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Read moreJillian McGillivray, Global Director of Digital Collaboration
The processes and protocols established in your business map out its routes to success. They provide a scaffold for growth by helping your teams operate in an aligned, compliant and efficient manner. At least, that’s what they should be doing. But many organizations continue to struggle with time-consuming or labor-intensive workflows.
In 2023, our survey of 200 interdisciplinary senior figures found that while 86% were confident that their business had the right organizational structures and processes to potentially achieve their goals, only 53% felt that these were being used to a ‘quite effective’ or better level.
This discrepancy highlights major opportunities for businesses to improve and streamline workflows in a way that maximizes marketing productivity, employee impact and revenue growth. And at an operational level, better workflows empower talented teams to deliver on personalization-enabling Content Supply Chain strategies. In this article, I’ll cover four scalable workflow automation opportunities, and how they boost Content Supply Chain outcomes.
Some of you may be asking, “why are we bringing Content Supply Chain into a conversation on workflow automation?”
The reason being, workflow automation isn’t our headline outcome. Workflow automation is just one of the techniques we’re using to enhance our Content Supply Chain delivery. The ultimate value lies in the way we’re speaking to and serving customers, improving their experiences and nurturing their journeys. Getting workflow automation right puts time back into your team so you can focus on revenue-driving Content Supply Chain projects like Personalized Journey Management or Product Development.
In a challenging landscape, growth targets remain ambitious. With this comes the need to scale operations, and to do so efficiently.
In the past, this has simply required more personnel and more ‘hands on deck.’ Today, you can better leverage automations within your existing tech stack to support scaling and optimization across product, sales, marketing and delivery.
The knock-on effects for the Content Supply Chain are clear. Empowering teams to ideate, create and iterate communications rapidly is a fundamental element of Content Supply Chain success. When the processes for content creation and management are clearly signposted and built into automated workflows, team members can focus on using their specialist skillsets to deliver (think creative design, copywriting, SEO) rather than dedicating their time to the manual movement of tasks and projects.
In this area, I’d look to Work Management solutions like Adobe Workfront and monday.com. These advanced platforms keep projects moving, automating task handover and repeat processes like approvals to streamline content production.
But we must spare a moment here to mention integrations. This can only work when your Work Management platform is integrated with your wider digital ecosystem – your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) for delivery, your Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform for maintaining content and campaigns. It’s all part of a holistic infrastructure which makes up your Content Supply Chain – and sometimes seeing that bigger picture is where it helps to have an expert partner!
Workflow automation and optimization is your route to doing more with less, to the benefit of your Content Supply Chain. You’ll know that time and team capacity are key resources. Your Work Management platform acts as an always-on project manager, moving tasks forward and minimizing manual input to free up your team.
For example, newly created assets move straight into an approval flow which notifies key reviewers and passes their feedback straight to the creative team. It’s a future with less reliance on email and Slack discourse, helping to maintain focus and keep projects moving.
And with smart integrations, you’ll not only be creating faster but creating more of what you really need. Bringing your Digital Asset Management platform into this environment means your team is empowered to access, reuse and repurpose approved content rather than recreating similar assets repeatedly. It cuts down on wastage and puts time back into the team.
Let’s be honest, nobody likes being a bottleneck on a project. But, it happens!
Platforms like Adobe Workfront and monday.com provide clear controls and accountability for project execution. They automate key moments in the campaign process, and facilitate cross-team collaboration to reduce human delays or bottlenecks.
Beyond automation, they provide great functionality for resource management. Overwork can be a source of individual bottlenecks. Your Work Management platform not only provides an insight into project progress on a general level, but gives you a way to check on the tasks and workload of each team member. You can see where individual experts are too heavily relied upon, and forecast where capacity might be coming up in the team.
Put it this way: when integrated correctly, your Work Management platform is a periscope into all the projects your team is working on. Connect to analytics platforms for real time insights and proactive adjustments, putting the magnifying glass on challenging projects to keep operations smooth and the Content Supply Chain flowing.
Collaboration and Alignment; these are the cultural pillars that tie all of this together.
Work Management supports better alignment. Not just the foundational alignment between marketing and sales, but between operational teams and business leadership, between marketing and legal teams, and between your digital platforms, daily activities and business goals.
Automating workflows across your tech stack fundamentally drives collaboration and decision-making throughout your business – essential where workflows touch multiple departments, are complex, or support hybrid work environments. By seamlessly channeling requests, execution and approvals through your teams – with a user experience tailored to an individual’s needs – effort and errors are reduced, duplication removed, and time saved.
Equally, you want to engage with your team where they’re already doing their work. Conversations in Slack or Microsoft Teams can kick off projects right there and then – no need to wait for a formal project meeting. By integrating your Work Management platform with these spaces, informal ideation messages can quickly generate an automated flow for creating new assets and bringing those flashes of inspiration to life.
This is program initiation, and you could apply it to all sorts of routine tasks like creating a new lead in Salesforce from a Teams mention, or kickstarting a new project in Jira by turning a discussion into a project ticket. The possibilities are endless – and the advantages all add up.
There’s a lot going on here. I’ve mentioned a number of platforms, and a series of automation or workflow opportunities. The trick isn’t to try to adopt all of them – it’s to embrace the concept and culture of workflow optimization to get your unique teams doing more with less.
Ultimately, workflow automation represents an enormous opportunity for businesses with ambitious growth goals, and this article can only serve as a whistlestop tour into the topic. But for those wanting to get serious about workflow, I’d urge you to get in touch for your free consultation with Bluprintx.
With over 150+ Workfront projects and 50+ monday.com ventures married to our specific integration expertise, you can tap into certified Bluprintx experts ready to build around your business. Let’s talk!
