Get Your Workflow Flowing

Everyone has workflows that they work through on a daily basis. Workflows are a part of life and especially important when running an organization successfully. A workflow is a process or a set of steps that you follow to reach a goal. It can be simple or they can be complex. Either way, workflows are important and essential to getting things done in organized and efficient fashion.

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All in all, workflows work best when they are actually flowing, no matter how simple or complex. If a workflow stalls or stops, it can make an organization come to a grinding halt. What keeps a workflow from flowing? Here are a few things to think about:

1. The Sneaker Net: How long does it take to walk a document around for signing? Is this walking around causing a disturbance(s) in schedule of the person walking them around?
2. Bottlenecks: What happens when a stall happens because someone is out of the office for vacation or a sudden accident or illness or simply doesn't know that they are holding up progress?
3. Where Are We?: Ever started a workflow and, later, realize that you have no idea of where the process is, who is supposed to be doing what, and/or how long the process is taking?

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Sound familiar? If it does, you aren't the only one. Lots of companies have issues with slow flow or no flow workflows. Workflows not flowing or flowing slowly wastes time and money and can accumulate into huge problems which can wreck your organization. Now you may be asking: so how do I speed it up? Automation, my friend. Picture this:

1. Eliminate the Sneaker Net: Imagine kicking off a workflow and no one has to physically walk it through the process. Imagine it being started and it routes itself around.
2. Get Rid of the Bottlenecks: Imagine that a workflow is started and one of the people in the chain is out of the office. Imagine that the workflow waits for a certain amount of time before it auto-magically delegates itself to another person on that team, notifies someone about the bottleneck, and/or it is initially sent to the team and moves on once one person from the team completes the action. Imagine that person or those people are constantly reminded until their task is completed without someone having to do remind physically them.
3. Know Where You Stand: Imagine being able to see where the process is and who its with by checking out a dashboard that gives you real time stats. Imagine getting notifications on the workflow's status.

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If your workflows were flowing efficiently, how much more productive would your organization be?

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Your workflows can start flowing successfully by using great tools called SharePoint (and/or Microsoft Teams), PowerApps, and Power Automate! One of the many great things SharePoint does well is bring together the online forms and custom apps of PowerApps and workflow automation via Power Automate as well as add in the added ability for project management using SharePoint and/or Teams and dashboards using PowerBI and much more! Your organization's workflows can be implemented, to your specifications and you can also have a special portal or portals for your clients and/or vendors to be able to fill out forms, participate in workflow, and view statuses. These portals can also? keep historic data.

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As a small, or even a medium sized, company, you may think that getting these Microsoft tools will be hugely expensive. I'm here to tell you that is a fear of the past. Since the invention of Microsoft clouds, Microsoft/Office 365 and Azure, you can get SharePoint for a fraction of the cost of getting it on premises. If it works better for your organization, you can also decide to break the cost down into a monthly cost, making it a more manageable operational cost as opposed to a capital expense. If your organization gets Microsoft/Office 365, you also get solutions for email, online meetings, Office, and much more!

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Are you 501c3 nonprofit? Guess what! You can get the power of Microsoft / Office 365 and other tools for FREE! Seems too good to be true? Well, believe it.

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Already have SharePoint on-prem? Nice! You already have your basis. Just need to get cracking on identifying those slow flow and no flow processes and making them into automated solutions that will save your organization time, money, confusion, and stress.

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So are you ready? Want your workflows to start flowing? Let's do it!

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Interested to learn more? Need help or a demo? Need to talk this through more? We understand and are here to help. Visit us at?www.consultntctech.com?or reach out to us at [email protected] and we will happily answer your questions. Simply reach out for a FREE consultation!

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