There are 7 easy steps to efficient workflow automation. Bonus: Why automate and which questions do you need to ask before starting.

Workflow automation isn’t only about making things move faster. It’s about keeping your business processes systematic, transparent, and easy to manage.

Why use workflow automation and how to complete the transition successfully: Read on to learn the answers.

Why Automate?

A typical workflow automation example is an approval process. What does it look like prior to automation? A few people excessively exchange emails; nobody knows which version of an Excel sheet or Word document is the last one—the project manager keeps asking what stage the process is at.

How does workflow automation work?

It creates a digital track of your business process and pushes an input message through a sequence of stages. Each stage is assigned to an employee or team. Once the tasks in the stage are complete, the process moves to the next stage automatically.

You are only seven steps away from this new digital reality.

7 Steps to Workflow Automation

Based on many years of consulting experience, we have identified a few universal workflow automation steps.

1. Find Patterns in Your Business Routines

You should revise your business processes and find out which tasks are performed in a unified way. Indeed, you know your business better than anyone, but an automation consultant may point you to some hidden potential and should be a part of the transition from the very beginning.

2. Define Your Business Goals

What does workflow automation do in your case? It saves costs, makes it more transparent, and accelerates other processes. For instance, if transparency isn’t your aim due to the confidentiality character of information, your implementation partner should know about it.

3. Talk With Future Process Owners

People who will initiate the workflow should provide their feedback at an early stage. You may as well ask your implementation partner to undertake this part and conduct interviews with your employees.

4. Draw the Prototype 

Remember to include a security matrix. You may want to make some stages visible only for a few selected management roles.

5. Choose Your Workflow Automation Tools

Decide on out-of-the-box or custom tools, cloud or on-premise tools, and an all-around or niche platform.

6. Review Proof of Concept 

Your consultant will translate specifications into a prototype and walk you through the implementation.

7. Test and Train

Select a few users to test the delivered result and create training materials based on their first-hand experience. Then let all other users familiarize themselves with the digitalized workflows.

Now you’re ready to roll it out within the entire organization.

7 Questions to Clarify Before Automation

Steps 1 and 2 from the previous section deserve special attention. The more precisely you describe your routine processes, the better the outcome.

We prepared the following checklist:

1. Where and how should the process start: an email, an online form, or a customer call?

2. Which information is mandatory to include?

3. Who is involved and what are their roles (manager, editor, observer)?

4. What are the stages and what are the responsibilities in each stage?

5. Should the workflow be granted access to other processes or databases?

6. How does the process end?

7. How should it be archived?

The checklist is designed for companies of all sizes to help start implementing workflow automation, even for small businesses.

Closing Words

We will be honest with you: Implementing workflow automation involves costs and efforts on your side. You’ll need to spend some time answering questions of your implementation partner and discussing mockups. Your employees will need some time to learn new routines.

However, in the short run, you will see the first benefits of saving time and managing bigger workloads. In the long run, the cumulative effect of all spared efforts and money will result in an ROI increase.

Laminar can assist you at every stage of your digital transformation and will ensure you get the most efficient workflow automation tools.

Find out what AI and machine learning can do for your business and how chatbots can save you time and money on the customer services side.

AI and Machine Learning

What do self-driving cars, Amazon Alexa, and Netflix’s movie recommendations all have in common? They each use a form of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their decision-making and provide a superior customer experience. As the fourth industrial revolution becomes more and more central to 21st-century living, companies are finding innovative ways to use AI and machine learning to improve the quality of our everyday lives.

AI comes in many different forms; from simple chatbots that can relieve the pressure on overworked customer support staff to global big data projects with life-and-death consequences.

What Is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. At its core, machine learning is automated data analysis where the systems that you have put in place use the data that is being gathered and processed to identify patterns and trends and make improvements without the need for human intervention.

A good example of machine learning is natural language processing, where chatbots learn about tone, context, and meaning through interaction with the human voice.

Chatbots

An AI chatbot is a computer program that simulates a regular human conversation online, but in fact, is between a human and a program. For example, Google’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are sophisticated chatbots. They’re easy to build, useful, and helpful tools for superior customer support. Most people know they’re not talking to a human, but they’re willing to interact with a chatbot if it’s efficient, friendly, and charming.

How Chatbots Help the Customer Support Effort

Chatbots allow companies to interact with their customers in a casual, personalized manner without the expense of hiring extra staff to fulfill those roles. By handling most of the simple, everyday queries that customers may have, a chatbot saves time and money for a company, freeing up staff members to tackle more complex issues that require human intervention.

AI Data Applications

Most AI is deployed in those areas of a business that customers never see. AI data applications operate in the background, gathering reams of data in real time and offering solutions that feel seamless and natural, but are actually driven by extremely complex, sophisticated rule engines. For example, Walmart uses SAP’s HANA to reduce costs and increase efficiency across its entire supply chain, while General Electric uses Predix to monitor and predict when critical equipment might fail.

Companies can use the technology in many different ways, big and small; however, the only constraint is the knowledge and imagination of business owners who may be unaware of what AI and machine learning could do for their businesses.

Predicting Trends and Identify Patterns

One of AI’s greatest strengths is its ability to identify patterns in large amounts of data. Something that would take humans years to do, AI can do in seconds. 

 This is particularly useful in a number of ways:

• Detecting fraud by spotting transactions that don’t fit a pattern and can be flagged for further investigation
• Identifying buying patterns in different branches of a store so that management can respond appropriately with a proper stock allocation
• Recommending further purchases for consumers, based on their previous spending behavior

Businesses around the globe are at a threshold moment in their adoption of this kind of intelligent software and AI learning. The proper use of AI and machine learning can provide an overwhelming advantage to your business if you understand what they can offer. But no organization can be expected to understand it all; that’s why it’s strongly recommended to partner with technology specialists, like Laminar, who can pinpoint areas of need in your business and recommend effective AI solutions.

Microservices solve problems of clumsy all-around applications. The isolated, functional modules with APIs are simple to develop but can be complex to deploy.

IT circles primarily talk about all-around applications. Meanwhile, microservices has become a new and mysterious term being passed around. Should you pick up this trend in 2022?

How Do Microservices Work?

Microservices are parts of an application—single-function modules that work independently. From a technical point of view, each of them runs its own process, occupying its own piece of memory storage. Although they remain integral components of one application, you can install them on separate computers or servers.

The majority of microservices speak to each other through REST API, mostly communicating in a decentralized way. Rarely, one microservice would play a hub role, collecting and forwarding messages from the others.

Advantages of Using Microservices

If you often hear about bugs bringing e-commerce or SaaS businesses to a halt for hours, microservices may offer a solution. Their isolated nature means you can precisely locate a failure in a workflow. After fixing it, it requires less effort to deploy only a microservice instead of an entire application.

Isolation also solves a lot of scaling issues, providing flexibility for intensively growing businesses. You don’t have to upgrade the whole application; however, you may only need to upgrade one or a few microservices. It helps to remove bottlenecks from the workflow swiftly.

Moreover, microservices can be built using different programming languages. You can hire people with better programming skills and not because they’re into a particular language.

As a result, you get a higher release speed and your IT architecture is resilient and always up to date at a lower cost.

Microservices Drawbacks

With microservices, deployments happen so often that you have to coordinate them very carefully. Furthermore, since microservices are independent at performing their tasks, they must be tested as a whole before rolling out new ones.

You will definitely run into the necessity to use a deployment automation tool. One or more specialists in your team will get busy with orchestrating development life cycles. You may even need to hire a development operations engineer. That adds to the final invoice.

Yet, if you have frequent system failures and microservices could eliminate them, you should do a thorough calculation. You must compare the costs of a new architecture to the expected revenue loss from the breakdowns. You can use historical data to estimate a possible benefit or an absence of such. For instance, take the average number of orders per hour and multiple them by breakdown duration.

How to Build a Microservices Architecture?

Before you start, you need to analyze existing software and choose a decomposition pattern. We recommend looking at business functions that they perform: how parts of one application contribute to the revenue. For instance, order and delivery management are good candidates for disintegration and becoming microservices. They have different business functions and can be reincarnated as independent modules.

In this way, you should go through all of your applications and create a project roadmap.

You implement microservices architecture step by step. Whereas parent applications keep going, you replace their features one by one with more isolated modules. Indeed, you can always engage a partner company to make this journey safe and short, from planning to deployment.

Conclusion: Where Are Microservices Used?

Microservices architectures are a good fit for steadily growing companies that have in-house developers or plan to actively form a developer team. Microservices work especially fine for e-commerce and SaaS brands that constantly experience turbulent changes. Such businesses can react better if they have many “joints” instead of a single monolith platform.

And you don’t have to wait until 2023 to start the microservces development: Laminar will help you move toward the new architecture in a leap.

Companies can use AR to boost their efficiency. VR prototyping, employee training, and virtual office environments become essential for future success.

Virtual reality has gradually developed an image of something similar to a nice playground. But it can be used for quite serious purposes. Companies must consider the following use cases they can benefit from.

VR Prototyping

Before you launch an expensive product, you always create a prototype that should be very close to reality. It works well with consumer products, ranging from electronics to vehicles. But what about prototyping immobile facilities, or other “heavy” and resource-consuming products? How do you know what it feels like for your customer to stay or move inside it?

3D tours used to be one of the methods for answering these questions. But they now have a solid and eventually mature rival: virtual reality prototyping. In the construction industry, AR does not only allow to virtualize the result but also the very construction process. The whole factories can be simulated to help investors in making an informed decision. And companies can acquire project financing easier.

Augmented reality prototyping enables manufacturers to save money and perform a virtual test drive before building a physical prototype. Moreover, such simulations can be used by dealers or retailers to attract customers, even during a pandemic.

Although simulated test drives have a lot in common with computer games, they are a serious instrument in raising your sales KPIs.

Virtual Reality for Training Employees

You may know that simulations are also great for training. Previously, a person would sit in front of a screen. In the best case, he or she would be provided an isolated space to avoid possible distractions. But, when you have VR goggles on, you do not even need this, since your side vision is also immersed in the training simulation. This boosts effectivity of training programs.

Moreover, VR goggles or headsets are very compact in comparison with the equipment that was used for simulation training before. You can store more of it easily in the training facility and train more employees at the same time. You can send the VR headset to someone who is working from home.

Indeed, the biggest advantage of VR employee training is its closeness to the real environment. VR can emulate difficult situations. It is actively used to train police officers and merchandisers that have their shifts during Black Friday sales.

The AR technology may be starting a new era in customer service preparing support employees to handle unusual situations.

A Virtual Reality Office

While some people may be enjoying a permanent home office mode, many teams have been suffering from the absence of shared office space. Brainstorming does not work as well online as it does offline. You cannot see the reactions of your colleagues quickly enough. Introvert persons keep silent throughout the sessions since they miss a moment to speak up.

Besides, a social component is important for team building. Video conferencing helps to concentrate on dry facts but personal communication is completely out.

Augmented office environments enable you to recreate the working atmosphere and bring the post-COVID team spirit to a new level. There are numerous applications that help to simulate a meeting in a physical meeting room. Your employees won’t be looking at a flat screen, they will be sitting in a virtual 3D room surrounded by their co-workers.

This environment won’t be looking like a cartoon copying your usual office space. It will be augmented. You can hold workshops and have name badges floating near participants. You can have your collaboration tools open and work on projects together.

Fascinated by VR?

Want to make your company an industry leader? Contact Laminar to implement your corporate VR strategy.

Cloud migration inevitably involves serious organizational changes. Internal supporters, like technical evangelists, and external partners guide you through it.

Organizational change and transformation prepare two traps: a technical failure and a non-technical adaptation of the working routines that your employees have difficulties anticipating.

Workflow Digitalization: The Limits of Customization

Sales management, candidate management in HR, labeling in manufacturing, finance reports generation — almost every workflow would nowadays find an automation vendor.

But every company is different. And most of the out-of-the-box solutions were created with a kind of common denominator in mind. They provide templates that an average business can use. The problem is, there is no such thing as an average company. Each workflow digitalization and automation needs a customization effort to some extent. Even though the new platform will be adjusted for the company staff to enable easy use, they still have to learn at least a new user interface.

Each migration is aimed at sustaining and facilitating efficient workflows. Thus, sometimes it is necessary to get rid of less efficient ones or come up with a new design for them. It may seem an edge case at first glance, but changing working routines may cause consequent insecurity among employees.

How to Get an Organization-Wide Support

Stepping out of the usual path in everyday duties may be a bit frustrating for your employees. They are worried that their working performance will actually drop instead of an expected increase. It can even come to a soft resistance.

That’s why you should obtain some supporters that can spread the word about the bright sides of new technology and enlighten about a necessary adaptation period. Technical evangelists and early adopters help you to prepare the rest of the company’s staff for the forthcoming changes and raise their commitment.

Technical Evangelists

Technical evangelists are employees with a strong technical background but highly sociable and possessing an informal authority in the company. They enjoy explaining new technologies to other folks. They are far from being nerds; they help people to understand how cloud migration works without overwhelming anyone with unnecessary details.

Technical evangelists are often social hubs. You would know them already from informal team events or can quickly find them. When approaching a technical evangelist, remember to talk about the advantages of the platform migration for the employees and focus less on the business numbers.

Early Adopters

While technical evangelists won’t be dealing with the new technology after the migration, early adopters will. Those are mostly the power users of a new platform, such as senior specialists and team leaders. Once you’ve convinced them, they will find a way to sell new digital workflow software to their colleagues.

Of course, early adopters need to hear about the same kind of advantages before they express their readiness to help you. They should bear a message that a cloud migration process has a destination beneficial for all employees.

An Organizational Change Is a Masterwork

When you decide to roll out new digital workflow solutions in your company, help your employees to feel secure about the forthcoming changes. The most novel technology won’t work as expected if your best employees leave the company due to insecurity. It will require a lot of effort to subvert their fears and resistance.

Since you need to concentrate on change management, you may consider outsourcing the technical part of the cloud migration. Laminar Consulting provides cloud migration services on any scale, from small businesses to big enterprises. We can assist you in project planning and implementation leaving you enough time and resources to deal with the other aspects of cloud migration.

Laminar helps you to focus on essentials. Simply scroll down this page for one of the contact opportunities.

Learn how AWS continues to innovate by leveraging process automation, AI, ML, and IoT to build additional functionality to help your business.

“When you have a period of discontinuity like a pandemic, companies take a step back and they rethink what they’re doing,” said incoming AWS CEO Andy Jassy at the AWS re:Invent 2020 in December 2020.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to innovate and reinvent itself by leveraging process automation, AI, ML, and IoT to build additional functionality. Here are just a few of the ways that businesses are using AWS robotic process automation for better data analysis and business insights.

• Amazon Connect Services
  AI can transcribe a phone call in real time and perform sentiment analysis, then describe mitigation steps or automatically escalate calls.
• Amazon ComprehendUsing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, Amazon Comprehend finds relationships in text. Its data sentiment analysis tool analyzes text for sentiment, language, syntax, and key phrases.
• Amazon Outposts Edge
  Amazon Outposts is shifting workloads to the edge with an on-premises box. Amazon Outposts architecture extends the AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility for a consistent hybrid experience.
• AWS CloudFormation Modules
  With AWS CloudFormation, you can define your infrastructure and apps using modules. These modules are reusable building blocks that encapsulate resources and configurations that can be applied across an organization. Many of the modules are being built and available through the open-source developer community.
• AWS Lambda
  AWS Lambda allows organizations to run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can run code on nearly any type of backend service or application without administration. You upload the code and AWS takes care of everything else to run (and scale) your code with high availability. Only pay for computer time. When the code isn’t running, there’s no charge.
• AWS Batch
  AWS Batch allows fully managed batch processing at any scale. You can easily run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs simultaneously. AWS process automation dynamically provisions the resources needed based on volume and requirements of the batch jobs without human intervention.
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing
  AWS Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple Amazon instances. This improves your fault tolerance in applications and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances while restoring unhealthy instances. You can balance loads across single or multiple availability zones to improve app performance.
• Amazon IoT Events
  As a fully managed service, Amazon IoT Events can connect a nearly unlimited number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. AWS process automation can detect and respond to sensor and app events in real time. It avoids having to build expensive custom apps to trigger additional events.