How Cloud-Based Workflow Apps can help scale Operational Efficiency

A scalable operation for delivering products or services is key for organizations to thrive in any marketplace. You can have a great marketing and sales process, but, without a scalable operation, it will be tough to fulfil promises made to customers. As an Information Technology service provider, with software development centres in India, Softcrylic faced a lot of scalability challenges in its core operational areas such as human resource management, infrastructure, and accounts.In its growth trajectory, Softcrylic like other growing organizations relied on disparate tools to collaborate across departments. However, the tools didn’t talk to each other but only amplified productivity issues. Day-to-day tasks that require cross-functional coordination like on-boarding new employees, kick-starting new projects, providing IT infrastructure and coordination of billing activities became daunting over time.

In essence, our operation was still people dependent and not scalable.

Upon evaluating several online productivity tools, we narrowed down to Podio, a cloud-based Workflow automation platform. Subscribing to and starting up with Podio happened with just a few mouse clicks. Requiring no upfront capital investment is another bonus as you can always opt out. Podio impressed us with its intuitively simple user interface and customizable functionality to automate even complex business processes.

Here are a few ways in which we use Podio to our advantage:

• New functionality like internal blog or help-desk ticketing system can be installed from Podio’s community-driven App Marketplace, in a matter of minutes
• Business processes are mapped to its respective owners, stakeholders, and participants for enhanced collaboration
• Employees stay on top of priority action items like tasks, to-do lists, meeting invites, etc. from their personal dashboard
• We respond to business opportunities swiftly by integrating our existing CRM and HRMS tools with Podio
• Productivity has been drastically improved across the organization with user-privileged activity streams, live chat, mobile alerts and email digests

Overall, Softcrylic has been benefitting with improved operational efficiency with a cloud-based workflow automation app. While Podio is our choice, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, are some of the other market leading cloud-based workflow automation apps with similar features to choose from.