How to Automate Business Processes with Forms and Workflows

74%¹ of business leaders say process automation has helped their workforce save up to 30% of the time spent. And 59% of them say they have reduced up to 30% costs.

Manual work processes take up precious time. Process automation is essential to transform rigid, time-intensive workflows and make organisations more agile. By harnessing the interoperability of your organisation’s business systems, you can streamline processes and operate faster. In this article, we share 5 steps to automate business processes with a customisable form and workflow approach – Kintone.

Step 1: Gather Data and Analyse Results

First things first, decide on a business process to start with. This could be transforming your expense reports, sales prospects list, job application app or inventory system. Evaluate the process objectively by looking at the step-by-step tasks involved. Look for ineffective work procedures and get feedback from process owners. From there, track all the information involved in the process including the time and the steps required to get approvals and verifications.

Step 2: Determine the Business Goals

What is your current business goal? How will process automation help? And how will you measure its success? These are key questions to consider when digitalising manual work tasks. Taking the time to set goals and working out the details on how to achieve them help organisations increase the likelihood of success. For example, if your goal is to improve productivity by 20%, your objective will be steps to take such as converting existing paper forms to digital forms with workflows. By converting paper forms to digital forms, you can reduce the time employees spend on manually filling in, filing and retrieving paper documents. You can measure success by calculating the amount of time saved. To do so, find out the amount of time employees used to take compared to the amount of time they take after implementing digital forms.

Step 3: Map Out the Current and Desired Automated Process

Try value-stream mapping using the current process to help design the future process. To optimise the entire process, create visual guides to map out the individual work tasks required to deliver a product or service. From there, select the desired process and you’re ready to build it using Kintone’s no-code workflow and forms custom applications. Start by determining the functions of your application and use the drag-and drop feature to build the application. Watch helpful tutorials here on how to build an application with Kintone.

Step 4: Gather Feedback

Once the application or custom workflow is built, gather internal feedback from:

• Upper management on the division level
• Middle management on the department level
• Employees on the process level

During the feedback process, check with the departments on ways to improve the process and make appropriate adjustments based on the data-driven insights and qualitative feedback gathered.

Step 5: Train, Implement, Feedback, Develop, Repeat

Train employees by setting up training sessions and video tutorials. This will be especially useful to those who will be most affected by the changes. Then set the “go live” dates for rolling out the automated business processes to different departments. Keep the entire team informed with regular updates and training sessions. 

One the process is live, continue to follow up, get feedback, train and celebrate accomplishments. Then determine what other business processes to transform next. Interested to learn more about how you can build and implement automated workflows for your organisation with Kintone? Contact us now!

¹Statistics sourced from Salesforce