When you use many manual, repetitive tasks as part of your business processes and workflows, your teams will get less done. And, let’s face it, everything suffers when your teams are less productive.
Luckily, you can avoid this by using no-code workflow automation to inject some efficiency into your business processes. In this post, we’ll look at how you can do this in more detail.
Why Automate Your Workflows?
No-code automation is better than sliced bread because you’ll enjoy a plethora of benefits, including:
- Improved efficiency and productivity. When you automate your workflows, you’ll eliminate many manual tasks, making your teams more efficient and productive. Through automation, they’ll get more done in less time.
- Fewer errors. When you eliminate manual tasks, you’ll, by implication, also eliminate human errors. As a result, your teams will deliver more accurate work.
- Improved consistency. With automated workflows, you’ll also have more consistency. In other words, your workflows will go through the same steps every time, improving accuracy.
- Cost savings. Finally, when your teams make fewer mistakes, work faster, and are more efficient, you’ll bring significant cost savings.
Remember, though, these are just some benefits you’ll enjoy when you automate your workflows, and several others might be possible based on your specific circumstances.
How to Automate Your Workflows
Considering the advantages mentioned above, you’re probably convinced that you should automate your workflows with a no-code tool. Here’s how to actually do it!
Step 1: Decide What You Want to Achieve
The first step is deciding what you want to achieve with workflow automation. To do this, you’ll need to figure out:
- What your goals are
- What challenges you’d like to solve
- What your budget will be
- How you’ll measure your success
This lays the foundation for the other steps you’ll follow to implement workflow automation.
For example, your project managers may take a lot of time to transcribe notes and extract insights. Add it to your to-automate list.
Source: Marketing Charts
Step 2: Define the Process and Workflows You Need to Automate to Reach Your Goals
Once you know what you’d like to achieve through workflow automation, you need to create a list of business processes and workflows you’ll need to automate to reach your goals.
This will help you understand what you’ll automate, what manual processes you’ll keep, and how these will combine to make your workflows more efficient. With this understanding, you can then move on to the next step.
Step 3: Map Out Business Processes and Workflows to Automate Them With No Code
When you know what you’ll automate, you have to map out your workflows and processes to show how they interact and engage with each other.
Source: SweetProcess
This will help you plan and understand how to best use automation to make them more efficient.
In addition, by mapping out your processes and workflows and the interactions between them, you’ll also be able to spot any issues early in the process, which means you won’t have to sort out any problems later.
Step 4: Look at Checklists and Your Key Performance Indicators
During the next step of the process, you’ll have to look at the checklists your employees use when they do their work manually. Compare your map to them to see how they correspond, what you can include, and what you can leave out.
Similarly, look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) you use to measure your employees’ performance to decide if they’re still relevant.
Step 5: Appoint a No-Code Automation Leader
One of the significant benefits of using no-code tools to automate your workflows is that your team members can build their own solutions based on their unique needs and requirements.
However, allowing everyone to build solutions haphazardly will be a mistake. For this reason, you’ll need a leader responsible for the automation process. They should be your entire team’s primary point of contact and tasked with keeping everyone in the loop.
Step 6: Consider the No-Code Options
The next step in the process is to consider the available no-code tools that you can use. Luckily, many of these tools are available that suit different requirements, skill levels, and budgets.
Unfortunately, this can also be a disadvantage because it makes choosing the right tool challenging. Ultimately, to find the right one, you’ll need to consider tools that best meet your needs and requirements, fit into your workflows, and fall within your budget.
Our blog has suggestions you can consider, depending on your specific use case. Also, when choosing tools, it might be a good idea to take advantage of demos and free trials to make the decision easier.
For example:
- Automate multi-app workflows with a tool like Zapier
- Do you need to streamline inventory management? You’ll only need your spreadsheet and sheet.best’s API
- De-clutter your project management with Airtable’s no-code features.
And more! There’s a tremendous no-code solution for every use case.
Step 7: Start Slow
Finally, when implementing your no-code tool and automating your workflows, it’s always a good idea to start slow. In other words, you should begin with a single, possibly smaller, project to see how the implementation works, what challenges you encountered, and how you solved them.
When you’re satisfied, you can move on to a wider implementation.
No-Code Workflow Automation Use Cases
You can use no-code workflow automation to streamline your processes across your entire organization. Typically, we see the best results in the following teams:
- HR and employee onboarding
- Customer support and ticketing
- Reporting
- Contract reviews and approvals
- Finance and purchasing
For example, B4B Company uses sheet.best to build and operationalize powerful chatbot databases.
Start Automating Your Workflows Now
Now that you know what workflow automation is, what processes and workflows you can automate, and, more importantly, how you can get started with a no-code tool, it’s time to hit the ground running!
Map out your processes, get your team on board, and start with a small project. Why not supercharge your traditional spreadsheets and turn them into web apps?
All you need to turn your spreadsheet into a REST API is sheet.best.
Then, use your API to automate everything from employee onboarding to customer support!
To learn more about sheet.best and how it can help your teams be more efficient, get started for free.