7 Reasons why Forms are Crucial for Your Workflows | CMW Lab Blog (2024)

Over the years, business trends and needs have greatly evolved. As time went by, newer and better solutions have been in demand in order to cater to this need and keep up with all the new trends and practices.

In this case, we want to highlight a particularly important item that is necessary in today’s business world…Automated workflows. An automated workflow is defined as a set of steps dedicated to reaching a specific result, in this instance, an automated way of getting work done in your firm.

Workflow automation software avails a number of tools for achieving the goals in question, one of the important ones – forms. Forms in workflow software play a number of roles and we’re going to touch a bit more on them below.

Workflow Forms

The forms in workflow software are an integral part of the system. As mentioned above, they play a number of important roles in the success of your workflow software’s efficiency. Before we get to that, let’s highlight a few design elements to avoid whenever designing a form for your workflow software as well as some qualities they ought to have:

1. Imitating paper format forms

This would be the first thing most people would go for in this case. Most paper forms include a lot of fields that eventually just bloat the system with unnecessary information. As such, a thorough understanding of the information needs you have would go a long way in ensuring that these forms are designed to capture only what you need.

2. Multiple approval levels

As is the case with many current forms used in companies. Forms in workflow software should have minimal approval needs I.e. approvals should only go to the most essential personnel involved in whatever task is at hand so as to avoid creating a bottleneck effect in the system.

3. Creating rigid forms

I.e. creating forms that can’t be easily edited so as to cater for new information needs or doing away with some fields that are no longer necessary for the workflow process.

Workflow management software by CMW Lab enables non-technical users to design their own workflow forms with drag’n’drop simplicity

The merits of having proper Forms in your Workflow

Having seen some of the elements to consider when designing a workflow form, let’s highlight the importance and advantages properly designed and customizable forms can have in your workflow:

• Negates the need for paper media

Since they work in a software environment, all information can be captured, stored, handled and distributed electronically without the need for bulky and messy paper forms.

• Efficient information and data capturing

Well-designed forms, as mentioned earlier, are designed to include only the required fields of information. Seeing as how they can also be customized any time, fields that are no longer needed can be easily edited out and also newly required fields can be included in the forms.

• Employee satisfaction

Such forms increase the convenience of getting work done by your employees. As such, they would appreciate their use, their simplicity and efficiency eventually increasing overall productivity for your company.

• Promotes scalability

In an age where information and data is a major driving force behind the success of companies or organizations, a scalable mode of capturing and manipulating data is needed. Workflow forms allow for exactly this since they can handle more data as needs increase, which is an inevitable occurrence anyways. Having these in place ensures you can handle the large-scale data whenever anytime.

• Error reduction

Workflow forms have the ability to validate data as soon as they’re keyed in. This ensures fewer error occurrences in your information pool.

• Time-saving

Forms allow for data and information capturing at a very fast rate.

• Security

When the need to address security or audit compliances comes, forms play a key role in identifying the source of unnecessary or false data within the workflow.

In Conclusion

Automated workflows are a must-have for the successful and efficient operation of companies. Their efficiency here is seen to be heavily tied with having proper forms in place within it and as such is one aspect needing careful consideration so as to achieve the expected levels of productivity.

CMW Tracker makes it a snap to create workflow forms and adjust them as needed without IT-guys help. Design proper forms and use them for capturing all the data required for workflows, e.g. for approval, request or order handling workflow.