So often clients will ask me to automate some of their workflows into their systems. They tell me it will save them time and make them more efficient. There is some truth to this, but there can also be some false to it as well. Let me explain.
Automate Workflows
Workflows will mean your team members don’t need to complete all steps of an administrative process. The standard administrative process goes something like
1 – Receive request
2 – Enter details into system
3 – Generate function based on request
4 – Finish
BUT, there are a few steps in there that may or may not be important that an automated process can not help you with. Most administrative processes are requested by humans, and every human has a story that is different to the next, so automating a full process or workflow may not be the answer to your dreams. In actual fact it may create more work later. I will give you an example.
I once did work for a computer shop which did front of house sales and back of house technical work. The customers could buy computers from the salesman at the front, and then request add-ons for their computer from a technician. It could be anything from a software install to a higher end graphics card to be inserted. The salesman would make the sale, add the services to their system at the point of sale, and then hit a button which would automatically generate the job for the technical team. The technical team would then wait for the relevant computer to be delivered and begin the job. The system would automatically generate due dates, invoices, work hours, allocate which technician should complete the job (based on what current jobs he had in the system), automation of notifications, adjustments of KPIs and sales targets and about 100 other things, all with the intention of “increasing efficiencies”.
It started with a salesman doing a technical sale over the phone, entering the details and starting the job. The problem here was, the task was allocated to a person that had free time, and they were due to complete it by a certain time. But, the computer was not in the shop. So, the technician hadn’t started it. A new job came in and went to the free technician. The first guy still hadn’t started his job. The second job was completed, and a new job came in, which was again allocated to the second technician, the first one still hadn’t started his job. Then, the due time expired, so, the first technician had done no jobs, and his supervisor started to get notifications that he had not completed his job on time. This resulted in an automated mark against his name.
This was all resolved later when the technician spoke to the supervisor to tell him that the job hadn’t actually come in, so the job needed to be delayed, the negative mark against his name needed to be removed, and he needed to be added back into the cycle for receiving new jobs. The job was cancelled by the supervisor, which notified the original salesman automatically that he had lost a technical sale. This resulted in him getting an automated mark against his name to be registered for further sales training for closing sales.
This step then needed to be fixed and cleared up to confirm that the sale had actually gone through (fees were received), and that no, he didn’t need new training, what he needed was to contact the customer to restart the job again.
Unfortunately, the customer had received an automated notification that his job was rejected, resulting in him requesting a refund from the accounts department, the accounts department had processed the refund, marking it as a negative against the salesman for his sales target and a negative against the technician for not completing the job on time. This data then needed to be cleaned up to fix the records for the technician, the salesman, the accounts and the customer. This then led to some further data checking to see what other automatic job bookings had not really followed the process. The end result was about 50 hours of data cleanup and a further 25 hours of accounts cleanup. All because of a fully automated system to “increase efficiencies”.
The Lesson
The lesson the client learnt was, automated workflows are all well and good, as long as someone is:
1 – approving the workflows
2 – monitoring the workflows
3 – correcting the workflows
In the end, we added in a technical supervisor approval and manual allocation of jobs for the technicians post point of sale. And a manual change for job completion. This enabled the salesman to make the sale, which would then escalate to the technical supervisor, who could check the realistic time frame and who was actually available to complete the job. The technician could then complete the job and manually mark it as complete, notifying the salesman, supervisor and customer that their job was actually complete.
Finally, efficiencies were created in the entire company by reducing the amount of corrections required by automation.
DigiGround can look at your workflows and let you know at what step to automate and what step to not.
Contact us about our Business Solutions today.
