The four most common workflow automation use cases

This year alone we’ve helped countless businesses with workflow automation use cases – sourcing the right solution and building their workflows. In this blog we’ve summarised four of the most common examples we’ve delivered in recent months.

Business growth is hindered by manual processes or outdated, inefficient scripts. They are time intensive, costly and more susceptible to human error. Ultimately these processes generate little job satisfaction and employees’ time could be much better spent on tasks that add more value to their customers or service users.

Sophisticated automated file transfer is far more efficient in comparison. The quicker response times can give organisations the competitive edge, reducing costs and increasing margins.

Most common workflow automation use cases

We asked the Pro2col technical team to tell us the most common automation use cases they see, working with organisations from all industry sectors.

1. Securely pushing and pulling files to and from S3 and blob storage.

We’ve recently set this up for a customer for long-term archiving of financial data, and for a healthcare organisations for simple retrieval of patient data held across multiple disparate systems. This functionality is either enabled via an additional cloud connector module, or through capabilities native to your file transfer solution.

2. Collecting files from a defined location, extracting data from Excel and inputting it into a database.

We set this up for an insurance broker recently, who wanted to automate policy updates between their customer and the insurer. This is delivered using advanced workflow capabilities with conditional logic.

3. Extracting files and converting them into different data formats.

This is another common insurance use case. The workflow would pull customer information from a CRM system (eg: Salesforce) into a JSON file, move it to a secure folder location, convert it to a CSV file then email it to a specific person or department. When someone makes an insurance claim, this process is executed to provide the claims handler with the complete customer record. This is delivered using a Salesforce cloud connector, a secure folder module, folder monitoring and advanced workflow capabilities.

4. Integration with cloud-based applications (eg: ServiceNow, Jenkins).

We’ve recently worked with a help desk to replace an outdated script with seamless integration with ServiceNow via a cloud connector. ServiceNow is a ticketing / job management tool. When an email request is submitted to a defined inbox, the automated workflow executes. It collects the email, converts the content into a ServiceNow ticket and sends an automated email back to the sender with a ticket number.

As you’ll see from these examples, automation can take different forms: System-to-system automation, triggering regular batch transfers and onward data gathering processes; person-to-system automation, such as web form data capture or order management with automate onward processes; and system-to-person automation which can manage the secure distribution of data. Whichever use case fits your business, we guarantee you will soon reap the benefits.

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Benefits automation

Security: Workflow automation will encrypt and transfer data between systems and endpoints, eliminating the need for manual processing, scripts and multiple FTP servers.
Save time: Time-intensive manual processes and managing multiple outdated scripts both take up a lot of time. Automation allows businesses to re-invest team resources in order to focus on higher priority responsibilities.
Cost savings: As well as saved staff time, automation helps prevent financial penalties associated with SLAs and data protection regulation violations.
Visibility: Workflow automation is managed through a centralised platform, giving full control and operational visibility of all data transfer activity. This level of reporting is invaluable for compliance with regulations like the GDPR.
Ease of use: Most automation solutions have an easy-to-use tool to build and schedule workflows. For example, monitoring folders to execute workflows when new or changed files appear. A scheduler allows you to set specific times to execute workflows, such as night time to minimise load on the server, or delay sending if users are on leave or absent.
Scalability: This technology is scalable, meaning you can add additional modules or workflows as your business requirements grow. This future-proofs your solution.
Accuracy: Maintaining multiple scripts written by different employees in different scripting languages introduces complexity and reduces your ability to scale file transfer activities. Automated file transfer solutions helps take the ‘human error’ out of this process.

We are currently offering up to a 10% discount on modules that address these or other automation use cases. Please get in touch to discuss your particular use case. Alternatively if you need help building your workflows, download our template. Our expert engineers have put this together to help you organise your file transfer automation workflows and file recipients before building or moving legacy workflows across.