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Workflow automation examples

Surveys of employees and executives have shown that the automation of digital workflows yields benefits for both. Employees can offload cumbersome processes and focus on higher-level responsibilities. Through workflow automation, executives gain visibility into smoother processes, improving short- and long-term planning and speeding the roll-out of new initiatives.

Here are some examples of how workflow automation changes how work gets done.

Problem: A swiss reinsurance firm with 15,000 employees, Swiss Re accumulated a variety of in-house and off-the-shelf apps, like most companies, each to address specific issues. But the resulting tangle of isolated solutions made it difficult to establish consistent processes company-wide or obtain visibility into the breadth of the IT operation.

Solution: Swiss Re replaced nearly two dozen disparate IT service management solutions with a set of workflow automation tools from ServiceNow. The tools allowed managers to manage complex IT processes through a consumer-like user app experience. Knowledge base articles with solutions to common problems now linked more directly to service requests, enabling more self-service fulfillment of common requests like password resets and equipment requisitions.

Payoff: Employees now navigate through common IT issues more quickly, freeing them to focus on other tasks. IT leaders gained clearer insights into developing problems; the standardization of service processes also allowed Swiss Re to create and measure more useful service level agreements.

Read the Swiss Re Case Study.

Problem: Gemalto, a cybersecurity firm based in France, needed to rethink its customer service management platform following a merger. Customers were complaining about a poor user experience that deterred self-service solutions. IT personnel were frustrated by isolated service functions, a lack of visibility into customer service agreements, and legacy systems that required specialized web developers to make changes.

Solution: Gemalto decided that a cloud-based SaaS approach best fit their needs. The company migrated those functions to a new CSM platform from ServiceNow that automated key workflows. Within 10 months, Gemalto launched a customer service portal that improved user experience, met needs for scalability, and blended smoothly with in-house applications.

Payoff: The new system solved Gemalto’s CSM issues, accelerated the pace of communication with their most engaged customers, and made potential process defects more visible. The effort also led to the creation of a standardized service model for more than 66,000 products, streamlining the customer support experience for everyone.

Read the Gemalto Case Study.

Problem: Cars.com incubated a process for bringing in new employees that was high-touch but slow moving—and riddled with frustrating pain points for both employees and HR managers.

Solution: Cars.com created a new employee onboarding app that is integrated with OpenHire, a workflow automation platform for HR. The platform helped all stakeholders in the onboarding process. Payroll, IT, facilities, security, and other functions were able to automate common processes in ways that were consistent and repeatable across the company.

Payoff: Cars.com saved HR managers 300 hours per year to devote to other activities. IT saved more than 1,000 hours by streamlining their most repetitive onboarding tasks. Today, 90% of new employees at Cars.com complete all onboarding steps before they leave the office at the end of their first day.

What is workflow automation?

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