Document Workflow Automation Tools in 2023 | Soluntech
One of the key challenges facing a small or midsize business (SMB) is document workflow management—the practice of controlling and streamlining information across all departments. Inefficiency costs time and money, and businesses willing to make technical upgrades will have a competitive advantage.
Managing documents better, through workflow automation tools, is essential to improving your SMB’s operations and logistics—both for internal-use desktop applications and your digital products and services—because so much of your business happens in documents.
In fact, most SMBs agree that embracing automation is essential to their survival.
Enter intelligent automation. Intelligent automation (IA) is the rise of next-gen technologies involving artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to prioritize and sort digital workloads. These “bots” exist only in software on computers or cloud servers.
Intelligent Automation Is Impacting Document Management
In recent years the intelligent automation trend has converged on the SMB document management space to yield powerful new document workflow automation tools to help SMBs flourish and compete with larger, better-established rivals.
Due to continuous technological improvements and the massive shock to our economy from the pandemic, IA is set to continue heating up for the foreseeable future.
At Soluntech, we strongly believe in the potential for intelligent process and document workflow automation to lift up businesses and make them more streamlined and competitive. As SMB software development consultants, we partner with our clients to offer critical services which connect SMBs with these emerging technologies. (See our Case Studies!)
Here are three exciting workflow automation trends for SMBs to look out for in 2023 and beyond.
1. Tracking & Reporting
How much of your company’s document workflow is tied up in tracking and reporting? Manual tracking is usually the greatest bottleneck—and the cause of the most errors—in a workflow system.
Businesses with a strong situational awareness of their operations, logistics, and development processes are quicker to identify problems and enact solutions.
It’s immensely valuable for a company to know things like how employees spend their time, where projects stall in the development pipeline, and which tasks have fallen behind schedule. But asking employees to manually enter this information can further slow things down.
Successful businesses input operational data into automated reporting software. Without strong tracking and reporting document workflow automation tools, you have no way of precisely knowing where your business is at or how it is performing. But in the past, this work has been messy, time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive—and employees often resent it as “bureaucratic.”
Intelligent Automation Will Revolutionize Tracking & Reporting
A major trend of the 21st century has been to extend automated precision into the realm of business operations. How employees spend their workdays is just as important for you to know as the dollar value of a sales contract—not because employees may be doing something wrong per se, but because your operational processes may not be optimal or may not be aligned with strategic goals.
Strong tracking and reporting draw out these kinds of insights. Some of the most valuable document workflow automation tools in recent years have been dedicated to this objective.
Intelligent tracking and reporting technology is still emerging, but it is a major intelligent automation trend that will continue to improve and gain importance in business operations this decade.
Where can your business streamline its tracking and reporting?
2. Low-Code & No-Code Development
Development is no longer just for the coders. Low-code and no-code software platforms empower SMBs to develop and deploy digital services and applications, as well as manage their document workflow processes, with a much lower IT headcount than traditionally required.
The fact is, IT workers are expensive and in short supply. Many software functions are similar from a programming standpoint and do not need to be created from scratch for every application. Winning companies use software that writes itself.
Basically, this intelligent automation trend lets you create apps even if you don’t know how to program. Low/no-code platforms save money by streamlining processes and reducing your need for skilled labor, but they also provide another key benefit: They put development more directly in the hands of project managers, creatives, and leadership.
Whether you’re developing products and services or internal applications, low/no-code platforms can be great product development cost optimizers and powerful document workflow automation tools.
That last point is important: Low/no-code is often discussed in terms of product development, but it can really help your business with internal operations and logistics, leading to better performance through better document workflow control.
Low-code and no-code automation tools have been coming online in recent years and will continue to improve in functionality, responsiveness, and utility as businesses increasingly digitize.
Coding solutions at a fraction of the cost.
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3. Generative AI, Collaborative Bots, & NLP Tech
We’ve emphasized better tracking and reporting of your business operations through intelligent automation. But what about an intelligent automation trend for business operations themselves?
Wherever your operations involve a digital document workflow, you can potentially hand some of that work off directly to AI and collaborative bots.
Business leaders know the value of having another pair of eyes on challenging tasks. We’ve moved beyond spell-checking software and simple data validation in spreadsheets. It’s increasingly possible to collaborate with and delegate tasks to AI “colleagues.”
Artificial intelligence is already widely used to help with analytics, but the rise of generative AI—which allows AI to study existing things, such as a document workflow management process, and then generate its own—is creating a whole new dimension of workflow automation possibilities.
Add to the mix the rise of collaborative robots (or just “bots”), who can handle some of the busy work in larger workflows, integrating efficiently with human employees to streamline tasks and expedite milestones.
These virtual resources don’t just offer useful outputs such as AI-optimized document workflow automation tools. With technologies like natural language processing (NLP) becoming more effective by the year, AIs and bots are able to accept a larger and larger variety of inputs as well.
How can your business benefit from collaborative AI?
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Help Your Business Thrive with Soluntech
These three document workflow automation tools stand poised to help SMBs become more competitive in the coming years—especially those who adopt early. However, more than any single intelligent automation trend, you have to keep your eyes open about how IA tech is evolving and what is becoming possible. At Soluntech, we’re on it.
Learn about our pricing to see how we operate with transparency and set expectations that lead our clients to greater success. Already know what automation tools you want? Get a project quote with Soluntech, or contact us to get the ball rolling. Let’s work together to envision the future of your business.