MAKE Issues: Learn-by-Doing: 5 Steps to Workflow Automation
Have you noticed routines in your daily activities?
Think about getting ready for work. You probably go through a series of steps: waking up, having breakfast, showering, getting dressed, and heading to the office.
We call this series of steps a 'workflow.' Identifying and executing repetitive steps in a workflow creates organization, efficiency, and consistency.
But workflows can sometimes be tedious. What if each step of the workflow could be automated? That's the power of workflow automation.
Now, many companies and individuals are leveraging this new field to achieve tremendous productivity gains.
So what exactly is workflow automation, and how can you use it to improve your operations?
What Is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation has two core elements: workflows and automation. Let's look at each in turn.
The Workflow Recipe
A workflow refers to a series of tasks performed to achieve a specific goal.
For example, suppose you want to follow up on overdue customer invoices. To achieve this goal, you might perform these tasks:
- Check the billing system for overdue invoices
- Find email addresses for contacts with overdue invoices
- Send an email to that person following up on payment
- If payment isn't received within 7 days, send another reminder email
These steps comprise the tasks of the overdue invoice collection workflow.
According to Scott Collier-Weir, founder of workflow optimization consulting agency SimplaDocs, workflows have three characteristics:
- They are performed regularly and repeatedly. For example, a business must repeat the invoice collection workflow daily to check overdue invoices and take necessary follow-up actions.
- They involve multiple steps. At least two tasks are performed sequentially.
- Workflow steps can vary depending on the situation. This helps us respond appropriately when various events occur. For example, if W happens, do X, but if Y happens, do Z.
Workflows create structure in our work. If you want to achieve a specific outcome, you must follow specific steps in a specific order. Smart companies document their workflows to know which actions to take in which situations.
No guessing required.
Automation That Supercharges Software Speed
In this way, workflows inevitably include repetitive elements: you must repeat the workflow whenever the situation calls for it.
But repetition can get tedious. That's where automation comes in.
Automation is the process of using technology to complete activities with minimal human input. For example, in a typical factory floor setting, machines can be pre-programmed to sort and package items or assemble products.
But automation isn't limited to factory floors. 79% of corporate strategists surveyed by Gartner saw automation as critical to their success through at least 2025.
The reason is that automation can automate not just physical, hardware-driven processes but also software.
Workflow + Automation = Productivity Boost
Workflow automation refers to the process of automatically executing procedural workflows, which increases efficiency and reduces "manual" tasks.
Consider the overdue invoice collection workflow mentioned above. We could have a finance manager manually execute the same steps, but we could also set up an automation system that handles both invoice checking and email sending on their behalf.
In the 10 minutes it takes a finance manager to find one overdue invoice and compose and send a follow-up email, an automation system could have already sent dozens of emails.
Workflow automation is big business. According to a Mordor Intelligence report, the global workflow automation market is estimated to be worth $21.7 billion this year and is expected to grow to $34.18 billion by 2029.
The growth of workflow automation is thanks to significantly lowered entry barriers, enabled by software that provides user-friendly visual interfaces for automating workflows with minimal code. Companies are taking advantage of these new capabilities.
Making Work Flow Smoothly
Automated workflows are streamlined tools. After all, if a workflow is running automatically, you don't need to spend time doing it yourself.
5 Benefits of Workflow Automation
Check out the stories from users of accounting management software Financial Cents.
According to a survey conducted in 2024 by this platform, 21.6% of accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firm owners in North America spent roughly 1-5 hours manually setting up and assigning tasks.
However, after adopting workflow automation software, 34.8% of respondents were able to reduce that time to less than 1 hour — up to a 5x decrease.
Other benefits of workflow automation include:
- Improved workflow productivity: By automating certain tasks, you free up time for other tasks — especially those requiring more creative and higher-level input.
- Greater employee efficiency: Automating business workflows removes tasks from your team, allowing employees to be reassigned to other responsibilities.
- Reduced human error: Automated workflows are generally reliable and execute the same way every time.
Who Uses Workflow Automation
Which business operations can benefit from workflow automation?
Sales: Automation for outreach, prospecting, and contracts helps teams pitch to more customers and close deals.
Marketing: Communicators can scale content creation and distribution efforts, consolidate reporting data, and more.
HR: Automating employee onboarding and offboarding, plus leave request management, keeps employees happy and motivated.
Operations: Automating project management, company data, and inventory management keeps the business running like a well-oiled machine.
Finance: Make unpaid invoices and revenue leakage a thing of the past through automation. Also automate payroll processing to pay employees on time.
Customer Experience: By automating support ticket management and customer onboarding, you can respond to customer needs faster — crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction.
IT: People can't operate 24 hours a day, but machines can. Leverage this by setting up automated, 24/7 monitoring systems.
Implementing Workflow Automation in 5 Steps
If the possibility of automating workflows excites you, you'll need workflow automation software.
Workflow automation software is driving the billions of dollars in investment that Mordor Intelligence and others forecast.
Types of tools
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): This software is useful for creating bots that perform rule-based workflows like data entry and screen clicking. These bots can operate independently or be assisted by humans.
- Business Process Management (BPM): BPM software maps out business workflow activities, identifies the teams responsible for them, and finds optimization opportunities. They usually also provide app integration capabilities to automate these workflows, but primarily focus on workflow modeling and optimization.
- Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS): Integration platforms provide the ability to connect workflow apps and run automatically when specific events occur.
Features of effective automation software
- App integration: Seamlessly connects app actions.
- Low-code or no-code: Technical development is no longer needed to create these workflows.
- Visual interface: Workflows can be visualized as abstract diagrams. Effective automation software extends this capability to the platform to make workflows easy to create.
- Conditional logic: Adjusts automated workflow behavior to different situations.
Workflow Automation with Make
Make is an integration platform that provides a user-friendly experience for automating tasks. Using Make, users create executable workflows called "scenarios," connecting app modules in a visual interface and customizing the data each app should receive.
Because Make supports over 1,800 apps, users can create workflows that include various tools, actions, inputs, and outputs.
Companies automating workflows with Make improve productivity.
- Insurance brokerage Fonds Finanz saved 10,000 hours on back-office tasks.
- Film location company Lokacni.cz saved 90% of the time needed for document processing.
- A consulting firm saw a 17% increase in organizational efficiency.
5 Steps to Workflow Automation with Make
So how can you automate workflows using Make?
In Make, workflows are created as "scenarios" on a visual virtual canvas. You can connect apps and actions in linear or branching order, which can be as simple or complex as you need.
We can create a scenario to automate an invoice tracking workflow using Xero and Gmail apps.
Creating a custom solution like this instead of relying on the billing system's basic features has advantages.
For example, we can send reminder emails from our own email address and add CC and BCC email addresses that our billing system might not allow.
You can choose to build Make scenarios yourself or find a professional automation consultant.
1. Start with a Trigger
Every workflow has a beginning — whether your workflow is analog or digital, manual or automated.
Think about which app will start your Make scenario. You can easily find it among hundreds of possibilities and add it to the canvas.
In Make, these specific app events are called "modules." Select the module that will serve as the scenario's "trigger."
Here, we use a "search" trigger to periodically check for overdue invoices.
2. Build the Scenario
The scenario's apps are called action modules. By adding action modules for additional apps, you create a sequence connecting activities across various tools.
The trigger module starts the scenario, and action apps follow after the trigger in the scenario. These are the various modules offered by Make's 1,800+ apps.
Module addition examples:
- Fetch the invoice URL for email display
- Download the invoice in PDF format for email attachment
- Get the contact email address from the billing system to send emails
- Send an email including a customized template follow-up message with the overdue invoice details.
3. Map Data
Building the scenario skeleton is easy, but how do you move data between apps and modules?
In Make, inserting data into these steps is called "mapping." It's a simple point-and-click step that inserts part of a specific scenario step's results into subsequent modules.
For example, if the module that gets the overdue invoice URL needs the invoice's ID, this data is mapped based on data previously fetched by the "search" module.
4. Add Conditional Logic
Not all workflows are linear. In business and in life, you often need to perform workflow steps only when specific conditions are met.
When running a "weekly grocery shopping" analog workflow, you'd only add toothpaste to the list when the current one needs replacing.
Make's workflow automation canvas provides complex conditional controls within an intuitive visual builder.
Apply filters between module actions so subsequent actions only execute when previous results match specific criteria.
For example, a filter after the trigger module in our overdue invoice collection scenario ensures subsequent scenarios only run when overdue invoices need follow-up.
Add a router module to branch the scenario, allowing you to handle completely different workflow sequences for different situations.
Our overdue invoice collection scenario uses a router to send different email content depending on how overdue the invoice is.
5. Schedule the Scenario
Building a workflow automation scenario has its most satisfying part.
Once you've scheduled the scenario and configured auto-execution, this is the 'set-and-forget' moment.
Now just sit back and relax — from now on, everything will be handled automatically.
Now you can schedule the scenario to run at specific intervals. This means setting the trigger module to run automatically at chosen specific times. Many apps' trigger modules support instant actions, so scenarios can run as soon as specific in-app activities occur.
You can check on your scenario at any time and receive notifications about errors or issues.
Having work handled automatically might sound like a fairy tale, but the magical process of workflow automation makes it a reality.
Right now, your team is likely handling countless tasks.
Among them, which tasks could be automated?
If you automated them, how much time and resources could you save?
We hope these possibilities become the catalyst for starting change.
And within that change, we hope you experience firsthand how your organization's efficiency remarkably improves.
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Source: Make, "Workflow automation: How to put your work on autopilot", https://www.make.com/en/blog/workflow-automation, (2024.05.30)