Workflows are the routines and systems you use to get things done. They define what you do and when you do it. They include individuals and technology and flow through and between organizations.
Refining and improving them is key to growing your business and a great way to do that is through automation. After all, things that happen automatically are cheap and quick. Automating your workflows can therefore massively improve business outcomes, giving you an edge over the competition.
Today, with constantly evolving AI and tools dedicated to coordinating different software platforms, there are more opportunities than ever to give your team a boost. In this article, you’ll learn why you should use workflow automation, what you can achieve with it, and how you can do it.
What is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation is the process of setting up an automated system to perform tasks that you would otherwise do manually. You need to set up a system that can carry out every required task, in the right order, at the correct time. That could be done with software or a code script. Dedicated workflow automation software can integrate with other software, initializing all kinds of action.
Benefits of Workflow Automation
Automating workflows requires investment, but once done, automation can drastically increase your productivity. Once a workflow is automated, it then functions with little intervention required.
That reduces costs, as automating work reduces the required labor. You no longer have to pay staff to do repetitive jobs or take time considering simple, binary decisions.
Workflow automation is also fast. Many automations carry out tasks near instantly, achieving things that would take humans considerable time. That can be especially useful when you need to act quickly, such as when responding to a client.
Workflow automation can also be more accurate. Particularly with repetitive jobs or tasks that humans find challenging, automating things can be more reliable. That means better outcomes for your customers and staff.
Key Components of Workflow Automation
There are many ways to automate workflows. It can be done using dedicated software, or by writing your own scripts. It can also be done by setting up specific tools to run at specific times if they include their own scheduling capabilities. However, all these tools have elements in common. Conceptually, automation tools consist of the following components.
Triggers
Triggers define when things happen. A trigger may be the receipt of an email, or the changed status of a ticket. You can also schedule triggers for particular times, or at regular intervals.
Actions
Actions are the things your system does. They could involve copying something from A to B, running a software script, or sending someone a message. Pretty much anything a computer can do can be an action.
Logic and Rules
Workflow automation involves making decisions, and then taking action accordingly. Decisions are based on rules, defined by logical steps. Code scripts are one way to implement these, and are perfect for advanced workflow automation. No-code systems can also be useful, performing well for simple workflows.
For example, a synchronization system may decide to send an alert to staff for urgent issues, but not for others.
Monitoring and Analysis
Many workflow automation systems track what they do using metrics. Systems can log the actions they take and report them to administrators. That helps you confirm they are working properly, and spot errors and problems. Careful use of analytics can help you refine your automated workflows and squeeze more performance out of them.
Workflow Automation Examples
Here are some examples of how you can automate your workflows. These are just some of the many possibilities. Hopefully, these workflow automation examples will show you what you can achieve, and inspire you to come up with your own ideas.
Automating the Software Development Workflow
Many teams use ticketing systems to track work, and log incidents. Often you’ll have different teams using different systems. For example, a customer support team may log issues on ServiceNow. A software development team may use Jira for development tasks. Often these teams will store or need information about the same issues.
A workflow automation can synchronize customer bugs to the programming team’s work tracking system. They wouldn’t have to use all the data, but just provide each team with the specific attributes it needed. Once the development team finishes working on the ticket status updates are passed to the customer support team. Everyone is kept in the loop with the right kind of information.
Case Study: Gartner shifted to Exalate to synchronize issues 45 times faster than their previous system.
You can use an automation to triage tickets, piping them to the correct tier of support, especially if your support teams prefer to work on different platforms. Suppose an issue isn’t dealt with or is flagged as challenging at the lower tiers. In that case, your automation can notify senior team members and copy the issue to their systems automatically, in real time. You can route tickets to the correct destination based on certain field values. For instance, sync Jira issues whose reporter is “George” to ServiceNow as an incident. Share only the required fields during different escalation scenarios. You can also re-route tickets to the correct support portal in case of any errors.
With this kind of IT service management automation, team members at each level of your support system get the information they need quickly, without waiting for someone to filter it manually, or for lower support tiers to escalate it. This can help you proactively avoid SLA breaches, improve support quality, and reduce churn.
Consolidating Multiple Customer Tickets to a Single Development Instance
Sometimes, multiple customers raise the same type of bug. Creating a separate issue in the development team’s task management system isn’t always the best issue.
Consolidate multiple Zendesk tickets into a single Jira issue to streamline development service operations.
Use Case: Learn how to connect multiple Zendesk tickets to a single Jira issue.
Customer onboarding often involves many steps, such as getting user’s data into your system, setting up passwords, and providing information. An AI-powered automation system can manage this process, triggering emails at each stage, checking that users have completed onboarding tasks, and providing them with reminders or information when needed. They can also alert a friendly human if there’s an issue.
Centralizing Software Development Project Management
If you have multiple projects stored on a platform like GitHub but want to manage work on those projects using a central system, then connecting everything together involves a lot of work. An automation can handle it automatically, synchronizing issues on all the GitHub repos on a single system.
Case Study: Read why seL4 foundation connected all its GitHub projects to its single Jira management platform.
There’s a lot of good automation software out there, so how do you pick the best? Here are some qualities you should look for when picking a tool.
Security: Since workflows span departments and companies, you need to ensure your data always remains safe and secure. Workflow automation software must have the required security measures in place, like limiting data exchange at the integrating endpoints independently. This ensures you have full control over what you send and receive on your side without any external system stepping in the way. Encryption protocols, RBAC, ISO certification, etc. are all a must.
Reliability – The automation should work without human intervention, and should fail as little as possible. The less you need to get involved the better. The point is to save time!
Flexibility – You’ll generally need to modify your workflow automation as data sources change and your tools and your use of them evolve. If you can make changes in your automation software easily, that’s a big plus. It’s also a bonus if the automations can be reused and reapplied to different workflows. That can really be a force multiplier throughout a large organization.
Scalability: As businesses scale up, your workflow automation software must be able to catch up. Adding new tools and technologies or adding new partners within your integration setup should not take a lot of effort.
Accessibility – Programmers can achieve great things with workflow automation, but coders are expensive to deploy, and they need time to understand the workflows of other team members. Al-assisted automation can make things much easier, enabling a broader spectrum of people to get involved. That way you can save time and take advantage of everyone’s organizational knowledge.
Getting Started with Workflow Automation Using Exalate
One key area where automation can help is syncing different systems. This could be two systems used in your company, or an internal system syncing with a client or contractor. Managing the relationship between these allows for complex workflow orchestration.
Exalate is an integration solution that lets you easily create advanced workflow automations. Tickets, issues, or items used by your systems can be automatically copied from place to place. You can copy everything, or set filters that pick items that match. You can also choose which fields to synchronize, ensuring everyone gets the data they need while maintaining autonomy and security.
With Exalate you can do the following::
Create granular-level triggers that define the conditions for data exchange. They are native to the integrating platforms
Pick which fields are shared between synchronized items. Set custom logic or data mapping and automate workflows end-to-end using the Groovy-based Script mode.
After a thorough evaluation, we realized other solutions couldn’t match Exalate’s precision and flexibility. The results speak for themselves: with over 20,000 synced entries and nearly 10,000 synced comments, Exalate has become vital to our cross-company collaboration.
– VODAFONE
You can use Exalate with Jira, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, Github, and Salesforce. There are guides for all of them. Here’s a guide to integrating Jira with Salesforce.
Once you create a synchronization, it can be adjusted easily, or recreated for different teams or purposes. It’s very easy to do.
Workflow Automation Best Practices
To get the most out of your workflow automation software, take a look at these workflow automation best practices.
Gather Information Carefully – Changing workflows can have a big effect on your team. Involving everyone in the process can help you ensure the switch goes smoothly. It also lets you gather information that can prove critical when setting up the automation. Managers, administrators, and anyone that works with the data can offer insight on what information they need, and how they use it. Collecting this knowledge can help you build workflows that help the whole team work better.
Improvement and Iteration – You can achieve big things with workflow automation, but it is an ongoing process. Monitor the performance of your automations and see how they can be improved. You should also be on the lookout for ways to recreate automations in other areas of your business.
Start Slowly and Have a Backup Plan – Automations can go wrong. Systems have outages and the internet can go down. You should be able to deal with these issues. That means having a way to get work done when the automation is out. It also means the automatic systems should be robust enough to restart automatically without any help. Automatic alerts to managers when problems happen are another good idea.
Conclusion
Automated workflows boost your productivity and enable faster, more efficient collaboration with others. They minimize staff costs, performing tasks quickly and reliably. There’s so much potential, but it’s imperative you make the right choices when setting things up.
Fortunately, there’s never been a better selection of software to help you, and much of it is accessible enough for anyone to use. By applying modern tools, you can connect your platforms together, moving and manipulating information seamlessly.
Exalate delivers an easy, but powerful solution for workflow automation. With it, you can build automated workflows that are reliable, versatile, and powerful. Check it out, and see how it can turbocharge your productivity.
