SMEs are businesses with limited resources, so they need to rely on technology to ensure their growth. Automating their management provides them with significant advantages, allowing them to match the behavior and capabilities of even larger companies in their sector.

In this article, you will learn about workflow automation, its importance, and the four most powerful platforms available on the market for automating your business workflows.

What is Workflow Automation?

A workflow is a sequence of activities or steps that must be completed to accomplish a specific task. These actions make up what is known as a process and require a combination of resources to carry them out.

Now, imagine a potential customer visiting your website, browsing through it, and becoming interested in a service. This service includes a form where the business gathers the necessary information to create a quote. When the potential customer finishes filling out the form, you not only receive an email with the information and contact details, but you also receive the prepared quote, and the system has already sent the quote to the customer.

What if the system is designed to detect whether the customer approved the project or not, and based on that, it sends follow-up emails? And if the project is accepted, the same system tracks the payment process. How much time would you and your staff save? Time that could be spent on activities that truly benefit the business.

This is process automation. Businesses have many processes, and nowadays there is technology that allows SMEs to save money by automating their processes.

Importance of Workflow Automation

Automating workflows provides significant advantages for your business, including:

• Reducing operational costs by ensuring greater efficiency in each activity, increasing the use of cost-effective and faster machine work over human work, resulting in more outcomes in less time.
• Enhancing the perception of internal and external clients by accelerating response times to any requests made.
• Significant time savings, which employees can then use for more relevant organizational functions.

Tools for Workflow Automation

Here is our selection of the most powerful tools you can use to automate your business workflows:

1. Zapier

This platform supports more than 3,000 applications that you can integrate for workflow automation. It is user-friendly and requires only three steps to create a process. It offers solutions for all areas of the business and doesn't require programming knowledge to achieve its purpose.

It has a free plan and multiple paid options ranging from approximately $20 to over $3,000 per month with annual billing.

2. Zoho Flow

This alternative is offered by Zoho software and allows you to choose from the 600 supported applications to perform integrations in a graphical environment using drag-and-drop.

For more complex solutions with advanced operations, you can use Zoho's own programming language. It facilitates collaborative work, as you can create flows as a team to better adapt to your company's needs.

It has a free plan and two paid plans that do not exceed $25 per month, offering both monthly and annual billing.

3. Zoho Creator

Another Zoho option that goes a step further by automating flows through the creation of customized applications for your business, with little to no coding required.

It features a visual environment that makes creating the solutions you need easier, including important tools like advanced forms that accept barcodes, detect locations, and more advantages.

These applications can be hosted on your servers, Zoho's servers, or any cloud service of your choice.

It uses the same programming language as Zoho Flow, Deluge, which requires short instructions to get the job done. It offers a free account for a single user and two paid plans ranging from $20 to $350 per month.

4. ProcessMaker

Provides the option to automate your processes and make them available both locally and in the cloud. It requires knowledge of business logic as well as BPMN methodology to model and launch processes.

It allows for connection between a wide range of applications so you can create your custom processes.

This tool has been awarded, but it's clearly aimed at high-income businesses, offering four plans ranging from $1,495 per month with annual billing.

In Conclusion

Workflow automation involves standardizing the organization's processes. With the help of IT solutions, you can achieve greater advantages for your business, such as saving money, time, and effort.

The four most powerful tools on the market to carry out this automation are:

Zapier

Zoho Flow

Zoho Creator

ProcessMaker

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