Advantages of workflow management for business

Workflow management is a system of supervision and control over process of transfer of the information, documents and tasks from one employee to another within the business. Properly organized workflow management defines successful business process in which every employee is a connecting link and he executes his tasks according to the predetermined procedure. Without workflow management, companies are compelled to track task statuses that have taken place in past. So workflow management is a set of methods of how to efficiently allocate works and tasks to resources in the company and make a long-range forecast.

Workflow management gives the following advantages for business:

Tracking tasks performance.

When manager tracks tasks, he can collect important feedback on task performance issues. Analysis of these issues can reveal so-called "bottlenecks" that could be caused by a number of reasons: a lack of resources, poor staff education, technical issues, etc. Analysis of the problem can then be used to implement changes to the workflow process.

Reporting employee's activity.

It provides the ability to monitor individual tasks as well as review resources productivity and work volume at the department/company level. The company can more easily determine available options for improvement

Improvement of production or service process.

Once the task performance issue was detected the manager can take measures to solve it. By simplifying the responsibilities of each employee and clarifying his role within the process, the company can more easily determine where improvements can be made in order to increase efficiency and to improve the quality of the product or service.

Standardizing tasks and works.

The situation when at the same level employees perform the same tasks and have the same functions is easy to control by manager. Workflow management allows to standardize working methods and approaches, and assign tasks efficiently to employees.

Improved customer service.

The ability to quickly search for and identify a work request within the process allows a manager to quickly respond to customer enquiries. Workflow management allows the customer to feel completely involved in the entire process and capable of getting answers to important questions.

Reduced costs.

Workflow management lets create a continuous workflow, i.e. unbroken chain. When a link in the chain is broken, it is simple to go back and determine where this occurred and immediately take measures. This gives the company capability to reduce idle time costs.

VIP Task Manager is software that gives the company manager capabilities to set and manage workflow efficiently. In the application the manager can customize workflow and edit tasks statuses. Besides default workflow that has such task statuses "Draft", "Created", "In Progress", "Completed", "Canceled", he can create new workflow and add new task statuses that precisely corresponds to your working process. For example, in some stage of working process the task is required to be checked and approved by Director or Manager. Then the manager could create such task statuses: "Verification" or "Approved".

For effective workflow management the manager needs to get complete information on how each employee performs his tasks. The manager needs to track and get reports on tasks. In VIP Task Manager he can set deadlines and track procrastinations, assign estimated time for tasks and compare it with actual time needed to perform a task, set reminders and task recurrence. The employee can generate reports on tasks and print it out or send these tasks to the manager by email. VIP Task Manager lets the manager receive notifications on task changes by email or within the application.

For better workflow management the manager can document tasks using the following features:

• Task attachment. The manager can attach some documents like pictures, drafts, schemes, orders, invoices, etc. or links to local/web resources.
• Reports. They could be built as in RTF or HTML format as in graph view (charts).
• Notes and comments. When a task needs to be specified the manager can add notes and comments to the task to describe step by step actions or add some details.
• Exporting to MS Excel. Task list in Excel view could be helpful, for example, when the manager do not have access to VIP Task Manager

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