Every organisation works with workflows and documents. Do you notice that you sometimes lose track of things or cannot find certain documents quickly? Then now is the time to think about how to organise your document management.
How do you regulate who has access to certain systems and documents? This is where workflow management comes in. This is indispensable for improving the processes within your organisation and organising your document management system (DMS) properly. But how do you best apply workflow management within your document management system?
By a workflow, we mean a process that consists of a series of tasks. These tasks should be performed in a certain order. This process takes place over and over again within an organisation. A workflow contains all the necessary steps to get work done. Every organisation works with workflows. Do you map out these processes clearly? Then you can optimise the processes within your organisation with our handy workflow management software!
So what exactly does such a workflow look like? Drafting an annual report is an example of a workflow. Annual reports are often first drafted and supplemented or adapted by several people. Important here is that they are not published too early or end up with the wrong person. Then the annual report has to be checked, a double-check has to be made and the responsible persons have to agree. Finally, the report is published. All these tasks together form one workflow.
Of course, you can create a workflow for multiple documents. This applies to all documents that affect business operations and/or contain sensitive information. You can also apply workflows for less sensitive but still crucial documents, such as documents that are part of a recruitment and selection process and instructions around the release of a new product. You can also create a workflow for handling a request, complaint or order. There are plenty of possibilities!
Workflow management is the way a workflow is set up. It ensures that business processes are optimised. Do you want a workflow to always run the same way? Software can help you capture and secure the process.
This way, you make sure that a task flows through the organisation as predetermined. The software determines who should pick up the task at what point in the process and sends a message, for example, when the task is assigned to you or your department.
This makes the exchange of information between different departments and individuals more efficient. So customers are helped faster and employees do not spend time on pointless steps.
Do you notice that not all workflows are running equally efficiently? Then gain insight into the processes within your organisation with workflow management. That way, you can optimise these processes. Below, we give you four reasons why workflow management software is important for the success of your organisation and how Zenya helps.
Workflow management provides an overview of the processes within your organisation. For example, you can see how far your team is with a certain task, how far the task is from finished and who is responsible for which part of the workflow.
As an employee, you immediately have a good overview of your task list and know which tasks have priority. This also prevents tasks from being duplicated.
Are all tasks in the workflow needed? Do you see tasks that do not add value or can be merged with other tasks? By looking at this critically, you ensure yourself that there are only essential tasks in the workflow that are useful. That way, the processes within your organisation will run faster and more efficiently.
Communication within an organisation is sometimes messy. Want to improve communication within your team? With workflow management, employees automatically receive a notification when a task needs to be completed or when there is a status update. This eliminates the need to ask what the status of a project is, which saves a lot of messages and e-mails.
Group Agapè also noticed this advantage. Groep Agapè is the collective name of three residential care centres in Belgium. Is there a technical fault in one of the residential care centres? Employees simply report it via Zenya. Once the report is made, the appropriate people at the technical department are notified. They then immediately know what needs to be done. This way, there is clear communication within the organisation when a report is made.
Mistakes are made in every organisation. Do you want to reduce the number of errors as much as possible? Then workflow management is ideal!
Indeed, workflow management for your DMS can greatly reduce errors. If a document needs to be reviewed, you obviously don’t want an employee to send the document to the wrong person. With certain documents, such as annual reports, it is also important that the report does not end up in the wrong hands or that it is published too early.
With workflow management, all documents are sent to the right people and documents are not published until all steps have been completed. Thanks to clear workflows, there is therefore less room for error.
All your vital documents are best captured in a solid DMS. Want to keep these documents easily up-to-date and make sure you share them with the right people? Then make use of these two workflows that are important for a DMS: version control and access management.
All documents go through a certain route before they are finally published. This route can be different for each document, but there are always authors who create the document and people who edit or approve the document.
It is also helpful if people can send comments about the content back to the author, who can then make adjustments to them.
All these changes create a new version of a document. Keeping track of these changes is what we call version control. Thanks to version control, you can always find the versions and you can even restore an old version.
In a DMS, it is important that the right people get access to the right documents. Gone are the days when everyone could access everything. The fewer people have access to information, the less chance there is of that information being breached, whether deliberately or not.
To arrange this, access management is necessary. With this, you determine who has access to which documents, but also, for example, whether someone can edit something or not. You can also revoke access rights when someone changes department or leaves employment.
While you can use separate workflow management software to handle version and access management, it is also possible to use Zenya, for example, where this is already built in. Zenya DOC is a smart software management system that allows you to secure the entire document management policy and process in your organisation. Zenya FLOW is ideally suited for workflow management. This combination offers flexible possibilities to set up your own forms and workflows to suit your organisation and processes.
The advantage of the total solution Zenya offers is that you manage both documents and workflows in one system, making it more efficient to keep track of. That way, you have everything organised in one place. This is clear for everyone in the organisation.
Anyone in our organisation can make a report very easily thanks to Zenya. We have created workflows for ICT reports, data breaches, incidents, repairs and ideas for improvement. Colleagues can even quickly take a picture via their phone, forward it, and done! Then the reports automatically reach the right people.”
Workflows are therefore important in your document management system and are often already part of the solution today. But workflows can also be desirable or necessary for other applications. Simply to comply with certain rules, or just to map and automate processes.
Do you have processes that could be organised more efficiently? Or are you curious about how workflows work in a DMS? Zenya makes it easy to create workflows within your DMS. It is the ideal software for efficiently managing and distributing documents from one place. Find out more about Zenya DOC and Zenya FLOW and how this software can speed up business processes within your organisation.
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