Enterprise Workflow Automation: Benefits, Use Cases, Challenges

Most enterprises face three challenges when they grow from a few hundred to thousands of employees.

These challenges are fragmented information across the workflow, the absence of a structured framework when employees seek assistance from HR and finance teams, and handling automation with the right approaches.

A great way to address all these challenges is through enterprise workflow automation–wherein you analyze, identify, and automate processes with custom workflows to manage a productive workforce.

This guide will dive deeper into workflow automation, its benefits, challenges, and top use cases.

What is enterprise workflow automation?

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.

Why do you need workflow automation in your enterprise?

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:

• Streamline scattered data and information across the organization to complete both day-to-day and complex tasks faster
• Build scalable and repeatable processes so the workflows don’t collapse when your team grows, and you need to accommodate more employees
• Create unified communication between multiple departments and teams to remove siloed communication and make information accessible to everyone
• Free up IT admins’ time spent on repetitive tasks and encourage them to spend more time on nuanced activities like high-impact incidents
• Build a productive IT support team that’s not overflowing with repetitive requests and reduce the possibilities of manual errors in their responses

What are the benefits of workflow automation for enterprises?

Automating common scenarios in enterprises has several benefits. It can help modern enterprises:

1. Identify and fix bottlenecks in existing workflows

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.

2. Cut down costs spent on overheads and multiple technologies

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.

3. Improve cross-team communication

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.

4. Automate process documentation for future reference

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.

5. Build an employee-first organization

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.

Types of workflows for enterprises

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.

Top use cases of enterprise workflow automation

Below are some of the most common enterprise workflow use cases observed in organizations:

1. Employee onboarding and offboarding

An enterprise workflow solution automates employee onboarding and offboarding activities. Some of the tasks that are part of an employee onboarding workflow include:

• Creating employee profiles on your HRMS platform and provide them with all required access
• Informing the team members and stakeholders with automated Teams/Slack notifications
• Posting welcome messages across different channels and groups
• Adding the employee to relevant channels and provide access to CRM, HRMS, and other tools

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.

2. Automating incident management

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:

• Cluster similar incidents intelligently and simplifying issue resolution  
• Notify stakeholders automatically without copy-pasting updates individually to different Slack channels and Teams groups
• Execute bulk actions like changing status and assigning agents without manual interference

3. User access provisioning

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.

4. Asset management workflows

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.

5. Employee document generation

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.

6. Knowledge management workflows

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.

Challenges in implementing enterprise workflows

Implementing enterprise workflow solutions in practice involves certain challenges. These include:

1. Narrowing down goals and use cases

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.

2. Flexibility and scalability of workflows

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.

3. Security concerns

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.

Conclusion

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 :)