they create a digital representation of a workflow and rules that dictate how each sequence step should be executed. Following the sequence, workflow automation software can handle manual business processes end-to-end.

Workflow automation aims to:

• relieve workers from the manual effort,
• enhance efficiency,
• minimize errors,
• reduce employee frustration,
• improve collaboration,
• enhance accountability,
• standardize task execution.

Workflow automation is a flexible tool that can be applied to various business processes in all departments.

Workflow automation implementation starts with identifying optimal processes and breaking them down into steps. Mapping the process onto a diagram or flowchart helps everyone involved learn more about the workflow, find potential challenges, and see which apps are used. First and foremost, this analysis enables you to assess if the workflow is suitable for automation and evaluate automation ROI.

Once you choose the process to automate and map out its steps, it’s time to configure the workflow steps. Workflow automation systems use an if-then, event-based logic. It serves as a blueprint for the software to follow when executing the sequence and how to move from one step to the next. With properly defined logic and conditions, the sequence can be performed end-to-end without human intervention.

These blueprints are made up of three main components:

• Triggers: Events that automatically initiate the workflow once they occur. Workflows can be triggered by various conditions, such as form completion, scheduled date, or data reaching a specific value.
• Actions: Steps that are performed in the sequence, like data entry, document approval, or sending notifications.
• Conditions: Conditions dictate how the system should execute actions depending on variable criteria. For instance, an approval process might follow different paths for different amounts requested.

Integrating third-party software used in the workflow is an important part of the configuration. Automating SAP, Salesforce, Jira, Slack, and other critical applications is necessary for the workflow to function correctly.

Before deploying your workflow automation, you must test it to see if it works as intended. Plug the workflow into test datasets to ensure that it produces the expected results without errors.

Still, no matter how well-programmed and carefully tested workflow automation is, exceptions will happen eventually. These exceptions may be business-related (e.g., missing or incomplete records that are required to perform a step) or caused by technical reasons (e.g., apps used in the process failing to load). In both cases, unexpected errors can bring the execution of the workflow to a halt.

Exception-handling systems help you handle errors differently depending on the event. For some actions, a simple retry may troubleshoot the problem; for others, the system may notify an employee to fix the issue. Exception handling can also be programmed to try an alternative approach. That’s why setting up methods of dealing with unexpected errors is vital during workflow automation implementation.

If all that sounds familiar, you’re on the right track: in some respects, workflow automation and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) share some common characteristics. They both aim to streamline business processes and offer similar benefits.
Where they differ is scope.

Workflow automation focuses on streamlining and connecting all steps of a more extensive business process, such as employee onboarding or invoice management. RPA, on the other hand, replicates human behavior to automate individual tedious tasks like data entry or document verification.
Despite these differences, the two can successfully complement each other. Mapping step sequence before implementing workflow automation can reveal high-effort, manual tasks that can be expedited through RPA. In the combined approach, workflow automation links together individual tasks, which can be executed faster thanks to RPA.

It’s also worth mentioning that leading automation platforms such as UiPath and Power Automate combine both approaches to offer their users the best of the two worlds.

Workflow automation tools combine mapping, configuring, monitoring, and other essential features you need to streamline business processes. But with dozens of workflow automation platforms, which one do you choose?