Most enterprises face the struggles of fragmented information across workflows and clogged processes while growing from a few hundreds to thousands of employees.
A great way to address these challenges is through enterprise workflow automation–wherein you analyze, identify, and automate processes with custom, agile workflows to manage a productive workforce.
This guide will dive deeper into workflow automation, its benefits, challenges, and top use cases.
When companies are smaller, managing processes is often simpler and more straightforward. For example, to onboard a new employee you might just involve a quick chat with IT to set up an email account, followed by a few access steps, handshakes over cubicles to get the new hire up and running. Everything is done quickly, and communication flows easily because the team is small and closely connected.
However, as a company grows, these once-simple processes become more complex and harder to manage. You might have multiple departments involved in onboarding—HR needs to handle paperwork, IT needs to set up systems access, and the finance team needs to ensure payroll is set up correctly. Without a structured approach, things can easily slip through the cracks, leading to delays, a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth, and a flustered employee on Day 1.
This is where workflows come in. Companies often start by creating team-specific workflows to manage these growing complexities. These workflows lay out the steps each department needs to take, ensuring that tasks are completed in the right order and by the right people.
But as companies continue to scale, these workflows can become rigid and hard to adapt. They might not keep up with changing business needs, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
This is where enterprise workflow automation makes a difference.
Enterprise workflow automation uses technology and deep enterprise integrations to connects different systems within or across departments to automate multi-step processes so that businesses can scale without getting bogged down or dampening employee experiences.
With AI, enterprises can create dynamic, automated workflows that can adapt as needed instead of relying on static, manual processes. Whether it's HR automating onboarding processes or IT handling incident management, these workflows are like a series of connected steps that happen automatically, based on predefined rules and triggers. Enterprise workflows are set up to pull data from different systems and orchestrate it into one seamless journey that boosts workplace productivity and enhances employee experiences.
Multiple needs and use cases can be associated with enterprise workflow automation.
Ivan Zhang from Cohere, an enterprise AI platform, says, “One of my missions with building Cohere for the Enterprise is to eliminate forums in general. We should not spend more time filling out giant forms like AI should just do it for us."
In general, businesses require enterprise workflow automation to:
Automating common scenarios in enterprises has several benefits. It can help modern enterprises:
Manual processes are full of errors. They are so exhaustive that it becomes impossible to identify the hidden bottlenecks. However, in an automated workflow where all phases are visible, you can easily identify where the bottleneck lies and fix it.
When manual, redundant tasks are automated, it means lesser overhead costs. Because one person now does the tasks that two to three employees did earlier. Additionally, by integrating one workflow automation software with your data sources and connectors, you can save the subscription costs of multiple tools and technologies.
Certain enterprise workflows require cross-department collaboration. Manual workflows involve a lot of back-and-forth communication, which usually translates into long waiting times. Enterprise automation software simplifies cross-team collaboration by bringing all workplace communication within a single platform. It reduces endless time spent on calls and executes tasks faster.
Enterprise workflow software automatically documents all reported issues, queries, and responses. IT support teams can use these documents to resolve similar cases in the future by simply accessing a real-time knowledge base.
When employees are not spending most of their time on repetitive, error-prone tasks, they have more time to spend on meaningful work that requires human intelligence and empathy. Strategic enterprise workflow automation takes all redundant tasks off employees’ shoulders and provides them with the support and assistance they deserve. This means higher employee satisfaction and an engaged workforce.
An enterprise has three different types of workflows: manual and automated.
Sequential workflows: Chart-based workflows that move from one task to another. Sequential workflows follow a simple flow, and they are always forward-facing. This type of workflow moves forward only after the completion of one task. It doesn’t allow you to move back to task after completion.
Example: Leave approval workflows in which an employee applies for leave, the HR manager verifies it and assigns it to their manager, and it is either approved or rejected.
State machine workflows: State machine workflows are more situational and move ahead based on different states. They are more complicated than sequential workflows, and there are lots of back-and-forth communications involved. They are a consistent process where you keep changing the workflow to shape the end output.
Example: Getting customer feedback, making iterations on a project, and then sharing it again for review.
Rules-driven workflows are similar to sequential workflows but driven by a rule-based algorithm. You can create pre-defined rules, such as ‘if-then,’ to execute more specific, custom workflows with a set objective.
Example: ‘If’ a customer changes support ticket status to ‘Done’, ‘Then’ closes the task.
Below are some of the most common enterprise workflow use cases observed in organizations:
An enterprise workflow solution automates employee onboarding and offboarding activities. Some of the tasks that are part of an employee onboarding workflow include:
You can automate all these steps with an end-to-end employee onboarding workflow to ease the employee experience and establish cross-collaboration amongst multiple teams. Similarly, during an employee's off boarding journey, you can automate the essential yet repetitive tasks of removing access to Azure directory, apps, or their assets.
Another area ripe for automation is effective incident management across the enterprise.
Using AI models, we can essentially trigger the routing of requests. We can identify the right intent, map them to the right tools, and drive the right automation, so that people are productive and not waiting to get work done. - Vijay Rayapati, CEO, Atomicwork
You can automate incident management workflows to:
Enterprise workflow automation can help you create custom-made user access workflows. You can easily automate repetitive provisioning activities like creating new employee accounts during onboarding, removing employee access from all software during off boarding, providing the right user access to different team members, etc., without involving human agents in the loop.
Apart from onboarding and offboarding, user access provisioning workflows can automatically modify access during role changes. By integrating with Azure AD, Okta, Salesforce, and other relevant applications you can manage user control seamlessly.
Managing IT and non-IT assets requires a lot of manual work. By adopting workflow automation for asset management in enterprises you can easily streamline scattered assets with efficient segmentation and configuration.
Automating an asset management workflow can help you auto-trigger notifications for relevant stakeholders regarding asset expirations and warranties, create asset maintenance checklists for routine audits, and send automated notifications for asset compliances.
These help IT admins keep a close tab on asset maintenance to avoid spending excess costs in renewing asset license costs post-expiration.
Employees often request documents like payslips, tax certificates, compensation breakdowns, job descriptions, etc. Creating these documents from scratch each time is a big trouble. With employee document generation software paired with your workflow automation tool, you can create custom-made workflows that auto-generate employee documents.
As an enterprise grows, it faces significant challenges in managing information. Information fragmentation becomes obvious when every team uses different tools and knowledge bases.
Today, people have to go to too many places to find the right information. Advanced information retrieval is a problem that could be solved using AI. - Vijay Rayapati, CEO, Atomicwork
To address these challenges, an enterprise workflow tool leverages GenAI for advanced information retrieval.
These solutions aim to integrate enterprise knowledge bases and automate knowledge retrieval. This is true for both traditional knowledge management systems like Confluence and SharePoint and modern knowledge bases like Notion. This integration ensures company-wide access to relevant information.
Implementing enterprise workflow solutions in practice involves certain challenges. These include:
With fragmented data, siloed information, and communication gaps between departments, IT teams often lack clarity over the issues that require addressing as soon as possible. As a result, they cannot set realistic goals and use cases to automate with workflow software.
Rigid workflows often collapse as an organization scales. Businesses need stronger and more adaptive workflows that stay intact as they onboard more team members or add new functions.
Security concerns are always present with sensitive content and data across workflows. To avoid security concerns, a dedicated team of employees should be responsible for ensuring compliance with data protection laws.
Your internal business operations are directly associated with customer satisfaction. Enterprise workflow automation software creates pre-built, custom workflows for your employees to provide them with the data and assistance they require faster.
Use-case-specific, custom-made workflows serve the way employees function, make them more productive, and ensure faster business approvals. If you're looking for more help to identify and automate enterprise-level workflows, block some time on our calendar to have a chat :)
Enterprise workflow automation is all about using technology to make everyday, repetitive tasks in a company faster and easier. Instead of doing things manually—like entering data, sending updates, or approving requests—automation tools handle these tasks automatically. This helps save time, reduces mistakes, and lets employees focus on more important work.
By integrating different enterprise systems and setting up rules for how tasks should be done, companies can streamline their processes. This not only speeds things up but also makes sure everything runs smoothly and consistently.
Enterprise workflow automation can be seen in action across various areas of an organization. Here are a few examples:
These are just a few examples of enterprise workflow automation.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and enterprise automation aim to improve efficiency and productivity. RPA focuses on automating specific, repetitive tasks using custom bots that mimic human actions, like clicking, typing, or copying data between systems. It’s ideal for simple, rule-based tasks, such as data entry or processing invoices, and is relatively easy to implement without deep system integration.
Enterprise automation, on the other hand, is broader, automating entire workflows across multiple systems and departments. It involves integrating various applications, data sources, and business rules which is more complex.
Yes, Atomicwork automates enterprise-level workflows across departments like HR, IT, Finance, and Operations to improve workplace productivity. Supporting enterprise integrations like Azure Active Directory, Intune, and Okta, Atomicwork can remove repetitive chores across departments. Sign up now to try Atomicwork.