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What is a Workflow Engine? + 5 Open Source Tools

Workflow engines are used to simplify, expedite, and optimize all sorts of internal tasks and processes. By codifying and digitalizing business logic, an effective workflow engine enables us to achieve a high degree of efficiency, repeatability, accuracy, and productivity within daily operations. They’re also a powerful basis for business process automation, integration, real-time analytics, and other digital transformation efforts across your business. Today, we’re exploring everything you need to know.

Ronan McQuillan

May 1, 2024

What are Approval Workflows & How do You Build Them?

Approval workflows are some of the most pervasive admin tasks in almost every business. They’re also one of the types of tasks where it’s easiest to eliminate manual interactions - and free up team members to work on bigger and better things. At least, they are in theory. In practice, approvals are one of the biggest time sinks around. You can probably think of a time when a project hit a roadblock because you couldn’t get someone to sign it off.

Ronan McQuillan

Sep 5, 2023

What is a Workflow Application?

A workflow application is a piece of software that’s dedicated to making a particular task - or related group of tasks - faster, easier, and more efficient. See, most day-to-day internal tasks are actually pretty repetitive. Many are downright menial. Today, we’re checking out one of the most effective strategies for managing this fact. Workflow applications provide a simple, flexible way to address this - through automation, process improvement, and a host of other interventions.

Ronan McQuillan

Aug 29, 2023

What is Workflow Integration?

Workflow integration is at the center of how modern businesses operate. Indeed, achieving efficient, secure, and performant internal ops is all but impossible without fairly extensive integration. Today, we’re exploring the practical side of this. Specifically, we’re diving deep into everything you need to know about integrating workflows. We’ll start with the basic principles and core business benefits of integration - alongside some of the common challenges. Then, we’ll move on to some concrete examples and the strategies you can implement to create seamless workflows for your team.

Ronan McQuillan

Jul 28, 2023

Integration for Digital Transformation | 6 Methods

Integration is one of the central building blocks of digital transformation. In fact, it’s very rare that we’ll encounter transformation solutions that don’t rely heavily on integration. See, many transformation projects aim to get the most out of existing assets - whether these are internal tools, data sets, or SaaS platforms. Specifically, we can achieve huge efficiency improvements by simply getting these working together more effectively. Of course, custom solutions play an important role too.

Ronan McQuillan

Jul 14, 2023

What are Information Management Workflows

Information management workflows are some of the most basic tasks that you’ll find in almost every business. Basically, any cognate task is going to include some element of information management. That is, we’ll almost inevitably need to gather, store, transform, or communicate information - regardless of what this actually represents. This could be invoice data, customer requirements, minutes from a board meeting, marketing content, or anything else. The point for today isn’t the information itself, but how we handle it internally.

Ronan McQuillan

Jul 7, 2023

Onboarding Automation | Practical Guide

Onboarding automation is a huge opportunity - not only to eke out efficiency savings - but also to improve your internal culture, employee satisfaction, and even your staff retention rates. Besides - onboarding employees is one of the most varied processes in any business. On the one hand, we’re dealing with a lot of paperwork and admin. On the other, we have more practical tasks, like getting them set up with the right equipment.

Ronan McQuillan

Jun 30, 2023

Project Management Automation | Ultimate Guide

Project management automation is - without a doubt - one of the most productive transformations any business can apply. All too often, though, it ends up as a bit of an afterthought. The thing is, project managers are highly skilled - and therefore highly paid professionals. Despite this, they probably spend more time on repetitive admin tasks than just about anyone else in your company. In other words, it’s basically the ideal candidate for automation.

Ronan McQuillan

Jun 30, 2023