Enterprise work has become much more complicated, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic that forced many workers to stay home. This dispersed workforce makes it even harder to manage workloads and collaborate on tasks.
Businesses need to be faster and more agile in executing highly complex tasks, but at the same time, teams are more siloed while working in disconnected and disjointed platforms.
As a result of this phenomenon, it can be very challenging for managers and executives even to monitor basic enterprise activities like tracking employees’ progress on their tasks. Different departments might use other tools with data scattered in various storage solutions and cloud platforms.
All of these contribute to increasing the complexity of the work management process, where Enterprise Work Management (EWM) comes in.
Enterprise Work Management is made possible with the help of software like Aproove. An EWM software offers a bird’s-eye view of the entire work process, from planning to execution to monitoring. It provides a centralized place to collaborate instead of dealing with various disconnected tools and platforms.
This guide will discuss the concept of Enterprise Work Management and how we can use EWM to improve your enterprise’s efficiency and productivity.
Enterprise Work Management: The Concept
Enterprise work management is, in a nutshell, a systematic method of managing, monitoring, and optimizing all work in the enterprise.
On the other hand, we can divide enterprise work into several different layers:
- Tasks: the smallest unit of work, a repeatable job with a certain objective that is often performed as a routine
- Business process: or ‘workflow’, a collection of tasks (can be sequential or non-sequential) to achieve a specific objective
- Project: a collection of interrelated tasks and processes to achieve a collective goal
It is important to note that Enterprise Work Management is not project management even though they are related. EWM covers a more extensive scope than project management.
EWM helps the whole department and team in identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks. By eliminating these inefficiencies, the enterprise can improve its productivity in achieving organizational goals.
On an individual level, Enterprise Work Management will also free workers from time-consuming administrative tasks to focus on their core competencies to contribute more to achieving the enterprise’s goals.
When appropriately implemented, EWM can help improve the enterprise’s efficiency and productivity by:
- Eliminating the need for manual reporting, for example, by using spreadsheets and manual word documents
- Providing a centralized communication hub, allowing us to eliminate email-based communications that are often inefficient
- Automating notifications to ensure everyone is onboard
- Reducing the need for time-consuming status meetings
- Preventing employees from deviating from their core competencies by reducing the need to perform administrative tasks
- Using an all-in-one EWM software solution and eliminate the need of using too many tools that are disconnected from each other
- Having a standardized set of workflows from start to finish
As a result, Enterprise Work Management can help companies provide structure, avoid missed deadlines, and prevent unnecessary usage of resources. Projects can stay within deadline and budget, and we can also keep employees’ morale high by enabling more transparency and accountability throughout the whole work process.
Four Elements of Enterprise Work Management
While the actual implementation of Enterprise Work Management may vary depending on the enterprise itself, the business processes, and other factors, there are always four key elements to consider in implementing EWM:
1.Standardization of workflows
A critical element of implementing Enterprise Work Management is standardizing workflows, which significantly improves efficiency and productivity.
It’s especially crucial to optimize processes performed as a routine like reimbursement forms, approval processes, and others.
The Enterprise Workflow Management software like Aproove will allow businesses to visualize the workflow in a diagram and capture the process as a template. This way, we can ensure standardization by providing accessible, standardized workflow diagrams for everyone in the team.
By standardizing processes, we can also enable workers to be more efficient and make fewer mistakes executing processes.
2.Unifying tools and solutions
A big part of Enterprise Work Management is eliminating as many unnecessary tools as possible and avoiding siloed, disconnected tools.
This is typically achieved by using a centralized EWM software like Aproove while also implementing integration and automation to other tools in the system. The objective is to ensure a streamlined information flow that is easy to monitor and manage from start to finish.
3.Centralized collaboration hub
Another key element of EWM is to enable a centralized hub to manage the entire lifecycle of enterprise work while facilitating collaboration from initial planning to execution to evaluation.
Again, it’s common for today’s enterprises to use more than ten software solutions and tools to perform their work, so workers often need to jump back and forth between different tools multiple times every day.
This will often produce unnecessary distractions, which will translate into lower productivity.
With an EWM software solution in place, businesses can establish a centralized hub for all employees and stakeholders from the beginning to the end of the work’s lifecycle.
4.Improving transparency and accountability
Real-time, centralized collaboration will ultimately translate to productivity.
The EWM solution can encourage transparent, visible, and straightforward collaborations where all parties involved are accountable since everything is traceable. Everyone can easily track who’s doing what.
An important consideration for any successful implementation of Enterprise Work Management is to ensure all work communication occurs in a documentable form visible to all stakeholders.
Conclusion
Enterprise Work Management (EWM) ultimately enables more efficient and productive work processes from start to finish.
While technology solutions like Approve are essential in implementing Enterprise Work Management, technology alone is not enough. Clear EWM policies and educating all stakeholders on implementing and monitoring Enterprise Work Management are crucial if you want to get all the benefits of implementing EWM in your organization.
Proper implementation of EWM can help improve efficiency and productivity in executing work processes.
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