How to increase workplace productivity with Arbela Workflow Manager
By Tatiana Sahagun, Senior Trade and Logistics ConsultantWhen it comes to productivity, we want to be able to look back on the day and feel as if we accomplished something of value, made an impact, or even just ticked that check mark on our ever growing to do lists. In reality, we often are inundated with meeting requests, find ourselves in battle against our inboxes, and the constant noise of checking are multiple various productivity apps or queues. We get it. Our digital lives are filled with pings that while essential, can drown out our productivity. As we take on more responsibility our administrative burden also continues to expand. Budgets need agreement, employee life cycle needs to be managed, vendor invoices approved, and expenses reviewed.
Dynamics 365 for Operations (D365FO) gives us powerful tools to manage our business document workflows, and we find that we are often approvers of multiple workflows across the application. As our roles grow we may find we spend less and less time tethered to our desks. But, requiring a solution that allow us to manage all of these approvals while simultaneously moving through our busy lives. Native D365FO supports email alerts that when configured properly give us a link back to the application to review vendor invoice, purchase requistion, or any other of the applications workflows.
However, thanks to our reliance on emails these approvals request get blended and buried into our jungle of an inbox rules, folders, and reminders. So that when we try and review our employee purchase requisition requests or sign off on their expense reports while in an uber to the airport we find ourselves searching our emails and trying to navigate the hyperlinks back to D365FO on our mobile phones. There must be a better way.
Microsoft gives us a mobile platform for many of the workflows within D365FO—but they don’t cover all. In particular with purchase requisitions are blaring ignored. However, having a mobile solution for approvals truly helps our employees on the move. Having an app for PO approvals keeps are supply chain process agile. Microsoft also supports a mobile expense approval application. Providing managers tools mitigates the challenges of managing approvals in our ever more mobile workforce. But, by providing mangers an app for each and every approval type are we really mitigating the digital noise in their lives? Or are we instead just giving them a to-do list of three apps and email to check daily?
At Arbela, we decided that there must be a better way to manage all of this digital noise and give users back their time to focus on meaningful items and reduce time spent on admin tasks. Building off the existing framework and leveraging the already native power apps functionality we created Arbela Workflow Manager (AWM) -- an incredibly simplified user interface that allows users to efficiently manage all workflows requiring their approvals. We take all the information your users deem pertinent in the workflow configuration on one screen to review, and act on business documents submitted their direction. With deep links back to the application and active directory authentication, we ensure sensitive data remains secure and limit the dissemination of sensitive information that could come from forwarding an email.
We also realize that sometimes we all need a subtle reminder of work items requiring our approvals and we would benefit from a reminder rather than an escalation to the next level manager of work items we haven’t gotten to on time. So, we’ve expanded upon native D365FO workflow functionality to empower your users to receive push notifications to their mobile devices when they have past due work items, prior to the work items escalation to their managers. Something not available out of the box.
With AWM, we want to give your users back their time to focus on impactful work and less on administrative follow up. Removing the road blocks of critical business documents, such as waiting for an approvers signoff who may or may not log in to D365FO on a daily basis. With AWM the users work items are in the palm of their hands and ready for action. You can find Arbela Workflow Manager on Microsoft AppSource or contact us to learn more and request a demo.