SharePoint Consulting and Automation
SharePoint consulting can be the time saver that your team has been looking for. Automation, what a wonderful thing! We have become very accustomed to the most mundane tasks taking care of themselves.
Consider the washing machine, the dishwasher, cruise control, the thermostat in your house, and everyone’s favorite, automated phone menu systems! Computing and automation goes hand-in-hand.
SharePoint workflows are the tool for your business automation needs. But be warned – with great power comes great responsibility. Due diligence to assess the automation’s workflow can save you a lot of headaches.
Forms Require Strategy
We collect information we need to do our jobs, so we create forms to make sure we have all the data we need. What happens next? Usually a process (we’ll call this workflow 
from here) is followed to turn the data collected into actionable information.
Let’s use an example to bring the abstract into the concrete. When you buy a product over the internet at your favorite website, you fill out a form to collect the information about the sale, such as what the product is, where the package should be shipped, and billing information.
When you click “Buy”, this information is then fed into one or many workflows. The warehouse must know what product to pull from the shelves, the billing department must bill you for the sale, and the shipping department must handle the shipment.
All of these are examples of workflows that keep the business running, but what about management? How many times has a manager asked for data from the operations personnel, encroaching on their core processes and slowing them down?
Imagine an infantryman in the heat of battle being asked by a commanding officer how many bullets he has fired. Nothing could be more frustrating.
A workflow developed for SharePoint could also provide business intelligence data collection silently while the business marches forward. Not only have you saved your employees the frustration of stopping work to tell you what has been accomplished.
Now, you have real-world information on how your business is operating. Any manager can tell you that this knowledge is critical to business intelligence and decision making.
The possibilities within the SharePoint Workflow framework are nearly endless. If the functionality you require is not available out-of-the-box, it can be custom built or purchased as an add-on to suit your business automation needs.
For more on SharePoint consulting and workflows, read this post!