What is workflow automation?
Workflow automation at a glance
Workflow automation uses technology to streamline and execute business processes that are typically manual, repetitive, and time-consuming. By automating tasks like data entry, approvals, handoffs, and communication, it streamlines work, reduces human error, and strengthens compliance. The result: businesses reduce costs and boost efficiency, employees can focus on more meaningful work, and faster, more reliable service improves customer satisfaction.
Summary
Workflow automation standardizes and accelerates repetitive tasks, improving accuracy and freeing up team bandwidth
It enforces consistent processes and compliance across departments, making enterprise-scale automation seamless
Teams can shift focus from manual task execution to strategic, high-value work such as innovation and decision making
The approach supports diverse use cases—from HR and finance to IT and customer support—delivering broad, cross-functional value
Performance gains multiply when workflow automation is paired with RPA and AI to orchestrate complex, end-to-end processes
Why adopt workflow automation?
Workflow automation speeds up how work gets done—reducing repetitive tasks, eliminating human error, handling handoffs, and allowing team members to focus on what matters most. By making processes more consistent, auditable, and scalable, workflow automation helps businesses operate with more confidence and agility.
Top benefits of workflow automation include:
Faster execution
Streamline task handoffs and eliminate bottlenecks and silos to move work forward more quickly and boost productivity.
Fewer errors
Automate rule-based tasks to reduce manual mistakes and ensure quality across every workflow.
Greater consistency and scalability
Standardize how work is done, improving compliance and making it easier to grow without increasing overhead.
More focus on high-value work
Help teams spend less time on routine tasks so they can prioritize innovation, decision making, and collaboration.
Deeper visibility and stronger control
Get real-time insights into process status, so you can optimize operations and respond to change faster.
How workflow automation works
Workflow automation software helps employees turn time-consuming tasks into seamless digital processes that run automatically—based on simple logic like "when this happens, do that." It connects people, systems, and data through a series of steps that are triggered, executed, and monitored with minimal manual effort.
Here’s how a typical automated workflow works:
Trigger: a specific event kicks off the workflow such as a form submission, a customer email, or a system update.
Actions: based on that trigger, the automation performs predefined tasks such as sending notifications, transferring data, updating records, or creating new entries.
Rules and logic: built-in business rules determine how the workflow branches or makes decisions. For example, if an invoice is over a certain amount, it might be routed for manager approval.
Outcomes and handoffs: once all steps are completed, the workflow either finishes automatically or loops in a person when human review or input is needed. It can also log results, notify stakeholders, or feed into other processes.
Well-designed workflow automation makes these steps feel invisible. Instead of being dragged down by manual processes like detailed data entry or email triage, teams can stay focused on outcomes. Meanwhile, workflow automation software takes on these processes behind the scenes.
Where does workflow automation deliver benefits?
Workflow automation can deliver improvements in any industry—particularly those rife with high volumes of repetitive tasks and manual data entry, such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, retail, and insurance. High-ROI use cases can be found in all types of workflows throughout every business function across the enterprise: human resources, finance, marketing, customer experience teams, supply chain management, sales, and beyond.
Workflow automation use cases include:
Invoice processing
Automate manual data entry and the collection, matching, and approval of invoices by coordinating actions across systems, flagging exceptions for a person to review.
Employee onboarding
Orchestrate onboarding across HR, IT, and facilities—triggering welcome emails, assigning devices, and scheduling training as soon as a hire is confirmed.
Customer support
Use automation to triage and assign tickets based on context, surface relevant info to agents, and keep customers updated throughout resolution.
Marketing campaign management
Automatically launch follow-up actions when a prospect engages (like lead scoring, CRM updates, or routing to sales) based on behavioral data.
Expense approval
Simplify the review process with automations that validate data, enforce policy and permissions rules, and escalate approvals when human intervention is needed.
IT service and security workflows
Monitor for key events and then coordinate real-time responses such as isolating devices, alerting stakeholders, or initiating remediation steps.
What’s the relationship between workflow automation and robotic process automation? How do they work together?
Workflow automation and robotic process automation (RPA) are different, but they’re both essential components of modern business automation—and they often are paired together.
RPA is a technology designed to automate specific, repetitive, rule-based tasks. It mimics how a person interacts with software by performing actions like clicking buttons, copying and pasting data, logging into systems, and extracting structured information from documents or websites. RPA is ideal when there’s no easy API or integration available, and tasks must be completed through the user interface.
Workflow automation, on the other hand, connects and coordinates entire sequences of work across systems, teams, and departments. It defines the logic and flow of a process—routing approvals, managing dependencies, syncing data, escalating exceptions, and ensuring that the right steps happen in the right order. Workflow automation can include a mix of people’s tasks, API calls, decision rules, and robotic activities (including RPA).
RPA and workflow automation are complementary, not competitive. Workflow automation focuses on organizing and coordinating complex work sequences that may span across technologies and functional areas. RPA serves as a reliable, flexible, and secure way of executing activities within that flow, especially when those activities require working in multiple enterprise systems and involve predictable, rules-based work.
They’re coming together in a platform near you. As automation capabilities mature, these technologies are increasingly unified. Modern workflow automation platforms bring together RPA, workflow design, AI-driven decision making, and exception handling to create adaptive, resilient, and human-aware process automation at scale. Standalone workflow automation solutions typically combine the two technologies, too.
Workflow automation versus process automation: what’s the difference?
Workflow automation and business process automation are sometimes used interchangeably, but they actually describe different things.
Workflow automation is all about managing the flow of tasks. It automates how work moves step by step—from one person, system, or tool to the next. Think of things like sending approvals, updating records, or triggering notifications when something changes. It’s focused on streamlining specific task sequences and optimizing how work moves within a process.
Process automation is focused on transforming an entire business process, like onboarding a new employee or handling customer service requests from start to finish. It’s scope encompasses optimizing multiple workflows, teams, and systems working together toward a larger outcome.
The two approaches are often used together. For example, process automation initiatives may leverage workflow automation to provide the logic, routing, coordination, and execution for specific workflow sequences within larger end-to-end business processes.
Workflow automation and process automation
What technologies do you need for workflow automation?
Implementing workflow automation involves a combination of technologies that work together to design, run, and manage automated tasks across systems and teams.
At the center is a workflow orchestration engine—it defines the sequence, logic, and conditions that guide how work moves, ensuring the right tasks happen at the right time. To make this accessible beyond developers, low-code/no-code tools allow teams to build workflows visually using drag-and-drop interfaces, templates, and API connectors.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is key for automating repetitive, rule-based tasks, especially when working with legacy systems that don’t offer APIs. Increasingly, agentic automation is enhancing RPA with AI agents that can work alongside people and robots to manage dynamic workflows.
You’ll also need integration capabilities (like APIs and event triggers) to connect apps, and business rules engines to manage decision making without hardcoding logic. When a person’s input is needed, forms and interaction layers support approvals and task assignments.
To handle documents like invoices or contracts, AI-powered document understanding and data extraction tools can turn unstructured files into structured data. Finally, monitoring, analytics, and reporting tools help track performance, surface issues, and optimize workflows over time.
While you can stitch together these technologies from different vendors, a unified automation platform offers tighter integration, easier governance, better visibility, and faster scaling.
Take the next step: orchestrate smarter, end-to-end workflows
Workflow automation is a powerful first step—but the real advantage comes when you orchestrate how tasks, decisions, and people work together across your entire organization. With modern orchestration, you can coordinate complex processes across departments, connect your systems seamlessly, and ensure that the right work gets done at the right time.
Whether you're automating employee onboarding, accelerating financial approvals, or managing customer requests, orchestration gives you the visibility, control, and flexibility to scale automation with confidence. It’s how individual workflows become unified, intelligent, and built to adapt as your business grows.
FAQs
Q: In simple terms, what is workflow automation?
A: Workflow automation uses software to automatically carry out tasks and decisions in a specific order—reducing manual processes and making work activities faster and more reliable.
Q: How is workflow automation different from RPA?
A: RPA automates individual, repetitive tasks by mimicking human clicks and keystrokes. Workflow automation connects multiple tasks into a sequence, managing how work flows across people and systems.
Q: What are examples of workflow automation?
A: Common examples include automating invoice approvals, onboarding new hires, routing IT tickets, and sending follow-up emails based on customer behavior.
Q: Can non-technical teams build workflow automations?
A: Yes. Many workflow automation tools are designed to be user friendly, offering visual builders or templates that make it easy for business users to create and manage workflows.
Q: Why is workflow automation important?
A: It saves time, reduces errors, improves consistency, and frees teams to focus on higher-value work—making businesses more efficient and responsive.
Q: Which industries benefit most from implementing workflow automation?
A: Industries like healthcare, finance, manufacturing, retail, and insurance can gain substantial benefits due to their high volume of repetitive, rule-based tasks.