Workflows are probably used in every department of your organisation to ensure processes run smoothly and steps aren’t missed. In some cases, the workflows might even be automated, whereby the first step in the workflow is activated by an employee and a computer does the rest of the work.
More advanced workflow management doesn’t even necessarily need an employee to start the workflow and is triggered by an event or action such as an email coming into the inbox or a document being scanned.
Automated workflows are already saving a lot of time for employees and reduce the number of mistakes made by human error at different steps in the process. Dynamic workflows take this one step further.
Where workflows are usually a linear sequence of actions set up by an employee or someone in the organisation, a dynamic workflow is one that can adapt to changing circumstances in a business process.
They can be set-up to react to events and changes in context, throughput, capacity and workload and they can enable manual or automatic intervention in an ongoing business process.
Effectively, dynamic workflows automatically respond to changes with new processes.
By being able to respond to change and adapting to the change, dynamic workflows can improve business workflows with flexibility in the workplace, reductions in long-term workflow maintenance and the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances in a business process.
Workplace flexibility
The workflows themselves can be built to be flexible and adaptable in the same way an employee might change the course of action if the situation calls for it.
As case-by-case differences and exceptions occur, dynamic workflows automatically respond with new processes and empower workers to intervene as needed, creating flexibility in the business process.
The issues sometimes found with workflow automation is that every time the process is repeated, it’s possible that the details or circumstances are slightly different and a linear workflow can’t make adjustments to suit, while a dynamic workflow can.
Reduce workflow maintenance
As described above, if something changes in a business process, a linear workflow can’t adapt to the changes and an employee will need to intervene in order for the process to carry on as it should - the last thing you want is information and data being passed through to the wrong places because the workflow couldn’t adapt to change.
By moving away from linear automated processes, there is less of a need for employees to interact and maintain the workflow, saving valuable employee time.
Quickly adapt to changing circumstances
Humans make mistakes and sometimes the mistake is not realising a change in the business process until it’s too late.
Dynamic workflows don’t make these same mistakes and because computers are notoriously good at picking up when something has changed, they are able to quickly react to the change and adapt to it.
While humans can be good at picking up change, identifying it and adapting the workflow in time, it’s a hugely time consuming process and can mean spending a lot of time monitoring the workflows and the data going into them rather than working on more valuable tasks that can’t be automated.
Dynamic workflows can benefit your company by reducing the need for employee intervention in business processes and speeding up the process by changing as needed along with adding flexibility to automated linear workflows.