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The goal of manufacturing businesses, as we know, is to turn raw materials into saleable products. We all use workflow to navigate production planning from A to B. However, knowing which workflows to automate is essential in maximising your company's productivity and output.
Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, is a popular and effective way for businesses to evolve workflows into automated processes. In fact, one survey found that 88% of organisations cited that implementing ERP helped them to succeed. Let's take a closer look at why workflow automation is so important and the benefits of using ERP software in this process.
What are workflows?
Workflows refer to a repeatable sequence of tasks that move towards one common goal. In carefully designing and implementing the best workflows for your business, you can optimise your outputs whilst maintaining high levels of consistency across your business. Workflows are more common than you might think, with most manufacturing companies using a number of workflows to get products from the factory floor to end customers.
Why planning is important
Workflow automation is vital to saving time and money for your business, removing all, or most, of the manual steps from a specific workflow enables you to create a well-oiled machine that runs without interference. Whether on the factory floor or in your finance office, workflow automation can help minimise human error and speed up your business operations.
However, knowing which systems or processes to automate is vital to the success of implementing ERP. For example, while automating your payroll system could ultimately save valuable time and energy, you may prefer your tax returns to still include a final manual checks.
What types of workflow could benefit from being automated?
Numerous types of workflow can benefit from automation, freeing up valuable time to concentrate on the more important or innovative projects. For example, you could implement automated workflows in the following departments:
- Finance - payroll, invoicing, accounting software
- HR - recruitment, onboarding, background checks
- IT systems - asset tracking, ticketing system for maintenance requests, cloud-based backups
- Marketing - auto-publish campaigns and advertisements, sharing resources across multi-site locations
- Sales - order confirmation and thank you emails to customers, gathering accurate data
- Product manufacturing - standardised quality control check, product management software
The benefits of automating workflows using ERP software
Enterprise Resource Planning can help you optimise process manufacturing with automated solutions that work both on server based or across cloud-based systems. So, whether you're in one location or multiple, ERP automation brings a range of benefits.
Creating lean manufacturing systems
Whether you work in stock distribution or food manufacturing, automating your workflows using ERP software can help you identify unnecessary steps and enhance your processes to create lean manufacturing systems, enabling you to:
Collect accurate data
Data helps businesses to optimise workflows and boost sales, so collecting accurate data sets is vital. Automated systems within ERP software solutions can help you gather precise data where you need it most.
Keep evolving with your business
Remember that your workflow automation needs to evolve with your company, so that your production software solutions work with your current and future business models. This factor is why ERP is so valuable because you can adapt and refine your processes with your teams to create the best solution for you.
Contact Winman today
If you're looking to automate your workflows, then the WinMan ERP software solution, which has been designed especially for manufacturers, is here to help. As a leading ERP vendor in the UK and US, we specialise in assisting a range of small, medium and large enterprise manufacturing and distribution businesses in optimising workflows with cloud-based, hosted or traditional on-premise ERP solutions.
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