SharePoint has become a juggernaut platform allowing businesses of all sizes to collaborate on knowledge, content, and documents amongst geographically disperse teams. As SharePoint has matured over the past decade, enterprise-class features have been added to address many needs of companies looking for a flexible solution to capture corporate knowledge.  One area that is quickly growing and providing immediate return on investment is the automation of workflows.

Workflows in SharePoint can accomplish many things.  Whether it’s supporting a less-paper initiative with electronic forms and document storage, or improving the visibility into established business processes such as requests for expenditures, SharePoint should be considered as an important tool to achieve corporate goals.

Critical Success Factors

A successful SharePoint workflow project begins with a clear understanding of the final solution.  This entails clearly defining a functional specification, what the solution will and won’t do, how it fits into your governance plan, to whom the solution is targeted, and how it solves the stated business need.  Obviously, executive support and sponsorship is paramount.  An ounce of planning effort spent will save a pound of implementation and testing!

Benefits

Leveraging workflows in SharePoint can provide five key benefits:

1. Control
2. Accountability
3. Efficiency
4. Insight
5. Ease of use

Control

Having control of information and the flow of information within the organization should support an organization’s principles.  Whether it’s capturing historical information or complying with regulatory mandates, controlling information is critical to modern businesses.

Accountability

Tracking the status of an action item, process step, or key document allows accountability of people and processes.  Workflows support and enable integrity of work for the organization.

Efficiency

Arguably the benefit with the most positive impact to profitability for an organization is the realization of efficiency improvements.  Automating workflows can reduce effort and time spent by employees performing workflow steps manually, enabling them to be more productive.

Insight

One benefit that many organizations may not immediately consider is the enhanced insight into a business process workflow. Knowing at which stage a particular process is or where the next step needs to be taken can help identify bottlenecks and reduce delays. This allows deeper insight into the business by key decision makers and provides important data needed to help steer the business.

Ease of Use

A critical factor to success will be making the solution easy to use for your audience.  A difficult to use form, or one that allows incorrect data to be entered, will lead to a quick abandonment of the solution by the users.  The solution should be intuitive to use and not require a large training effort.

Ultimately, every organization has internal processes that are used for delivering products or services to their clients.  Using SharePoint to make these processes easier to use, easier to control, and more efficient, while providing better insight, and accountability can help you gain the competitive edge.

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