As companies strive to increase efficiency and productivity, workflow automation and process automation are two terms that often come up. While workflow automation involves automating individual tasks or activities within a process, process automation is more holistic approach that aims to streamline entire end-to-end business processes. Understanding each term separately, along with their benefits, features, and key differences between workflow automation vs. process automation, is crucial for choosing the approach that best suits your needs.
What is workflow automation?
Workflow automation refers to the use of software to automate tasks, processes, and business workflows that involve multiple steps within a specific sequence. It aims to optimise the flow of work within your organisation by setting up rules, triggers, and actions that allow for task completion without manual intervention.
From simple tasks like data entry, document sharing, approvals, and notifications to intricate project management process, workflow automation includes various functions that, if automated, can enhance your organisation’s efficiency and productivity.
What are the benefits of workflow automation?
Implementing workflow automation offers multiple advantages that can significantly impact your company’s performance. It enables your organisation to automate the flow of work within a given project, allowing your workforce to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than mundane tasks. Besides these, it also helps with:
- Higher accuracy: Manual processes such as data entry and processing often lead to human error and inaccuracy in the result. With workflow automation, which includes predefined rules and validation, you can reduce the risk of human mistakes, oversights, and inconsistencies, leading to higher accuracy and reliable outcomes.
- Better collaboration: By offering centralised access to vital information, projects statuses, documents, and tasks, workflow automation encourages seamless collaboration across teams and departments. Everyone can easily track the work progress, share latest updates and collaborate in real-time, cultivating better communication and teamwork.
- Faster project delivery: Automated workflows have the ability to expedite the completion of tasks and processes. They eliminate bottlenecks, such as lack of communication and collaboration, human errors, and manual intervention to ensure the smooth flow of task through the pipeline. This reduces the turnaround times and leads to faster delivery of projects.
- Enhanced efficiency: One of the core benefits of automated workflows is the improvement in operational efficiency. By eliminating unnecessary delays caused by manual handling of tasks, the occurrence of human mistakes, and lack of required tools, automated workflows enable faster completion, more efficiency, and better accuracy.
What is process automation?
Process automation is a broader concept that focuses on automating and streamlining end-to-end processes encompassing several interconnected tasks, projects, and systems. It involves analysing, mapping, and redesigning the entire process to remove bottlenecks, manual efforts, and inefficiencies that lies within the business. Data integration, IT service management, human resource management, quality control and testing are some of the important business operations that can be automated using process automation software.
What are the benefits of process automation?
Process automation aims to automate business processes, optimise organisational efficiency, and free up employees’ valuable time to focus on more innovative activities. In addition, this holistic approach helps you with:
- Informed decision-making: Due to the lack of meaningful data and information, organisations often caught up making ineffective and hostile business decisions. Process automation provides organisations with actionable insights and analytics to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for innovation and optimisation. Using these insights, organisations can make strategics and informed decisions, leading to continuous process enhancement and competitive advantage.
- Scalability and flexibility: Whether it’s about embracing new workflows to support changing business needs or integrating with additional digital tools, process automation is quite flexible. Additionally, when it comes to handle large volume of work without requiring extra resources, process automation is highly scalable and accessible too.
- Cost-effective approach: Process automation is a cost-effective strategy that reduces operational expenses associated with manual labour, errors, and inefficiencies. Additionally, automation minimises the risk of expensive errors, rework, and compliance violations, resulting in substantial cost savings over time.
Workflow automation vs. process automation: Top 6 key differences
Now that you have gained clarity on workflow and process automation and their advantages to businesses, it’s time to understand the key differences between workflow automation vs. process automation. Here are some key attributes that differentiate both:
1. Objectives
Workflow automation focuses on automating the sequence and execution of tasks or activities within a specific workflow or department whereas process automation covers the automation of entire end-to-end business processes, including interconnected tasks, activities, and systems.
2. Complexity
When managing simpler and smaller tasks at granular level, workflow automation, encompassing predefined rules, is an ideal approach. On the contrary, process automation is suitable for complex business process that require a wider view, data analysis, and strategy to execute automation effectively. By leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Business Process Management (BPM) software, it handles the complexity of interdependent tasks and activities.
3. Integration
Workflow automation has limited integration potential to automate the flow of task and information within individuals or departments, while process automation, combined with iPaaS has vast integration capability, which includes multiple systems, applications, and data sources to support end-to-end automation, data exchange, and collaboration.
4. Flexibility and scalability
Workflow automation is flexible in terms of automating specific and targeted task. It is a self- serving automation strategy that reduces dependencies of employees on IT department. Process automation, on the other hand, requires in-depth planning and resources as compared to workflow automation. When handling complex business processes across multiple departments, functions, and systems, process automation is quite flexible and scalable.
5. Automation capability
Workflow automation include the automation of routine and repetitive tasks within a process to streamline workflows, enhance efficiency, and reduce manual. Conversely, process automation encompasses the automation of both routine and complex task within a business process, eliminating manual intervention and enhancing overall organisational efficiency.
6. Customisation
As workflow automation is usually confined to predefined rules, templates, and workflows, it has limited customisation options for users. On the other hand, process automation offers extensive customisation options, enabling businesses to tailor automation solutions to their specific requirements.
Workflow automation vs. process automation: Which is preferable for your business?
With the above arguments, it’s clear that both workflow automation and process automation have unique advantages in enhancing organisational efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. However, the right choice depends on your business needs and overall objectives.
When is workflow automation suitable for companies?
Workflow automation is an ideal approach if your company’s priority is to automate specific tasks within a process to improve team collaboration, work efficiency and productivity. It’s a well-suited strategy to streamline and optimise shorter duration activities with lower intricacies. As workflow automation offers self-service capabilities, it reduces employees’ dependencies on IT department and can be easily customised according to specific business needs.
Use case: Consider employee onboarding process in the HR department. Onboarding process involves a series of small, individual tasks such as sending welcome emails, setting up accounts, and scheduling orientation sessions. By implementing workflow automation software, the HR team can automate these tasks, making the onboarding process more efficient and consistent for all new hires. This not only saves time but also ensures a uniform experience for each employee. Consequently, HR professionals can devote their efforts to more complex activities like personal engagement and development planning, ultimately boosting team collaboration, efficiency, and productivity.
When is process automation suitable for companies?
If you are looking for an approach to automate and streamline entire end-to-end complex project or work sequences, then process automation is your go-to solution. It offers more in-depth insights into process performance, incorporating data analytics, AI capabilities and advanced features such as predictive modelling. With scalability and flexibilities features, it allows seamless coordination and integration with existing tools and systems without compromising productivity and efficiency.
Use case: Consider a manufacturing company aiming to enhance quality control processes. By implementing process automation tools, the company can automatically track production metrics. Detect deviations from quality standards in real-time and predict potential equipment failures before they occur. This automation not only ensures consistent product quality but also reduces downtime and boosts overall work efficiency and productivity. The company can integrate these automated processes with its existing ERP systems, ensuring a cohesive workflow across all departments.
How can OneAdvanced help you automate your business processes?
At OneAdvanced, we are committed to transform our customers world of work through portfolio of sector-focused software, underpinned by a resilient cloud platform providing common services for data & analytics, security and AI. We aim to effortlessly automate your end-to-end business processes and get your job done, giving you the freedom to focus on thriving for your customers, your people and your communities.
Want to discover how? Download ‘Power Your Productivity’ eBook and learn how OneAdvanced can help you automate your business processes with it’s software solutions along with expert tips.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Can a business use workflow automation and process automation together?
Absolutely, businesses can combine these two processes to optimise outcomes. Though workflow automation focuses on micro-level task optimisation and process automation addresses macro-level operations, together, they complement each other. Workflow automation acts as the foundation for process automation, enabling the construction and automation of comprehensive, end-to-end processes.
How much does it cost to implement workflow vs process automation?
The cost of implementing workflow or process automation varies based on the complexity, scope, and business needs. Workflow automation software is typically less expensive as it deals with simpler task and has limited integration capabilities. Process automation tools, on the other hand, require advanced technologies such as AI, RPA, or BPM software, making it relatively more expensive. However, both approaches offer long-term cost savings by reducing manual labour and streamlining processes to improve efficiency and productivity.