Our vision of a perfectly optimized enterprise.
For a second, let’s imagine what a “perfectly optimized” enterprise would be like.
It’s an organization that never stops improving business processes and seeking the best ways to optimize operations. It acknowledges the rapidly changing landscape and adapts to them every time, just like the ocean gets stable even after the hardest storm.
Such an organization undertakes a holistic approach to automation. It understands the market and trends and leads the competition through its non-stop strive for excellence. Three organizational pillars - people, process, and technology are all “data-friendly” and work in a perfect balance for the same goal.
In this organization, everyone works on the most valuable things without having to run transformation projects every other year. There is no place for legacy systems or siloed structures. Instead, the organization is transparent and open to developments. Well, before we get any more poetic, let’s move further.
There is more to optimize than you think…
The question is: are there such organizations that we could think of? Even the most data-driven and agile enterprises have some sort of imperfections, and it’s quite reasonable - the larger the company, the more complex its operational models, business applications, and process landscape are. However, organizations are striving to become one to be productive and competitive in the market. In this article, we’re about to show how Workfellow can get you closer to being a perfectly optimized enterprise.
What is Workfellow?
Workfellow is a plug-and-play process intelligence platform that shows how teams use different applications, tools, and systems to perform tasks and processes through innovative Work API approach. Simply put, Workfellow helps to see how work gets done as seen in digital footprints and then automatically follows up with recommendations on what technology or process changes could improve the work and operations.
What are companies trying to achieve with Workfellow?
There are certain things that companies would like to and can achieve in their digitalization journey. At Workfellow, we think that it all drills down to these three criteria that, if improved, could together make the company truly optimized.
Digitalization ratio
This ratio shows the share of work done in the preferred business applications. The more optimized and digitized the company is, the higher the digitalization ratio, meaning that the company runs faster and more efficiently.
Why does it matter? In the past, companies aimed to switch from papers to electronic documents - Word, Excel, e-invoicing, e-everything. What companies need now to become truly digitized is a “documentless” office.
When Excel just came to the offices, it was such a huge productivity leap compared to pen and paper. However, now that there are many efficient systems and thousands of more suitable SaaS tools, the spreadsheets and documents that were once novel became efficiency enemies. Countless spreadsheets and documents moving within the teams and across units have made our lives harder and work more complex. People have to spend hours navigating through all the information, finding what they need, and updating those damn files, preventing the data from flowing and thus decreasing visibility.
*Here, by preferred business applications, we mean the most optimal tools, technologies, and applications for the particular task or process in the particular organization. For example, building real-time BI reports or replacing Excel with Fetch API would improve productivity, thus being a preferred application in this specific case.
Flow
This ratio demonstrates how “clean” our work is.
Building manual reports by typing the data, repetitive responses to the same questions, and filling the same report for stakeholders every week are tasks that prevent work from going smoothly. Teams could save a lot of time by eliminating these and focusing on more critical, value-adding work.
As a solution, getting help from automation scripts where it’s needed or optimizing workflows would make the work effortless and intuitive, making it literally flow.
Time
The third ratio is very connected to the first two and is a direct outcome of what has been done earlier in improving and automating the workflows. As the name says for itself, it shows how the changes made throughout the software use have helped to reduce time. We can see the real impact of what we do - how much time we can save by improving the work and getting rid of manual, mundane, and repetitive activities.
Time saved is an essential measure if the company wants to be more efficient and productive.
These three criteria are outlined and measured automatically on our software, allowing users to keep track of their achievements in the digitalization journey. Many companies try to provide these metrics but oftentimes, they’re based on estimates and don’t provide a holistic view of digitization from all perspectives. Workfellow is the first platform that measures these indicators based on real-time data and facts.
What would changes in these measures mean for an enterprise?
As soon as these measures improve inside the organization, work becomes more fluid, frictionless, and transparent. This directly impacts employees’ productivity as well, as they will find work more enjoyable and less manual. In addition, processes become more digitized, optimized, and automated, and technology augments people to make the work more meaningful.
How to become optimized?
To become truly optimized, it is vital to understand the parts of the work blocking from being so and/or could potentially be improved.
- Be documentless.
We mentioned it already, but it’s worth pointing it out again. Switching from paper to electronic documents has been a disruptive step in the way companies operate. However, once switched, people got too reliant on e-documents and started creating and using them for literally everything.
Remember the last time you were navigating through the shared folder full of Word documents and spreadsheets trying to find that small piece of information? Exactly, we know the pain! Suddenly, we became too reliant on documents and picked up the habit of creating documents for every single thing.
It might be pretty hard to accept at this point, but it is possible to cut the documents in our work. In fact, there are many comprehensive tools and software for specific purposes that help to organize different pieces of information in a single place in an organized and orderly manner instead of having to have them in multiple documents. So, as the key takeaway, just like we became paperless back then, we have the potential to become documentless and start a new era in information handling.
- See the reality of work.
It is essential to understand what exactly prevents the work from being smooth or potentially breaks it before starting any digitization/automation activities and projects. If an enterprise wants to become optimized (read: successful), it first needs to know the current state of its operations. Without sufficiently knowing point A, it’s practically impossible to get to point B - an end goal.
So what should we do then? Collect the right data that would reflect exactly how the enterprise is operating so that the later decisions could be based on them. There’s an unlimited array of opportunities and things that we can do with the correct data. What we, at Workfellow, see most often in the organizations as the leading cause of workflow issues are mainly manual activities that prevent people from working efficiently.
- Understand where technology can assist you
All technologies, tools, and software are there. Think of any business task or a process that needs optimization - the chances are, there are dozens of tools that help with the same challenge.
The question is, which one to choose for a particular problem? Technology is the best productivity booster, and you don’t want to miss out on all the great things it can provide. In the meantime, choosing the right technology should be very thorough and based on reliable data. It must be the right match to your specific needs must provide measurable improvement and verifiable impact to your business cases.
How does Workfellow optimize the work?
Workfellow is software that helps see how the work is done in your organization. It provides the real-time monitoring of all the work-related processes and activities. In addition, it suggests instant prioritized actions to optimize business operations and technologies to maximize operational excellence. This way, Workfellow ensures that every role and the team can focus on the most critical things while resting assured that everything is done in the most secure manner.
One thing is sure - enterprises are facing changes at an accelerated speed experiencing shocks from customers, suppliers, markets, etc. So companies need to adapt quickly to stay competitive. The only way to do it is by getting a clear understanding of the reality of work across the organization. Right now. And in that, Workfellow can surely help.
