Workflow Automation Q&A #2: Why Use TAP Over In-House WFA?

Welcome to another installment of “Workflow Automation Q&A.” We’re excited to deliver a little insight for another question we frequently get from customers.

Although we at Mitratech live, breathe, and dream of workflow automation, we often forget that it’s a technology that requires a bit of explanation. We want to take a step back and clear common misconceptions of workflow automation. For this month’s Q&A, I sat down with one of our very own Solutions Engineers, Cam Pierce, to get his thoughts.

Question: I think our IT (my department) already has a workflow tool, what do you do differently?

Cam: Regardless of whether or not your department already has a workflow tool, TAP is going to offer you distinct advantages that really warrant a second look. One example is how TAP users can build and publish their workflows in a matter of only days to weeks, and that’s largely possible because they’re able to use a simple drag-and-drop UI that doesn’t demand they have programming knowledge.

In contrast, other workflow tools pretty often require a certain level of technical expertise makes the design process inaccessible to a fair number of people within an organization. That also tends to slow down development and implementation.

So, from an IT perspective, the way TAP works provides improved transparency for users who want to have a good, quick grasp of the solution they’ve been given, and that means time and effort are saved during implementation. It’s one of the benefits we get a lot of positive feedback about, to be honest.

Question: Is workflow automation just for e-signature? Sending contracts? Approvals? Et cetera..?

Cam: Workflow automation goes well beyond e-signatures, contracts, and approvals. Of course, these are features that show up in many of our use cases because they’re key for our users, but workflow automation also encompasses things like the ability to send and receive data with third party systems, enabling actions to be taking place in parallel, robust user management with granular permissions settings, a centralized repository of workflow data, the need for analytics surrounding that workflow data, and so on.

Since TAP offers all of the above, that opens the door for any number of use cases outside of the conventional contract-centric view of workflows. For example, HR onboarding and offboarding, event management, e-billing, product requests…anything, really! We built TAP so it would be customizable to meet an organization’s exact needs, so it can automate any business process they’ve got.

We’ve really seen that in action with our customers, who take TAP and innovate new ways to deploy it we would have never thought of on our own. We like to say that what a user gets out of TAP is, honestly, only limited by their imagination.

Cam is a Solutions Engineer who spends his time doing all things workflow–building them, talking about them, and thinking of new ways to use them. In his free time, he likes to run in Golden Gate Park and FaceTime with his parents’ dog, Rory.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WORKFLOW AUTOMATION: DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK