Whenever a manual, repetitive process gets the all-star treatment – streamlined, optimized, and updated into an automated workflow process – the company benefits not just from new efficiencies but also from new kinds of data that suddenly become available. This data is gathered from two places: from within the workflow itself and from the meta-data that is tied to the workflow. Both are critical to your business intelligence. 

There are three key ways you can begin leveraging workflow analytics today to streamline collaboration to elevate your results — but first, a little insight into how workflow automation pulls in-process analytics in the first place. 

First and foremost, it’s important to consider whether your workflow automation platform is truly no-code. The best workflow platforms do not require coding to deliver high-quality business intelligence to your department, but rather empower users at every level of the business to drag and drop tools, visualize any process, and track and report on results. 

Here are three ways you can begin leveraging workflow analytics today:

1. Use data visualizations to track and prove your success

With a robust reporting tool in your workflow platform, you can connect and analyze workflow data, visualize data and workflow performance through interactive dashboards, and gain near real-time insights into business operations. Easily create and customize pie charts, bar graphs, and other clickable visuals to see what is working (and what could be improved) and share this effectively with key stakeholders. Accessible data makes it easier to prove ROI and the value of your workflow automation platform. Instead of sending your stakeholders a data-laden excel sheet, include straightforward and actionable workflow graphs in presentations to teammates and leadership to drive adoption and excitement.

2. Eliminate bottlenecks

Workflow analytics give you a birds-eye view into your processes, so you can see what kinds of requests zip through and which pile up – and where. If there is a certain location in the workflow that takes a few days more on average than you would expect, you can drill into the details: is it a triage step with not enough hands on deck? If so, could you automate the triage? Or is there a way to remove the language that causes a clause to stick in the redlining process that your legal team can help smooth out? This type of insight helps drive better decisions surrounding workload distribution, staffing needs, unnecessary steps, and more.

3. Find and monitor new trends

Sometimes, the best information comes from the data you’re not looking for, , but discover when your data is visualized. With visual charts and figures that identify how long each process takes, and, with a click, drill into each step of the process, stakeholders easily spot trends and opportunities for improvement. For example, you might not realize that over 6 weeks, review time has increased by 30% on your NDA workflow — but from a visual dashboard, a graph makes it easy to spot a growing cycle time, allowing you to dive into the root cause and address the issue before it impacts business. In other words, data-visualization gives you an opportunity to spot trends – at a glance –  that were invisible before you started monitoring the huge amounts of data that every process automatically collects.