Learn about the principal differences between the Pneumatic way and the Kissflow way in designing and implementing workflows to help you decide which system is a better fit for your company
In today’s dynamic business environment, the importance of effective business process management is becoming more and more apparent and while the market is awash with sundry agile task managers, solutions that offer robust business process management are still few and far between. Two prominent players in this emerging field are Kissflow and Pneumatic. Both seek to bring enterprise-grade workflow management to the masses by wrapping it in a streamlined highly interactive user experience generally associated with the SMB segment. And while both deliver on the promise of tangible improvements in operations management, their approaches differ significantly.
Kissflow’s approach to workflow management is centered around data. There is a master form that needs to be filled out and the workflow built on top of it defines the sequences in which the various fields in the form are to be filled in, as well as who’s responsible for filling out which fields.
This approach is a match made in heaven when it comes to digitizing existing paper-form-based business processes. If you already have a pretty good idea what data needs to be collected and who’s responsible for providing what information, it will be a breeze implementing this process in Kissflow. We’re talking a seamless transition from paper directly into the cloud with a barely noticeable learning curve for your staff as they’ll be working with, essentially, digital doubles of the familiar paper forms.
The added benefits include the fact that all the information gets stored in the cloud and can be accessed and/or uploaded from anywhere. Plus, Kissflow lets you create and manage your own databases and reuse the information stored in them across multiple forms and business processes.
Now, while this approach works great for digitizing existing business processes revolving around the filling out and passing of various forms within the organization, it can stump an aspiring operations manager trying to design a new business process from scratch without any pre-existing forms to draw inspiration from. It forces you to think in terms of data-centric workflows and invent forms for processes where none are needed.
Another downside is that highly complex and branching processes end up requiring huge forms with, sometimes, hundreds of fields, and it can become a real challenge to effectively set permissions for who gets to see which fields at each stage of the process, with the result that team members will often end up getting swamped with irrelevant information.
When all is said and done, Kissflow really delivers if you already have a business process in place that relies on paper forms and you want to digitize it. The downside is, of course, that at the end of the day you simply get a digitized version of the exact same process with all the same limitations and caveats. Kissflow isn’t really conducive to improvising new business processes as you go through trial and error.
Pneumatic treats workflows as sequences of tasks for your team to complete with data being included on an as-needed basis. Steps can include data fields but don’t have to. Instead, Pneumatic acts as a task master, notifying your team members when they get assigned new tasks and giving them easy access to their personalized to-do list, known as their bucket of tasks, where they only see the tasks they’re supposed to be working on at this very moment. Maximum focus with minimal distractions is the name of the game: every time you complete a task it disappears from your bucket.
You build out a workflow template by simply adding steps to it and assigning each step to one or several members of your team. In its most basic form, a Pneumatic workflow template doesn’t need any data fields. You run one or several workflows from it and the system will start assigning tasks and notifying assignees about them. Emphasis is on human-in-the-loop processes, but, as has become standard in modern SaaS apps, workflows can be run and tasks can be completed through the API.
Pneumatic is built for iterative, continuous business process improvement, making it extremely easy to redesign and expand upon existing business processes. The assumption is you build a simple proof-of-concept workflow template, start running workflows from it and then expand and improve it with more steps and data fields based on feedback from your staff and performance metrics.
Now the downside of this approach is that automating existing paper-based processes may not be as straightforward as in Kissflow, but the upside is that you’re gonna have to take a step back and reassess how you’ve been running things. This can be a great opportunity to re-engineer and improve your operations, streamlining your data flows and discarding unnecessary fields.
Pneumatic also makes an effort to gamify workflow management and in general make it a more fun and engaging experience by including such hip features as video embeds, interactive checklists, in-workflow chats and mentions, which gives it a bit of a social media vibe. And last but not least, Pneumatic also comes with highly effective mobile apps, meaning your team can view and complete their tasks from their smartphones.
All in all, Pneumatic doesn’t force you into the mold of form-based processes, which makes it easier to work with in contexts where you need to design business processes from scratch. The use of interactive features such as comments, mentions, reactions and video embeds makes for better employee engagement. All of this makes Pneumatic feel less bureaucratic and more agile.
All in all, comparing Kissflow and Pneumatic feels a bit like watching the old Get a Mac commercials from the mid noughties: in one corner, you’ve got a somewhat boring bureaucrat with endless forms to fill out but he gets the job done, no question about it, in the other corner, you’ve got a soy latte sipping hipster who also gets the job done but who also makes a genuine effort to cut down on red tape.
So it’s not about whether or not either system can pull off workflow management, they both pull it off with aplomb, it’s about which approach is a better match for your company at this particular point in time:
Do you already have paper-based business processes that you’re totally happy with and simply want to digitize and are your processes data-centric? Then Kissflow might work better for you.
Do you need to build out new human-centric business processes from scratch or organize your existing tasks into sequences? Then Pneumatic is the way to go.
Either system will have your back when it comes to integration and enterprise-grade support.
