Workflows are to operations management what spellcheckers are to writing. Sure there’s always going to be the human factor and error-free operation is an impossibility but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to get rid of routine inconsistencies and that’s what having a set of SOPs can help you achieve.
When you organize business-related communication within your company around workflows it makes all communication several orders of magnitude more relevant. In Pneumatic, when you get notified that you’ve been mentioned or assigned a task, the system takes you directly to the relevant workflow so you can see the relevant context and hit the ground running with your reply.
Standard operating procedures free your staff from having to manage tasks in manual mode. Once the right standard operating are designed in put in place, your company can pretty much run itself. The added benefit is that you can always go back, analyze the performance and adjust your SOPs accordingly to remove any bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
A workflow is a sequence of steps that reliably produce the same result. It’s vital to understand that workflows are all about continuous improvement: you build workflows, you analyze performance, then you go back to iteratively refine it to minimize waste.
When tasks are organised into workflows, the assignment of tasks can be fully automated at the level of workflows - when one task is completed, the next task in the workflow immediately gets assigned to relevant performance. There is no need to manually track the progress of tasks through workflows - the workflow management system does these routine tasks for you.