Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2023
In the digital era, where mobile and remote workers are becoming increasingly prevalent, the importance of workflow management cannot be overstated. Efficient and well-designed workflows are essential for businesses to adapt to a changing work environment, while ensuring productivity, collaboration and overall success.
According to Martyn Williams, Application Sales Enablement Manager UK & IRL, CITG, IND and MEA at Xerox, workflow management helps to facilitate collaboration, streamline processes, ensure flexibility, maintain accountability and drive growth.
“What’s needed are workflow apps that are designed to streamline and improve business processes by automating and optimising various tasks and activities. These apps are typically built on a platform that in turn integrates with multifunction printers (MFPs) and provides a range of functionalities to enhance productivity and efficiency,” he says.
By leveraging workflow apps that provide seamless integration between physical and digital workflows, he continues, businesses can simplify and automate their document-related processes, enhance collaboration and productivity, reduce costs and improve overall operational efficiency.
Essentially, continues Williams, workflow solutions are designed to streamline processes and improve productivity across various industries, for example:
- Healthcare workflow solutions focus on enhancing patient care and operational efficiency;
- Finance and banking solutions aim to improve transactional processes, reduce costs and ensure regulatory compliance;
- Document-intensive processes in the legal industry can easily be streamlined;
- Helping the education sector manage administrative tasks and improve document workflows;
- Enhancing citizen services and optimise internal processes in the public sector;
- Improving operational efficiency and customer experience in the retail industry; and
- Automating claims processing, underwriting, and policy management in the insurance sector.
“Utilising quality workflow solutions can offer several tangible benefits to businesses, such as improving efficiency through the reduction of manual tasks and minimising errors and boosting productivity and turnaround times. It saves costs by reducing reliance on paper-based processes, while businesses can save also on printing and document-related expenses. In addition, they help to optimise resource allocation and reduce waste, resulting in cost savings over time.”
“Furthermore, it enhances collaboration by providing centralised access to documents and enabling real-time sharing, editing and version control, while also streamlining document capture, storage and retrieval. This is achieved using advanced document management features like optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent indexing and document search capabilities. This simplifies document organisation, improves accessibility and saves time spent on manual document handling.”
Other benefits he mentions include the scalability and flexibility such workflow solutions can offer, allowing businesses to adapt and expand workflows as their requirements evolve. He further mentions the improved customer experience delivered by automating processes and reducing errors, faster response times, more personalised services and the provision of analytics and insights.
“By capturing and analysing data from workflows, businesses can gain valuable insights into process efficiency, bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. This data-driven approach allows for informed decision-making and continuous optimisation,” he adds.
“Workflows can also offer increased data security to protect sensitive information. These solutions often integrate with existing security systems, ensuring secure access, encryption and data storage. This helps businesses comply with data protection regulations and safeguard confidential data.”
Furthermore, suggests Williams, the right workflow partner will help to implement a zero trust architecture that takes an end-to-end approach to enterprise resource and data security, encompassing identity, credentials, access management, operations, endpoints, hosting environments and the interconnecting infrastructure.
“The reality is that automation of workflows improves scalability, quality, consistency and decision-making capabilities, while enhancing both the customer experience and risk mitigation efforts.
“Ultimately, by leveraging automation technologies to further improve their workflows, businesses can continue to optimise their operations, drive growth and stay competitive in today's rapidly evolving business landscape,” he concludes.