7 Ways to Automate Your Business Processes with Microsoft SharePoint

Technology should better match business operations. Therefore, it’s crucial to modernize legacy apps and services to cloud-ready, always-on systems while making this shift. Microsoft 365 provides tools to improve your operations and services or adapt to new operating trends. This blog will demonstrate Microsoft 365 and SharePoint’s immense business process automation possibilities.

At Code Creators Inc., we assist our clients to use Microsoft 365’s SharePoint Workflows, Power Apps, and Power Automate, to improve corporate productivity and efficacy across departments and processes to create seamless and digital-friendly customer experiences. Also, we believe that our 15+ years of SharePoint consultancy and development experience will help you comprehend SharePoint’s business process automation capabilities.

Business Process Automation?

Business process automation empowers teams to use technology like software applications to simplify everyday operations and processes. Automating repeated operations saves time, money, and effort.

Does Your Company Need SharePoint Automation?

Before automating, ask yourself the following questions to see if your organization needs it.

5 Signs Your Business Needs SharePoint Workflows

• Does your company perform many monotonous tasks?
• Most of these tasks require numerous people.
• Is your team deadline-driven?
• Do your tasks impact organizational processes and systems?
• Do you manage compliance and audit trails?

 

How to leverage SharePoint for Business Process Automation?

According to an IDC’s survey, inefficiencies cost organizations 20–30% of revenue annually. In order to mitigate such inefficiencies costs, Microsoft designed SharePoint Workflows, that basically simplify and automate complicated and repetitive business procedures. These workflows might track typical procedures or collect approvals, signatures, and feedback, for a project or document.

By 2023, global businesses will use digital automation as a standard.  SharePoint can automate workflows and business processes.

SharePoint Alerts & Notifications

SharePoint’s notification and alerts feature keep you informed of file and folder changes. Additionally, these alerts notify users of Microsoft SharePoint documents or site updates. A library, list, folder, file, or list item can be alerted quickly. Also, you can set up an alert for a library folder to receive notifications only when files in that folder change.

Allow Content Approval

Secondly, we have content approval workflows. Besides notifications and alerts, Power Automate also enables SharePoint library content clearance for critical documents. In the document library that needs approval, just add an approval process. Additionally, this content approval procedure hides documents awaiting approval from users.

Use SharePoint’s Processes

SharePoint workflows can help your business with approvals, comments, digital signatures, phased activities, and content publishing.

Checking and tracking tasks like delivering documents and giving reminders take extra time. Also, constant interruptions can overwhelm you and your coworkers. SharePoint’s pre-built workflow templates allow you to automate tasks like gathering signatures or document approval to save time.

Furthermore, the SharePoint document approval workflow automatically checks, tracks, reminds, and forwards documents. Most processes notify you of late task completion or other issues. As a result, this reduces process monitoring.

Creating Workflow Using Power Apps

Power Automate lets you create workflows for Microsoft Lists, SharePoint, and OneDrive libraries and lists. Whereas, MS Flows streamlines routine tasks and save time. And, accumulatively, it automates typical SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and third-party tasks.

Power Automate allows SharePoint to accomplish the following;

• Extract, verify, and populate spreadsheets PDFs, and other data automatically. This means pulling, checking, and reporting data is faster.
• Process forms, PDFs, images, emails, and other data sources automatically. It simplifies document creation and sharing.
• Automate workflows – Some of your processes may require automation. Checking stock, ordering, invoicing, updating customers, etc.
• Automate crucial information flow — Save, manage, and exchange important papers and company facts. SharePoint’s many connectors and plug-ins allow retrieving email attachments, work projects, and tweets easier. Share and store those automatically with your remote peers.
• Automate human labor and third-party procedures — If your company takes extra steps to validate user, sales, or other crucial data, SharePoint’s vast library of tools and connectors can reduce these activities.
• Automate project procedures and steps — Your regular workday may contain a sequence of multiple tasks that can be completed in a few minutes instead of hours by automating operations like sending emails, generating Planner tasks, and sending team messages.

 

SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer workflows may manage your company’s simplest to the most complicated business operations. It automates human collaborative and business application processes.

Also, it allows users to send a document to an employee’s manager for approval, whereas business application workflows update one data source after another.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio’s state machine workflow lets you model event-driven workflows, unlike SharePoint Designer’s few-stage workflows. Also, it has many features that allow developers to build complicated workflows that support several business processes. Furthermore, Visual Studio lets you design effective workflow templates and deploy them to numerous SharePoint sites.

Nintex Workflow Designer

Even though you can’t develop processes in Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer, you can use third-party tools like Nintex to construct a solution with many bespoke features. This means that enterprises may automate workflows with Nintex-built SharePoint workflows.

Also, the IT administrators may improve SharePoint functionality and workflow value by tightly integrating Nintex processes with SharePoint. And, users who are familiar with SharePoint and its techniques for saving documents, assigning tasks, and recording user information should migrate processes from Infopath to Nintex and integrate them into SharePoint.

Conclusion

SharePoint is a potential platform for organizations to construct bespoke automation utilizing Microsoft Power Automate, SharePoint Designer, human collaborative, and other third-party tools. Moreover, SharePoint workflow automation allows organizations to enhance employee workflows, remove manual, repetitive operations, and focus on more valuable work.

Since the core Microsoft program lacks workflow automation features, enterprises commonly use add-ins and third-party tools. However, enterprises sometimes need special features for a simpler interface to automate common activities.

The greatest method to improve SharePoint automation and business value is to develop powerful automation and workflow management capabilities across your business processes. Ask our SharePoint professionals about SharePoint Business Processes and Workflows Automation.