Should You Upgrade Your Technology Workflow Processes in 2025? The Case Against the Status Quo.

We’re one month into 2025. Is it time to talk about how automated your workflow is? How easy is it to do business with you? How many manual processes in your systems can be automated and turned into higher profits, higher revenue, or both?

It’s easier today to talk about AI. AI is going to change our businesses. Competitors are adopting it. People you didn’t know were competitors are adopting it and will soon take your customers. Run for your lives! Hurry up and adopt it, or risk obsolescence! 

But let’s take a log off the fire, shall we? It’s a sensible bet that your business will continue to face challenges. Nothing new here. Let’s start by reviewing your business workflow. Before one answers the question about which business process is ripe for AI, first, we should know precisely what the business process entails.

• How does an opportunity move to a signed contract and then money in your bank account?

• How many people and systems are touched along the way?

• Are there opportunities to remove steps, humans, and time from the workflow?

A Financed A3 MFP From Start to Finish

Let’s continue with the original premise here. Have you taken the time to review in painstaking detail how an opportunity works through your business to a closed sale? How and where does a salesperson log that opportunity? We need to track the customer and then maybe build a configuration for a device or devices. 

Now, the rep needs to price out that configuration and have it approved by a financial partner. There may even be an internal team that checks to ensure a viable configuration has been proposed. Or that the prices that have been inputted are correct (we know these prices tend to change every few months, along with rate factors, contracts, and service assumptions). 

This may involve entering the price and configuration into a finance portal (is that automatic, or does a person do that?). Assuming everything checks out, you can create a proposal and a contract. Likely a PDF that the customer needs to review and sign. 

So let’s say congratulations are in order, the opportunity has gotten this far, and the customer signed the deal. Now, all of this data must be entered into your finance system, products must be ordered, and the contract information must be inputted once again.

How much time did this deal take to execute?

Was that an acceptable amount of time for your customer? How many hands did it touch? Is there a person in the process representing a single point of failure—the loss of which would genuinely hurt your business?

We all want to increase revenue and opportunities, but one thing is for sure: if we reduce costs, we will surely increase profits. Every business has some nuance or difference from this process. Still, the time, proclivity for error, reliance on one person to be “heroic” in the process, and multiple redundant data systems are common. 

Not automating these processes in 2025 represents the status quo. It could be the right approach for your business, but when it comes to AI, you will not be able to benefit from it if you continue to rely on manual input processes to move data across your business. The cost of implementing automated processes could be greater than the financial benefit. However, if you do not know the cost of your current process, it would be impossible to see if it is a cost, a benefit, or even...

A REALLY BIG FINANCIAL BENEFIT!

A good starting point in evaluating all this? Knowing what is possible. 

With this in mind, here’s a demo of an automated contract workflow that takes your sales cycle from 5 weeks to 5 minutes.

Learn More About the Digital Finance Portal (DFP)