It’s not uncommon for many different types of businesses to rely on routine operations as a part of their daily activities. As such, it’s also quite common to implement various means of automating such operations with forms, standardized activities, customized workflows, and such.
Some examples of operations that tend to benefit greatly from proper automatization tools are banking operations, purchase orders, inventory management, management of production processes and/or supply chains, etc. The proper implementation of automatization tools brings a number of useful advantages to the table, including cost reduction, elimination of manual input errors, simplification of some of the more complicated processes, and more.
It would be fair to say that the type of potential advantage depends on the nature of the operation you’ll be attempting to automate. For example, there’s process automatization, as in performing process mapping to figure out potential troublesome places. In this case, a Gantt chart is at its most effective, providing a great overview of both the entire project and its specific parts, with a useful addition in the form of real-time synchronization. It can be used to figure out the time span for each part of the project, and you can also make changes to the plan in question to stay on the project’s general schedule.
Other types of operations that can benefit greatly from at least some degree of automation are manufacturing, product development, and similar ones. These operations require different, more agile tools to analyze the entire chain of the process and eliminate various problems and/or bottlenecks. This is where SharePoint Kanban Board (by VirtoSoftware in my case) comes in, helping with project analysis, workload optimization, information filtering, and more.
That being said, it’s not easy to find a process that cannot benefit from the introduction of SharePoint workflows. It can be used to hide sensitive information from specific groups of employees, among other things, which makes SharePoint extremely useful when it comes to various banking-related operations – reducing the potential number of errors and improving the overall accuracy of the information.
Speaking of files, the majority of file-related operations can also be managed more quickly with bulk copying, bulk moving, and other operations that perform multiple file changes at the same time. The introduction of bulk file management tends to save an enormous amount of time for your employees, at the very least.
Another way to improve your routine regular operations is to use customized reminders and alerts – mostly used for notifying specific employees about deadlines, upcoming operations, or overdue ones. SharePoint’s own notification system offers a variety of customization features when it comes to alert frequency and alert conditions.
There are many different suppliers of SharePoint-centric software on the market that can offer some or all of the applications above to your company. For me one of the best example of such a companies is VirtoSoftware, which offers:
- Workflow scheduling
- Kanban boards
- Customizable forms
- Calendar pro
- Customizable alerts
- Working on files in bulk
- Workflow monitoring, and so on.
As such, it’s safe to say that smart automation is capable of bringing a lot of benefits to companies if implemented correctly, reducing the number of project delays, lessening the probability of supply chain disruptions, and all of that without overcomplicating the work processes too much.