Imagine this scenario, Mike steps into his office and among other tasks has to book a conference room for an impromptu meeting. Mike mails his supervisor for an approval following which, Mike plans to send the mail to the facilities department, check on the room availability and book it.

Sounds simple, and that’s what Mike thought too, after sending the approval mail to the supervisor. Engrossed in other tasks, and needing a break, Mike steps out for coffee to learn from his colleague that his supervisor is on leave. Mike rushes back to his seat and forwards the request to the designated supervisor, who approves the mail post lunch. Mike forwards the approval to the facilities department, only to hear that an 8-seater conference room isn’t available. With few hours to go, will Mike be able to book the conference room or not?

Compare the above scenario with how Darwin handles it with workflow automation in place.

What has happened here, is nothing but the work of workflows.

Not just Darwin, workflows when simplified, helps many Mikes out there. Interesting? Then, get into the world of workflows with Maarga’s latest webinar on “Simplify Design of Complex Workflows”.

Sales folks will love this example. One of Maarga’s clients had over 200 + sales force on the field. And every large quotation to clients involved discounts. Discount structures and discount values needed approval from the head quarters. With email and excel based approval process, the sales team was getting frustrated having to chase down the head office to approve. Maarga automated the approval process, made it web based and mobile responsive and improved the cycle time of approval to less than 2 days for bulk of the proposals.And now with a central repository of historical quotation and tracking and analytics capabilities, Maarga’s smart automation truly was a shot in the arm for the sales team. A 30% increase in proposal wins was testimony to the results.   .

The power of great workflows

Simplified workflows deliver benefits to both businesses and processes. The process benefits range from:

1. Reduce TAT (turn around time)
2. Reduce human errors
3. Increase scalability
4. Improve visibility
5. Insight driven decisions
6. Ease of use

The process benefits lead to business benefits which include – reduced cost, increased revenue and improved customer satisfaction.

Where do we begin?

First, get the context of who needs the workflow. This slide below will call out the key stakeholders who need to provide their inputs

A great workflow should be designed well so you get tangible benefits out of it. Here are 3 dimensions of a well-articulated, bulletproof workflow.

1. Validated Interface Designs
2. Articulated Workflow Rules
3. Defined Roles and Privileges

Three Dimensions of a Bulletproof Workflow

Workflow effectiveness is directly linked to the ability to make effective, fast decisions based on the data. Drill down into the workflow data and filter by the process types, users, roles, departments, and more. With all the stakeholders having real-time, hindsight or ad-hoc reports available, the number of proposals pending with the manager at any given point in time or in other words the workflow effectiveness can be easily measured.

The audience had come up with some interesting and relevant questions, towards the end of the webinar. Here we have some of them for you.

1. Does your workflow work with the cloud? In other words, are they available in cloud services?
   Yes, workflows work on the cloud with tools like SharePoint Online and many others.

2. Are there tools or templates available to start workflow design or do we need start from scratch every time?
   In SharePoint Online, the popular tool for designing the workflow is SPD (SharePoint Designer). In the Microsoft stack there is another tool called ‘Flow’ that enables quick deployment of workflows with almost no programming.

3. What technologies can be used to implement workflows?
   Regardless of the technology, the process is the same for workflows. At Maarga, we have done it with SharePoint, DotNet and Java. A meeting room booking workflow was built on ‘Slack’, Node.JS and SharePoint Online. For more details you can reach out to Maarga.

Summary:

The webinar presented by Anantha, workflow specialist at Maarga had everything about the world of workflows for both business and technology teams to learn from.

The slide deck was well appreciated by the audience and the fact that everyone stuck till the very end shows the interest level in the subject.

Watch the webinar here

Learn more from our upcoming webinars. With Maarga, it’s not just workflow designs, its work simplified too.