Automation: Eliminate manual processes and manual work and get more work done

Blog: Monday Project Management Blog

The average office worker spends more than 3 hours per day on tasks that could easily be automated.

3 hours. Per day.

That’s nearly half of an average 8-hour day!

You can view this data as alarming, or if you are a glass half full kinda person, the numbers can be seen as an opportunity.

According to a recent Gartner article, 69% of routine work currently done by managers will be fully automated by 2024 – thanks to “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies such as virtual personal assistants and chatbots.”

The days of manual processes, manual work, and manual tasks are disappearing rapidly.

In this article, we’ll answer “why automation,” touch on various ways to automate manual processes using software (like monday.com’s Work OS), discuss how automation and integration work together, and share some monday.com customer automation success stories.

Why automation?

In 2019, monday.com’s Matt Burns stated, “The future of software lies in allowing teams to collaborate, facilitate transparency, and automate mundane tasks so people can see the full picture of their workflow.”

(The bold is mine.)

Burns said the automation of mundane tasks (+ collaboration and transparency) allows people to “see the full picture of their workflow.” Truth!

Automation also:

Frees up employees to work on things that actually drive revenue
Eliminates menial, repetitive tasks
Means extra productivity without the need to hire new staff
Reduces the chance of human error

The good news: There are lots of automation opportunities!

Automate now!

What can you automate?

Everything.

Automation

Well, maybe not everything, but most business processes can include some level of automation.

Some examples include:

Chatbots: Not every question needs to have a human available — chatbots help by answering prospect or customer queries directly on a specific webpage. Chatbots are a great way to automate some of the most common repetitive questions.

Email alerts/notifications: Instead of having to remember to send an email every time something gets updated, email alerts can be automatically sent out every time:

An item/task is assigned
Someone replies to an update
Someones mentions you in a post or reply
Someone subscribes you to a Board/item/Team

Here is what it could look like in monday.com:

Sales: Sales automation is the process of using AI to streamline your sales activities, aiming to achieve hyper-efficiency. Sales automation helps with:

Task delegation
Lead generation and management
Marketing and sales personalization
Automation of repetitive tasks

Here is what automating part of the lead management sales process could look like:

Similarly, you could set up an automation updating your #NewSalesLead (for example) Slack channel every time a new lead fills out a form on your website.

monday.com customers use automations all the time. Our automations allow you to use an event inside monday.com (like the changing of a status) to trigger an action (like sending a notification).

We accomplish this through what we call “automation recipes” – pre-defined combinations of triggers and actions. For example: when a status changes to something, notify someone.

Each of the underlined words is the event or trigger:

Using monday.com to automate workflows

Teams can set up countless automations within monday.com. In fact, you can automate more than 250,000 human actions affording you the flexibility to streamline any type of workflow.

A few of the more common automation categories include:

Status changes
Recurring tasks
Date reminder
Item creation
Move item (within a board)
Cross-board
Subitems
Dependencies
Custom recipes

Here is a short video explaining how to add automations in monday.com:

Test today

How automation and integrations work hand-in-hand

Integrations allow your team to connect monday.com with the tools you already use — have all your team’s work in one place.

If you rely on multiple software to handle operations, you must integrate them into a single source of truth. This will foster transparency and improve collaboration.

At monday.com, we offer many integration options.

A few of our more popular ones include:

Outlook: Automatically convert emails into action items to track and manage
Microsoft Teams: Embed monday.com boards within your MS Teams chats to enhance workflow capabilities
Dropbox: Easily attach, share, and preview files stored in your Dropbox from within monday.com
Slack: Share information, updates, and files in Slack #channels from directly inside monday.com
Zoom: Set Zoom calls within any monday.com board to communicate in context.
Google Calendar: Manage your time more efficiently and stay up-to-date with all-important deadlines.

monday.com customers can set up integrations in just a few clicks – no code required!

And here’s where it gets fun.

Use integrations and automations … together. Boom.

Integration + Automation

Try monday.com

How automation has saved monday.com customers time & money

Automations are all about saving time, reducing human error, eliminating menial (repeatable) tasks, and ultimately saving money.

A few examples of how monday.com customers used automation to accomplish some (or all) of the above:

Example #1: Falkbuilt Ltd. increased its project capacity significantly in just a few months by automating 40,000+ human actions each month.

19 Automations

Read their story.

Example #2: By standardizing workflows and automating menial tasks. monday.com customer Seer Interactive saved over 603,000 actions and an average of 1.6 hours per person per week.

Example #3: Parvenu used monday.com as its CRM, adding 150 automations and 52 integrations on a single board.

Parvenu

Watch their story.

Example #4: One of Zippo’s monday.com boards includes one of its “most advanced workflow apps.” According to Senior Product Manager Chris Funk, Zippo is only “two or three clicks away from making it 100% automated.”

Zippo