3 Easy Ways to Boost Efficiency in Your Workflow

Why Efficiency is Key

When considering the development, expansion, or analysis of your workflow, we circle back to the same word: efficiency. It boils down to how quickly your team can receive, process, and produce work. Regardless of your line of work, prioritizing efficiency in your workflow can save you money and time.

How do you guarantee that?

Narrow down your choices by pursuing contestants that have these going for them. Once they’ve met these criteria, keep up the progress and success between customer demand and satisfactory fulfillment.

End-to-End Visibility

Transparency is a great way to remove lags from the workflow. Once everyone knows what the task is, how to complete it and get the job done, things move a lot quicker.

End-to-end visibility provides clear job definitions, easy review and approval steps, spelled out parameters for success. Anything that obstructs any of that can be ironed out to keep progress up.

You may have a few kinks in your workflow, like these:

Bottlenecks

Congestion in a workflow can really jam it up. Points of congestion are called bottlenecks and are hard to identify because it could be caused by a lot of small factors instead of one glaringly obvious cause. They stop output from progressing naturally with most businesses none the wiser.

A visible workflow helps you identify symptoms of these bottlenecks. Long wait times, backlogs of incomplete work, and overworked employees are all indicators that you’ve got too much work flowing through too few resources.

Silos

Silos happen naturally as companies expand and the amount of data and processes increase due to complexity. It makes perfect sense – someone in HR doesn’t need to be privy to the inner workings of a sales team. That becomes too much irrelevant data heaped upon people who don’t need it to do their jobs.

Where silos become problematic is when teams that should collaborate are too siloed without open lines of communication. This results in outdated, erroneous, or even missing information that can disrupt the workflow or halt it altogether.

Silos can be a part of your departmental layout or your digital infrastructure. If you have a lot of software systems that aren’t talking to each other (payroll to invoicing, admin to field techs, etc.), there could be gaps that information is falling through.

Spearhead acts as a source of truth for all your systems, data flowing into it from your personnel and then out to all your integrated systems. Departmental silos that are still useful are then pulled from the same source, keeping everything consistent and accurate.

Productivity, performance, and profits all take a hit with bottlenecks and silos. Spearhead, Incyte’s workflow solution, comes complete with an objective analysis of your cycles. This way work travels from phase to phase or team to team can shed some light on what the trouble is.

Simple Beats Clever

Enhanced visibility can identify ways to improve functionality and performance. You’ll detect when a five-step process can be simplified to a two-step process. Or you’ll notice that there are too many teams involved in one project.

Promote efficiency by breaking up overly-complex processes and leveraging simplicity where you can.

Too many systems being juggled at once can be difficult to scale, maintain, teach, and to adapt to new circumstances. This is where you see productivity get hit the most. Trying to balance too many processes at once asks a lot of our attention, leading to:

Context Switching

This occurs when too many tasks or systems are running at once, causing an individual to switch between different modes on a regular basis. Often confused with multitasking, context switching diminishes progress and impairs productivity.

A major contributor to context switching is overcomplexity. When an employee has to toggle between multiple apps to accomplish one task, they can get distracted. If it takes an email, a ticket, a phone call, and a meeting to accomplish one task, it’s more likely distractions will disrupt the natural progression of the task or the employee completing it.

The easiest way to reduce context switching is to keep processes clean and simple with one system like Spearhead. Without being mired in complicated steps, you are bound to see more completed tasks and faster turn-around times.

Automate Where You Can

Enhanced scalability, profitability, and agility are all byproducts of automation. Render manual processes obsolete with automated tasks. Begin with menial, trivial tasks that are susceptible to human error and leave your processes open to inaccuracy.

Implement a guided workflow to make tasks less ambiguous, clarify metrics for completion, and keep everyone on the same page. This lessens the potential for skipping steps, misunderstandings, and incomplete work. Your guided workflow plus automation means everyone’s using their time and resources better, they’re more on task, and things get done better.

Departments That Benefit

All aspects of your business can reap the benefits from increased efficiency. From automation to streamlined workflows, these departments will feel a little less strain when they try to do their pivotal jobs:

• Billing: Generating invoices, tracking the life cycle of payments, or sending out reminders to clients are all examples of tasks that can be scheduled and automated to optimize your resources.
• Payroll: Distributing reminders about timesheet approval, review and expense approvals, and overtime configuration all take up enormous amounts of time. Guiding employees’ hours directly to payroll generation with timely updates, reminders, and approval processes can keep the trains running on time.
• Field Techs: Implement customized forms for each work order or task to clarify expectations and job roles, especially on job sites with multiple steps for a ticket. This will keep rework down and ensure the job gets done on the first try!

Spearhead can streamline all these operations with automation, intuitive processes, and guided workflows so your business reaps the benefits.

All the Ways You Can Benefit

There’s endless amounts of benefits you can derive from a fluid workflow. Once you’ve implemented visibility, simplicity, and automation, you’ll see the results instantly.

Timeliness

Don’t let complexity drag you down. With no more unnecessary complications in your workflow, revitalize job processing times. Remove hangups, lag times, and delays to see job completion times get cut in half.

Collaboration

Breaking up silos and adding transparency to the flow information can facilitate better communication between your teams. Everyone’s job responsibilities are clearly defined, parameters for completion and success are spelled out in this environment. Mix in some cross-departmental visibility and clarification of shared objectives like with Spearhead’s visible workflows, and your teams are bound to keep firing on all cylinders.

Productivity/Accuracy

Keep things simple and try to get as many tasks accomplished within one system. Communications, tasks, payroll – keep your number of systems down by trying to find something that either does it all or integrates with your current operational systems. This way, information is accurate and consistent across the board. Spearhead keeps the likelihood of context switching and errors down by making it the central hub of your operations.

Profit

With automation to lower administrative expenses and productivity on the rise, keep the distance between your bottom line and your profit margins. Spearhead’s productivity reports and dashboards per site, employee, and organization can help you identify potential gaps for revenue to fall through. You’ll lose less and less each year while your profits rise naturally.

Attracting and Retaining Customers

Speedy turnarounds, increased productivity, and improved communication – what more could you do to keep your clients happy? The work will speak for itself with your current customer base and attract the appeal of new customers. Better yet, Spearhead’s automated and simple operations are easily scalable, so your new client load won’t strain your processes.

Looking Forward

Keep up the expansion and the progress, don’t let outdated processes get in the way. A thorough analysis of your workflow can tell you all you need to know, if an upgrade is necessary, and how to implement the necessary changes.

If you’re looking to make visibility, simplicity, and automation work to your advantage, check out Spearhead. The customizable solution for your inefficiencies, you can reduce revenue leakage, optimize productivity, and promote success.

Want to know more? Reach out to schedule a demo and see what Spearhead can do for you