As the name implies, workflow automation does just that. . . it automates workflow.
But what is workflow and how do you automate it?
Most importantly, why should you care?
The term "workflow" in this context can mean many different things: workflow can be only one long task that takes a long time to finish, or it can involve many different tasks aimed at accomplishing a final goal.
Examples of long tasks are; formatting very long text documents, entering spreadsheet data, creating webpages , creating databases, cleaning data files, etc.
Multiple tasks projects are tasks that involve more than one application, more than one document, or many applications and many documents. For example, getting data from an email, sending it to a word processing file, exporting it to a spreadsheet, and, finally, creating a presentation.
In both cases, automation can be achieved by creating an application that interacts with all the programs and documents involved in the workflow process.
Automation can also act as a service, like an assistant or secretary taking care of tasks that can change every day. And... if you add data analysis to the mix, it becomes a very clever assistant!
So why should you care? The answer: increased productivity!
Before we begin the full explanation, let us first define what we mean by productivity.
Definition: Productivity is the number of tasks finished per unit of time.
In other words, the more tasks one finishes in the same amount of time, the more productive one is. Here at dicaSoftware, by finishing, we mean a final product of the highest quality.
Now, back to the nitty gritty. The graph below demonstrates the advantage of automating workflow.
Lets assume two individuals have the same ability to perform a certain task. After doing the same tasks over and over again, one of them decides to automate the workflow.
Below, see a graph that depicts this scenario (y-axis is the number of tasks):
Increase of Productivity with Automation
Below we use a graph to show how automation increases productivity.
We are assuming a mere 20 times increase in speed.
In reality, this factor is in the hundreds or thousands...
In this graph, the first third represents when both are manually working the workflow. The angle that this line makes with x-axis indicates the productivity: the greater the angle, the higher the productivity.
The second third of this graph shows the time where the non-automating worker is being more productive than the automating worker. The data shows that the latter worker is not producing anything while working to automate the task. But fear not! Take a look at the last third!
Because the tasks can be done without human intervention, the outcome is more precise and significantly faster. We can see from the graph that there is no comparison as to which worker you'd want on your team!
Interested in automation? Want to learn more about how it can benefit you, your product, and/or business? Contact us and we will be happy to help, no strings attached. You will get a (free) quote before any work is done.
Note: Nah... You can't play with the graph above, sorry!
By the way, the graphs in this page are also from Vis.js