Alongside your network, your business’s workflows are the backbone of your day-to-day operations. As with your technology, it’s vital to continually clarify and refine your team’s workflows to maximize workplace productivity and propel growth. Companies frequently do not have the internal resources—whether it be time, expertise, or a combination of both—to gain in-depth insights into operational workflows and how to improve them. That’s why finding the right business workflow specialist is a critical step to achieving your growth goals.

But where do you start, and what should you look for? In this post, we’ll break down the fundamentals of business workflows and explore where the FileMaker experts at Skeleton Key fit into the picture.

The Fundamentals of Business Workflows

Fundamentally, a workflow is any process you and your team follow to get work done. As such, a workflow is composed of the individual tasks that help you arrive at a defined business goal. However, in order to be a viable business process workflow, it must be repeatable. It’s not merely a one-time project or task. Instead, it’s a series of tasks your team regularly completes to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, a workflow can be as simple as the procedure for how an accounting department reports on receivables at the end of the month or as complex as the steps a company follows to perform an end-of-year inventory audit.

How a Business Workflow Specialist Can Help

The first step to streamlining business workflows begins with thorough documentation. After all,  how can you begin improving processes without clarifying each team member’s workflows? As a brainstorming exercise, you can start by listing the critical tasks your business performs each day. From there, you can determine whether these tasks represent a workflow in themselves or are a small part of a larger workflow. Merely listing out day-to-day tasks only gets you so far, however. That’s where a business workflow specialist can help.

A business workflow specialist can help you transform that list of seemingly disparate tasks into dynamic diagrams of how your organization operates at every level. With the power of business workflow software, a workflow specialist clarifies, tracks, and documents your business processes with interconnected flow charts that pinpoint inefficiencies, opportunities for growth, and project bottlenecks.

To achieve this goal, the right workflow specialist works with you to clarify:

• How is each task performed and completed?
• Who is completing each task, and who is in charge of overseeing each step?
• Which tools, hardware, and software do employees rely on to complete each task?

By answering these questions, your organization can start clarifying ways to streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks, building better tools, and prioritizing accountability. That’s precisely where Skeleton Key can help.

Transforming Inefficiency Into Productivity

When you work with a business workflow specialist, you need a team that can do more than merely pinpoint inefficiency. The right business workflow partner should also have the skills and tools to transform your operational inefficiencies into a more productive work environment. At Skeleton Key, our experts specialize in bridging that gap by first helping you understand organizational workflows on a deeper level and then designing a customized software platform to simplify and streamline those workflows.

In short, we not only have the theory to streamline workflow management, but we also have the tools for doing so. Our approach to workflow project management allows us to oversee every step of your business workflows, from diagramming with workflow tools to automating workflows that are repetitive and ripe for automation. 

With this goal in mind, we can help you save time, increase employee productivity, and cultivate a more balanced work life by leveraging the power of the FileMaker Workplace Innovation Platform. With our approach, we can design and deploy a customized software solution in a matter of weeks, instead of the months or even years required for conventional software development.

Start Streamlining Business Workflows With Skeleton Key

Are you interested in both clarifying and streamlining your team’s workflows under one umbrella project? Skeleton Key is the partner you need. We take a hands-on approach to understanding your operational workflow, so that we can then design a customized software solution around your broader organizational goals. Get in touch with our FileMaker experts today to start exploring how your employees can get more done in less time.