[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Impulsar la productividad a través de la automatización del flujo de trabajo es mucho más que una simple idea de moda. Es una forma de reducir las tareas que no agregan valor y utilizar su recurso más escaso, el tiempo, de una manera mucho mejor.

The goal of these tips will be to boost your team's productivity through workflow automation and business process management tools.

Tip 1

Establish tasks and an order

It may seem obvious but it is not. Many times you don't know what to do next or how to prioritize. When automating the workflow, the tool usually provides an "Inbox" or "To Do" list for each user. In this list, the team member can see all the tasks assigned to him/her, their priority and some relevant data about them. To conclude, once a task is done, it is possible to jump immediately to the next priority task, without delay, increasing individual efficiency and, therefore, that of the whole team.

Example: the partner management team must follow up on different opportunities. Are you sure they are following up on all of them? One of the problems is that they may be calling the less attractive ones first due to lack of knowledge and/or convenience.

Tip 2 

Pass on the tasks to your colleagues

Once a task is performed, many times the job (also called a process instance) sleeps for a while before it is passed on to the next person to perform the next task. When the workflow is automated, the process engine automatically and immediately moves the process instance to the next person(s) and places it in their To-Do list.

Example: a purchase requisition process. Once you have reviewed and approved the requisition, someone else must request quotes from suppliers. So how do you communicate that everything is ready to request quotes? The simplest way (rather than emails and calls that sleep in the process) is: if you pressed the "Approve" button and the process instance goes to the "Request quotes" stage, it is directly placed in your Inbox.

Tip 3

Let the business flow and nobody influences

When a person needs to ask "what should I do with this?" or "who should I send this to?" to complete their tasks, it means that the business is dependent on one/one person. This increases inefficiency. But most of all, it makes some people slaves to their work. By formalizing workflows, defining what needs to be done, who needs to do it and what follows next in a system, this does not happen. Modeling (Drawing) the workflow diagram with a BPM tool will make tasks to be assigned automatically without asking and without intervention by rules.

Example: you have an insurance approval workflow. When the insurance applicant is over 30 years old and the amount is over $100,000, you must .... and in this way, through rules, you build the flows. The idea is to take them out of the head and formalize them into business rules through the workflow. So that when there is a request, the approval workflow is executed without asking anyone at every step, increasing the productivity of the entire team through automation.

Tip 4

Eliminate your bottlenecks

Most processes have bottlenecks: stages where the workflow takes more time than is actually needed. The difficulty is to detect where they are, and to do that you need to dive deep into the process. But to find the bottleneck, you will need to perform real-time analysis and historical analysis. BPM tools have these functions and will show you information about which instances of the process are running, how long they have been waiting at each stage of the workflow. They will also show useful historical information such as "on average, it takes X hours to complete this stage", or "on average, user Y completes Z tasks per day".

Example: Managers complain that the candidate selection process is slow. Since there is an automated process, when you look at the KPI (key performance indicator), you find that the "average time to complete the process" is 10 days. But when you dive into this KPI and discover that these 10 days are the sum of:

• "Analyzing the position", 1 day on average.
• "Contacting candidates", 2 days on average
• "Response from the candidates! 7 days on average

The problem is not in the personnel. This is a hypothetical case by way of illustration.

Tip 5

Decisions based on reports

There is no point in creating reports every time you need to make a decision, because you will waste time. Or even worse, when you don't have time, you will make the decision without consulting/assembling the report. Reports must show relevant information about the processes in order to make decisions. They must be quickly and easily accessible. They should be sent periodically to whoever needs them.

Example: If you need to see all your commercial leads, grouped by salesperson and sorted by amount, you need a simple report to display it. With BPM tools, you simply click on the report link. This will reduce the time to gather the information you need, so you, as the decision maker, will increase productivity through workflow automation.

Council 6

Centralization of information

One of the worst ways to waste time is to search for documents and files in your email, in your PC file system, on your laptop, in your WhatsApp, etc. You should centralize the relevant information in one place, with a powerful text search engine to retrieve it immediately. A BPM cloud tool will allow you to build this search engine and the document management functions will allow you to identify the different versions of any document quickly and accurately.

Council 7

Manually typing the information

Not only does it take time, but it is also very prone to errors, which take even longer to be discovered. You must integrate your applications to exchange relevant data. There are standards such as web services and IFTTT applications in the cloud ("If This Then That"), or even RPA ("Robot Process Automation"), which make these integrations much easier.

Example: data exchange with a CRM or web form.

Council 8

Inactive times

Your productivity also increases when you take advantage of downtime and make it useful. When you are traveling, or in an Uber, or waiting in a routine doctor's room, your cell phone allows you to work through instances of the process, completing more tasks that day, thus increasing productivity.

Example: you have dozens of applications to approve. None of them are time consuming and not very complex, but there are many. The 30 ′ of a journey is an ideal space to complete them from your cell phone.

Tip: Plus

Thinking the process hand in hand with experts facilitates its creation. It is a road that can be traveled accompanied by a certified partner.

Example: at Etixen we offer licenses in pesos and remote technical support.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column text_align=”center” width=”1/1″][minti_button link=”http://www.etixen.com/es/contacto/” color=”color-2″ size=”medium”]CONTACTANOS[/minti_button][/vc_column][/vc_row]