What is workflow management?

Detroit, Michigan, was bitterly cold in January 1914. Nonetheless thousands of men queued to accept an extraordinary offer: $5 a day, for eight hours work. The offer of double wages for one hour’s less work, was a defining moment in 20th century manufacturing, and a win for workflow management. The moving assembly line didn’t just usher in the age of the car, it changed work forever.

The theory goes that every time you run the same workflow, the same result is produced. That's because workflows are designed to make the completion of routine and repetitive work more consistent, efficient and fast.

Notably, one-off projects don’t have a workflow: repeatable projects do. Therefore optimizing workflows requires a high level of organization.

To aid the organization of their production, Ford consulted Frederick Taylor (see below and sidebar), to examine the most efficient models to use. Four principles were employed to improve the workflow: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort.

After time and motion studies, reorganizing resources and adding mechanisations (ie. the moving assembly line), the results were revolutionary. Ford's Model T output went from 100 cars per day to an astonishing 1,000 a day – not that far off today’s modern factories.

But how did Ford’s pioneering work on workflow influence today’s SaaS applications?

What is workflow management?

Workflow management is an organized and methodical approach to creating, documenting, monitoring and improving a workflow – to help you optimize its outputs.

A workflow management system (WFMS) is a software package that’s designed and used to setup, manage and execute workflows within an organization. It’s a business process management technique that incorporates programs and people into a process framework.

WFMSs help businesses improve their efficiency and reduce operational costs. Generally, the systems optimize:

• Workflow
• Processes
• Automations

The key aim of a WFMS is to reduce the amount of unnecessary work and manual effort that's needed to be done. The benefits of workflow management are many:

• Workload reduction
• Better return on investment (ROI) of time, effort and tools
• Improves effectiveness and efficiency
• The business data generated, informs better decision making
• Increases employee empowerment
• Reduces dull, repetitive tasks
• Standardizes workflows
• Improves auditing capabilities
• Facilitates better time management.
• Aids integrations with existing tools

Workflow birth

The concept of workflow and its management can be traced back to two mechanical engineer pioneers, Frederick Taylor and Henry Gantt. They analyzed, organized and tracked work to improve its efficiency, and graphically depicted the subsequent workflows.

Frederick Taylor led the development of an entirely new discipline – industrial engineering or scientific management. From the 1880s onwards he found various ways to eliminate redundant processes and make both employees and mechanisations more efficient. Using his ‘scientific’ approach, the managerial functions of planning and coordination were applied – he added a hierarchy of managers between workers and owners – throughout the production process.

In an eerie echo of today’s digital transformation efforts to improve workflow, Taylor believed that a factory manager’s primary goals “... were to determine the best way for the worker to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to provide incentives for good performance.”

Around 1912, Henry Gantt created the Gantt Chart – the methodology and work management tool that still remains in use. The Gantt Chart is a graphical representation of the tasks and work processes needed to plan and manage milestones in any project.

Taylor and Gantt’s combined efforts advanced workflow management to the point where many late Victorian and pre WWI-era infrastructure projects were no longer done on an ad-hoc basis. Instead, they were accurately planned and managed with work, costs and resources apportioned against each project milestone.

Workflow growth

Following the application of Taylor and Gantt’s Scientific Management methodologies, the Ford Company continued to trial and succeed in his workflow management practices. From that era, one of the best known examples of an optimized workflow is their 1913 introduction of the assembly line for the production of Ford Model T cars.

This marked the beginning of large-scale workflow organization and management.

The assembly line had been specifically designed for the sequential organization of workers, tools or machines, and parts. Prior to this, people built cars unit-by-unit rather than part-by-part, which took longer, and cost more. By creating a linear process of work, Ford sped up the process of mass-production and transformed the practice of manual labor.

The next major step in workflow management occurred during World War II, when there was a high demand for efficient, organized work methods. Draft registration cards, file systems and classifications of all sorts were required to organize the logistics of people movement, equipment, records and paperwork.

Workflow maturation

With the advent of computer software in the 70s, workflow (at the time) was just a small feature within an enterprise suite and in many cases, didn’t even have a name. It usually just consisted of a process map or flowchart, without any other functionality.

In the early 80s and 90s, companies saw the potential benefits of defining and refining their internal workflows. It also became apparent that product-oriented processes designed for efficiently making cars, weren’t that efficient (or people-centric) in an office or home. Movements like Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma (6σ) soon emerged, to address problems in traditional workflows.

In the late 90s this gave rise to a range of enterprise software like ERP, DMS and CRM.

Eventually an entire methodology and software industry emerged (2005), that was dedicated to workflow and business process management (BPM) – where planning was linked with execution. Features and modeling tools helped companies analyze and contrast ‘as-is’ processes in an organization with ‘to-be’ processes, in an effort to make them more efficient.

What is automation?

According to Britannica, “In its ideal form, automation implies the elimination of all manual labor through the use of automatic controls that ensure accuracy and quality.”

The term was (not-so-coincidentally) coined by the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s, and was applied to the automatic handling of parts in metalworking processes. A broader meaning emerged after American mathematician Norbert Wiener developed the theory of cybernetics. He anticipated the application of computers to manufacturing situations, which further broadened its meaning to what we know it as today.

Early office automation began with the introduction of mechanizations – typewriters and adding machines – during the 19th century. As offices grew in size and number, they faced the challenge of managing, maintaining, and scaling workflows. Computerisation resolved the issue, aided by specific workflow and automation software that has helped to provide a competitive advantage.

What is workflow automation?

Workflow automation (and task-specific automation software) allows you to set up certain processes within your workflow, to happen automatically. It’s especially useful for repetitive tasks and generally uses project-specific workflows as the basis for the automated operation.

Automations augment manual workloads, reduce human error, and remove time-consuming tasks that don’t require human intervention. The removal of those tasks lets you better use the ‘gained’ time, to solve more challenging issues and help drive revenue.

Automations can also help your workflows run smoother, by acting as an IT bridging tool. This means the automation software can join together processes that run across different tools and departments. Currently, the term ‘workflow automation’ is used to denote modern, low-code tools that allow anyone to streamline their digital tasks.