All businesses and organizations always deal with at least one workflow, and graphic design businesses are no exception. The more efficient a business can execute its workflow(s), the more effective and productive it will be as an organization. This is where workflow management comes in.

Workflow management is an effort to map, analyze, and optimize a workflow to be as efficient as possible. However, in graphic design businesses and creative businesses, a key challenge in implementing workflow management is finding the right balance between maintaining creativity and optimizing the workflow.

Workflow management, in essence, is about providing structure to a workflow to ensure efficiency. Still, it's also no secret that structure and rigidity may limit creativity, which is essential for a creative business like a graphic design agency.

In this guide, we will discuss how to effectively implement workflow management in graphic design, covering the following elements:

• What is workflow management?

• Unique challenges of workflow management implementation in graphic design

• Typical anatomy of a graphic design workflow

• Step-by-step guide on implementing workflow management in graphic design

Virtually all organizations involve at least one approval process in their day-to-day operations, from as 'simple' as submitting a daily report for review to presenting an annual strategy to be reviewed by the board of directors.

Yet, it's no secret that approval processes can be the bane of efficiency, full of delays, endless revision cycles, and even disputes.

Probably you've experienced the pain of submitting something for review, waiting for days until you've finally got feedback, only for the higher-ups or the clients to ask for another revision. Even worse, the inefficient time you've spent waiting for approval can often be as long or even longer than the time you've spent on the project.

The efficiency of the approval process will directly affect the organization's overall efficiency and productivity. Poor approval processes will damage the business's overall performance, so the organization will need more time and resources to achieve its objectives.

In this guide, we will learn all you need to know about creating an effective and efficient approval process, and by the end of this guide, you'd have learned about:

• What is a process? Process VS workflow

• What is an approval process?

• Key challenges to ensuring the efficiency of an approval process

• Best practices for approval process efficiency

• How you can streamline and optimize your approval workflows

In any organization with a marketing department, the marketing approval process is often one of the essential workflows and one of the most challenging to optimize.

The majority of marketers have admitted that approval delays are one of the top reasons they miss deadlines. So, whether an organization can streamline and optimize its marketing approval process will affect how efficiently the whole organization will perform.

On the other hand, many marketing leaders and marketing teams still rely on inefficient methods and techniques like emails, basic file-sharing systems (DropBox or Google Docs) that are not designed for approval workflows, and traditional project management systems, while in reality, today’s complex approval process demands more.

A centralized approach to managing marketing approval is crucial, and an organization will need the correct tools and strategies to streamline the whole approval process.

In this guide, we will show you the actionable steps for building and optimizing an efficient marketing approval workflow, and by the end of this guide, you’d have learned about:

• The concept of a marketing approval workflow

• Why it’s essential to have a streamlined and optimized workflow

• Common challenges in the marketing approval process and how to tackle them

• A step-by-step guide to building and optimizing an efficient marketing approval workflow

• Best practices to follow to ensure the efficiency of the approval workflow

Enterprise Workflow Management, also called Enterprise Work Management (EWM) or Enterprise Process Management (EPM), is essentially the application of business process management, or BPM, in an individual enterprise.

However, “enterprise workflow management” is also often used to refer to the enterprise work management software that enables us to implement workflow management on an enterprise scale.

So, what is Business Process Management?

BPM often called workflow management, is a discipline focused on identifying, modeling/mapping, analyzing, measuring, and optimizing workflows and especially process workflows (note: we’ll learn about the differences between “workflow” and “process” later on in this article). 

A workflow can be defined as a set of tasks that get executed sequentially to achieve a specific objective. Thus, an enterprise workflow will help the company achieve its business objective (or objectives). 

All organizations and every professional working in an organization always involve at least one workflow. A hotel receptionist, for example, has a workflow for facilitating guest check-ins. 

Some organizations can involve only one pretty straightforward workflow. However, an enterprise typically involves multiple workflows that are all interconnected in a complex manner, which is why enterprise workflow management (EWM) would require a unique, more thorough approach while considering the enterprise’s overall strategy and available resources. 

Due to the typically complex bureaucracy of an enterprise, EWM will also need to provide a governance model for the management, implementation, and evaluation of the workflow management initiatives.

All businesses and organizations have workflows. Even individual workers always involve at least one workflow in their day-to-day operations.

When these workflows get executed efficiently, your business is also efficient, and vice versa: inefficient workflows will result in missed deadlines, lost opportunities, and losses in revenue, profits, and even reputation. 

But what are workflows, and why is it important to document your workflow? More importantly, how can we optimize these workflows to be as efficient as possible? 

In this guide, we will discuss:

• What is a workflow

• Different types of workflow

• Why you should document your workflow

• How to document your workflow reliably and accurately

• How to analyze the established workflow

• How to optimize the workflow to make sure it’s as efficient as possible

And more!

We can’t deny that in today’s business environment, marketing is growing more complex than ever: marketing teams are getting bigger and must handle even more activities from email, social media, public relations, advertising, and more.

Yet, we can only expect marketing to grow even more complex and challenging in 2022 and in the years to come.

Ensuring your marketing team stays productive, organized, and effective can be very challenging. The key to success is to create a marketing workflow capable of handling the details of every campaign and marketing project.

In this ultimate guide to creating a marketing workflow, we’ll discuss all you need to know about creating an effective marketing workflow for your marketing team.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have learned about:

• What is a workflow?

• What is a marketing workflow?

• The benefits of having a comprehensive marketing workflow

• A step-by-step guide on creating an effective marketing workflow

• How to analyze and optimize your marketing workflow to improve its efficiency

And more!

Creating a business process map (a process we know as Business Process Mapping) can be an effective way to improve your organization’s overall efficiency.

All businesses deal with at least one business process or sometimes (inaccurately) called workflow. The more efficient an organization executes its business process, the more efficient its overall performance.

In practice, however, most businesses deal with multiple business processes intricately linked with one another. Ensuring they get executed as efficiently as possible can be challenging.

Not to mention, most teams consist of multiple people with different personalities and thoughts. So, getting the whole team to execute a business process in a consistent, most efficient way can be tricky.

This is where a business process map can help ensure the efficiency and consistency of your business processes.

In this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about business process mapping, including but not limited to:

• What are business process maps and business process mapping?

• The scope of business process mapping

• Benefits of a business process map

• The principles and framework to map out a business process

And more!

All businesses deal with at least one workflow, no matter big or small. Even a simple lemonade stand, for example, has the process of creating a lemonade from raw lemons as a workflow.

How efficiently businesses execute their workflow(s) will ultimately determine their productivity and efficiency. Still, it’s also crucial to understand that a company doesn’t simply run by executing workflows and accomplishing the objectives. Workflows can be linked to one another, and every employee could have challenges in their unique workflows.

This is where workflow optimization is needed. Without a comprehensive workflow optimization and workflow management strategy, your business will miss more deadlines, be more exposed to risks related to human errors. It will use more resources to achieve your goals.

In short, your business will not be efficient, and it will be much harder to grow and scale your business.

Have you ever wanted to optimize your business’s workflows and improve your efficiency, but don’t know where to begin?

You’ve come to the right place.

In this guide to workflow optimization, we’ll share all you need to know about workflow optimization and workflow strategies you can use to improve your business performance. By the end of this reading, you’d have learned about:

• What is workflow optimization?

• Workflow optimization as a part of workflow management

• A step-by-step guide to optimizing your workflow

• How to optimize document management workflow to ensure its efficiency

• Actionable strategies you can implement to improve your business performance.

And more!

Let us begin this guide by looking at what workflow optimization means.

Document management can be a major headache for any organization.

When your organization is relatively small, and you only handle a small number of documents per week, document management might not be an issue. However, as your organization grows and needs to store and manage hundreds if not thousands of documents per month, you’ll see how document management can be a constant uphill battle. 

Data is now considered the most valuable commodity. The amount of data (and documents) coming in and out of an organization has constantly increased over the years, so you’ll struggle to keep up with the pace without a proper document management plan in place. 

Thanks to technology, now we also have the option to implement automation to the document management workflow. However, there’s one crucial thing to uphold: 

Automation is only beneficial when the automated workflow is already efficient.

Or else, automation will only amplify its inefficiencies and bottlenecks. 

So, it’s crucial to have a proper document management strategy in the first place and to optimize the process and ensure it’s as efficient as possible. 

In this expert guide to document management and automation, we’ll discuss how to tackle this issue precisely. You’ll learn everything from start to finish about document management as a workflow, and by the end of this guide, we will inform you about:

• The definition of the term ‘document.’ 

• The concept of document management

• Different aspects of document management workflow

• How to optimize document management workflow to ensure its efficiency

• How to implement automation to a document management workflow

And more!

BUSINESS CHALLENGE:

As one of the world's largest retailers, with annual sales of more than $121.1 billion (2019). With nearly 2,800 stores in 35 states, under 22 banner brands. Kroger’s Promotional Execution Team set out a transformation objective to change the performance across all Advertising and Display operations that orchestrate 600+ promotional content versions per week across Kroger’s 22 brands. With 2000+ employees in the end-to-end operating model, this presented a significant, enterprise-scale transformation program challenge.