Is your workflow, flowing?

Workflow is the term given to the tasks and processes that are undertaken in an organisation repeatedly. They are usually labour intensive, but are usually crucial to your business. The tasks can take many shapes and forms, and we work with organisations in different sectors to help them to literally get their workflow flowing using technology. In this blog, we wanted to illustrate the most common areas we get involved in.

We work with a number of Oxbridge colleges, helping them to automate different parts of their workflow.

One of the most common areas is getting new students set-up on the intranet ready for the start of a new academic year. This falls into two phases. The first is giving students access to information before they arrive and as soon as they have a confirmed place. Once students have a university id, the second phase is getting them full student access to the intranet, so that they are able to access online college info from the minute they arrive. 

To do this manually is a very lengthy task and is open to human errors with the sheer volume of data being inputted. Instead, we enable the first task to be completed via a data import and the second via an automated feed from the central user directory. 

Booking systems are another area where automation of workflow can really make a difference. We’ve worked with two summer schools at two Oxford colleges to provide a bespoke system for booking onto a customised academic programme.

We’ve worked with other organisations to automate the workflow around booking meeting rooms and to simplify the process of booking meals.

Benefits

• Less paperwork.
• Faster completion of the task.
• Flexibility on when it is undertaken, no need to wait for an employee to be free to take it on.
• Always up to date.
• Free up people to focus on something else.
• Fewer errors.

Another area that we’ve used technological solutions to help the flow of work in an organisation is in website content moderation. By creating automated review steps before content can be published, people within the organisation can be assigned sign off roles within the process. This means that content can be monitored to ensure it meets particular requirements set out by the organisation before it is published.

Access control is an area we work on for many different website owners. We do the technical set-up so that different access to different parts of the site can be granted to different people. This means that the correct people have access to the parts of the website they need to be involved in. Different roles within that part of the site can also be set, so that website owners can control the level of access each person has. 

For college websites with lots of departments and/ or large editorial teams, this is a really useful approach.

Benefits

• Complete control of what is being published.
• Information can be embargoed if necessary.
• Security is improved.
• Only the correct people are seeing their section of the site.
• Decreases the opportunity for errors.

When we work with our clients, we get to understand how their organisation functions and can recommend useful extras to help keep the workflow flowing using technology. Examples of this are:

• Introducing QR codes which link physical content to the website
  • QR codes are easy to share and improve efficiency and user experience.
• Linking event booking directly into people's calendars
  • reduces the risk of people forgetting to put events into their online diaries manually and makes managing calendars easier for users.
• Development of bespoke webforms for enquiries, bookings and much more
  • a webform sets up a consistent approach for certain processes and allows for easier collection and analysis of information. This in turn decreases the time needed for human intervention and reduces frustration for both users and administrators.

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down-to-earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been developing websites and designing tailor-made tech solutions for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years. 

We work with many of our clients as an ongoing technical partner, but we also offer a consultancy service to solve a specific strategic challenge.