Smartsheet Workflow Automation: Discover the Key Benefits

Running a business means tackling a lot of daily tasks, and while these processes are important, they can frequently be monotonous, time-consuming, and not necessarily strategic. On top of that, depending on manual work escalates the possibilities of human error, which can slow things down just when you’re trying to move forward.

That’s where Smartsheet workflow automation comes in. By automating those repetitive tasks, your team can save time, cut down on mistakes, and focus on the work that really moves your business ahead.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at what Smartsheet workflow automation is all about, how it can help your business, and share some easy tips to get the most out of it.

Let’s start with the basics of workflow automation first.

What Is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation refers to the system through which an organization uses technology to finish some of its business processes more effectively. If done right, the technology is then implemented, making the processes simple, more rapidly and efficiently, to ensure saving time for an organization’s employees to address more complex tasks.

What is Smartsheet workflow automation?

Smartsheet’s workflow automation helps you take repetitive, manual tasks off your team’s plate, saving time and keeping things running smoothly. It also helps ensure everyone stays accountable during the process or project.

The key benefits of Smartsheet automation include:

• Driving awareness of critical changes in your sheet with alerts
• Send weekly reminders, update requests, or alerts
• Request approvals from stakeholders
• Remind collaborators of key dates

What Is Automation in Business?

Through automation, several processes could be completed more effectively, like those that require less manual work. For instance, HR, accounting and purchasing-related processes, along with several others, can be made more effective and quicker through automation. 

Why Is Workflow Automation Important?

Workflow automation could help any organization execute daily and oftentimes repetitive and tedious tasks more effectively than would normally require more manual/human work. Not only does it save the organization’s cost by completing processes efficiently and more accurately, but it also frees up an organization’s employees to address more complex jobs requiring strategic thinking and cannot be automated.

How Workflow Automation Can Benefit Your Organization?

Workflow automation can bring a lot of progressive changes to your organization in several ways. Here are some of the key benefits:

• Make managing people easier: Helps simplify task assignments and tracking via automation, ensuring team management is easier and keeping everyone on the same page. 
• Minimize errors: With fewer manual inputs, automation cuts the possibility of human mistakes, resulting in more trustworthy and precise results.
• Create custom forms to collect and leverage key data: You can create personalized forms to gather exactly the data you need, enhancing your ability to analyze and use it efficiently for improved decision-making.
• Expand employees’ ability to work remotely: Automation enables employees to access and complete tasks from anywhere, making remote work or hybrid setups easier to manage.
• Improve collaboration and communication: Keeps everyone in the loop by sending automatic updates, reminders, and alerts, helping teams stay aligned and work more smoothly together.
• Maximize accountability: With clear task assignments and deadlines, automation makes it easier to monitor progress and ensure that everyone is held responsible for their work.
• Reduce repetitive tasks: Automation takes care of the boring, repetitive tasks, so employees can focus on more significant, strategic work that adds value to the business.
• Simplify business processes: Complex processes become easier to manage with automation by breaking them down into structured, repeatable steps that everyone can follow.
• Speed up approval cycles: Automated workflows accelerate the approval process by cutting down on redundant back-and-forth, so decisions are made quicker.
• Boost employee satisfaction: By eradicating the requirement for monotonous tasks, employees could spend more time on important work, further leading to greater job satisfaction and motivation.
• Ensure compliance: Automation helps keep your business on track with rules by ensuring that compliance steps are constantly followed and documented.
• Shorten sales cycles: With automated lead tracking, follow-ups, and approvals, your sales team can move prospects through the pipeline faster, closing deals more rapidly.
• Easily analyze and improve processes: Automation offers valuable data and insights, making it easier to spot inefficiencies and constantly enhance your workflows.
• Keep documents up-to-date and consistent: Automation ensures that your documents, reports, and records are always existing and standardized, decreasing errors and inconsistencies.
• Simplify workflows: By automating complicated tasks, processes become more straightforward to manage, saving time and power.
• Cut costs: Improve efficiency and reduce manual work, enabling you to get more done with fewer resources and lower operational costs. 
• Better workload management: Makes workloads stable across your team, ensuring that tasks are dispersed more consistently and efficiently.
• Free up time for strategic work: By managing routine tasks, automation lets your team focus on more creative and high-value work that needs strategic thinking.

All these benefits together create a more creative, effective, and agile organization, assisting your team to work smarter, not harder.

How do automated workflows work in Smartsheet?

Automated workflows comprise three components, which can be set after creating and naming your workflow within a sheet. 

• Trigger 

This is where you choose what should happen to kick off automation. For instance, this could be when a new row is incorporated into the sheet, or when a column is changed or when a date is reached. 

• Condition

This is where you could get more particular with your criteria and filter the details that will trigger the automation and be able to exclude items. However, it’s not necessary to use this step. For instance, this could be when a column is checked or unchecked, or when a date has passed, or when a value goes under or over a certain threshold. 

• Action

What answer do you want from automation? Options are alerting someone, requesting an update, moving or copying a row, locking or unlocking a row. If you have many columns of data in a sheet, you can then filter which key bits of details are shown in an automation to make its management easier, and it could be found in advanced options. 

Smartsheet automated actions

There are several different automated actions that you can accomplish with workflow automation, including some useful actions like:

• Alert Automation

Automate an alert to someone or an app, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, with crucial details regarding a project or sheet or row updates.

• Automate Approvals and Updates

Ask a reviewer or a manager to review and approve a work item once a certain field meets criteria, or look for information for a task owner once an item is past a deadline or changes to a particular value. 

• Assign Team Members

Assign people to work on a project after a date has been reached or when a row has been added or changed.

• Automate Cell Changes

Change a cell when data in certain conditions are met, like text or number conditions are met, a dropdown selection is made or a checkbox (ticked or unticked).

• Move or Copy Rows

Create a copy of or move a row in another sheet when a field meets a certain benchmark.

What are multi-step automations?

Multi-step automations refer to automations that have more than one layer. They are great for simplifying multi-step approval processes, archiving or transitioning tasks with move and copy row workflows and tailoring what details are shared via notifications. 

Smartsheet workflow automation examples

Here are a few real-world examples of how a Smartsheet workflow automation could work:

• Alert Automation

You work in the supply chain department for a retailer and are responsible for ordering stock. You have a sheet that captures all the lines that are held accountable for. This sheet has three key columns for every line that are:

• In-stock quantity
• A minimum in-stock quantity
• Above or below the minimum in-stock quantity (based on a formula of 1 & 2)

You can also set up a simple automation that alerts you when the stock drops below the minimum needed level, allowing you to re-order.

Moreover, you could set up another alert on whether the products on order have been received or not. This could be an update request automation to the supplier sent using Slack or Microsoft Teams if they do not use Smartsheet.

• Enquiry Automation

Suppose you work for a company with more than one sector, and you have an enquiry process for new business. A possible new client completes the enquiry form and chooses a sector they are involved in. 

You can set up automation to automatically send the enquiry to the right department, ensuring a quick response.

You could also set up a multi-layered approval process for the enquiry, requesting approval from numerous levels of management for the enquiry to progress. 

Hire Veridian Solutions for Smartsheet Workflow Automation

When it comes to optimizing your business processes with Smartsheet workflow automation, Veridian Solutions is the partner you can count on.

As a Smartsheet Gold Partner, Veridian Solutions specializes in delivering high-quality Smartsheet services that simplify workflows and enhance overall efficiency. Their team of professional Smartsheet consultants works carefully with you to design custom automation systems personalized according to your specific needs, ensuring your team works more efficiently and confidently.

With years of experience in Smartsheet consulting and a solid track record across different industries, Veridian Solutions brings a creative and flexible approach to the table. They make sure your Smartsheet training and automation are easy to use, effective, and perfectly fit your business goals. Trust Veridian to simplify your operations and help take your team’s performance to new heights.