The most important aspects of workforce management are assigning and tracking tasks, but it also includes managing leave and attendance records. Maintaining a dedicated role for task allocation remains common practice, even though, apart from a few exceptional situations, this activity can be fully automated.
Key Challenges in Task Management
Assigning tasks effectively requires a wide range of up-to-date information. We need to understand task dependencies, participants, priorities and deadlines. Beyond task-related information, we also need accurate details about the skills, capacity and planned leave of the people responsible for carrying out the work.
When we have to decide manually who should perform which task and when, we must not only ensure that the available data is current, but also notify everyone involved about their assigned tasks. This approach leads to inaccuracies and an ongoing waste of resources.
Managing Feedback
Unexpected problems may arise while carrying out tasks, requiring changes to the original task or the creation of additional subtasks. Such feedback may call for immediate intervention and the involvement of additional participants.
The first question when providing feedback is who should be notified of problems encountered during task execution, and who can be contacted if the primary contact is unavailable. In situations like these, it would be a significant advantage if the interface automatically displayed the contact details of the supervisor and their deputy, without any external intervention.
Automated Workforce Management
A process management system not only stores information but also provides visibility into preceding workflow steps, which must be completed before a decision can be made.
Based on the applicable conditions, a leave request can even be approved automatically. If manual approval is required, the request can be routed automatically to the appropriate person.
Task allocation can be automated using the same principles. The process management software knows which skills each task requires and which employees possess them. Using this information alongside workload data, priorities and deadlines, the software can automatically assign every task. If it detects a capacity shortfall, it can flag it.
Attendance Records
Maintaining accurate attendance records is important not only for meeting legal obligations, but also for supporting the organisation's operations. This administrative process is time-consuming and requires a level of precision that is almost impossible to ensure manually.
A process management system can also automatically generate attendance sheets based on leave and job-related data. Since the system can also manage printed worksheets, it can require every attendance sheet to be signed, scanned and submitted by the deadline.
Summary
The simple examples above clearly illustrate the many opportunities to simplify manual workflows and make them more productive while achieving significant resource savings. To ensure that processes are properly configured, we provide all our clients with ongoing professional support alongside our proprietary software solution, ensuring its effective operation.
