It’s no secret that enterprise work today is more demanding than ever: new trends and challenges come and go, demanding enterprises to be more agile. On the other hand, business processes have grown to be more complex, requiring a structure.
Thus, finding the right balance between stability and agility is often the biggest challenge of running an enterprise. Often, enterprises must rely on too many different tools and solutions that are disconnected from each other for this purpose, hindering productivity and efficiency.
This is where Enterprise Work Management (EWM) comes in.
Enterprise Work Management allows executives and project managers to easily monitor all the different elements of enterprise work in a single, centralized software solution. This will eliminate the need to use too many disconnected, siloed tools and platforms, providing you with more control over your enterprise work.
The Concept of Enterprise Work Management
Enterprise Work Management (EWM) can refer to two things:
- The discipline, the effort of managing, analyzing, and optimizing enterprise work to ensure it is as efficient as possible.
- The software solution facilitates the practice of EWM.
First, let us discuss EWM as a discipline, a systematic method of managing, monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing all kinds of work in an enterprise.
“Work,” in an enterprise setting, can be divided into several different categories:
- Task: the smallest unit of action will form other types of work
- Process: predictable and repeatable sequence of tasks involving the transformation of raw material to processed goods and/or raw data to the processed form.
- Project: typically a one-off sequence of tasks that executed a specific objective. The steps required are predictable but typically not repeatable.
- Case: similar to process but the required steps are not apparent at first; only when more data is gathered as the work is executed that the steps will present themselves
Enterprise Work Management deals with all of these work types, and as we can see, EWM is not project management, despite the common misconception. Project management is a part of EWM, but not the other way around.
Enterprise Work Management Software
The actual execution of EWM is facilitated with Enterprise Work Management software like Aproove, which provides a centralized space for enterprises to manage multiple processes, projects, and cases. This will allow executives and managers to:
- Get a bird’s-eye view of the progress of work against its objectives.
- Effectively manage usage of resources to ensure they are used efficiently and in line with the business’s goals and visions.
- Manage different projects, processes, and cases in a centralized space
- Plan, execute, manage, and optimize tasks down to the most granular level.
- Provide a centralized collaboration space so that team members, stakeholders, and external collaborators to facilitate transparent and effective collaboration.
While different EWM software solutions might offer different sets of features, a capable EWM solution should provide the following core features:
- Work management: the core feature, managing processes/projects/cases, tasks, deadlines, schedules, in a centralized space. Ensuring all tasks are finished within the deadline, within budget, and with deliverables within the desired quality standard
- Centralized Dashboard: view all processes and tasks in one place, allowing easier time to prioritize tasks
- Team Collaboration: a centralized space to facilitate communication and collaboration
- Resource management: scheduling and workload balancing, management of other resources to maintain efficiency. Allocation of available resources to current and future works.
- Automation: facilitating workflow automation and managing the automated workflows to ensure efficiency.
- Request management: overviewing, streamlining, and effectively managing all requests related to work execution
- Mobile management: easily monitor and manage work and requests from any devices
- Notifications: automated notifications, keeping everyone up-to-date without relying on emails and phone calls.
- Time tracking: log time on tasks and projects, ensuring accurate time tracking for work management and billing purposes.
- Reporting: generating customizable and comprehensive reports. Customize the reports to highlight KPIs and metrics that matter most
- File and digital asset management: store, organize, retrieve, and distribute digital assets from a single application
- Enterprise-Grade Security: data encryption and security measures to protect your data and digital assets
- Integrations and API: Integrations with your existing technology solution to eliminate disconnectedness
Why Do You Need an Enterprise Work Management
An Enterprise Work Management solution can facilitate the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency by offering various benefits, including but not limited to:
- Increased output: by ensuring processes are executed efficiently, the enterprise can accomplish more work with increased output. EWM also provides better transparency and accountability, which in turn will facilitate the productivity of the whole enterprise.
- Better decision making: facilitating visibility and reducing guesswork, providing executives with accurate, real-time information allowing data-driven decision making.
- Reduced emails: reducing the need for back-and-forth emails, which can be a source of distraction and can significantly reduce productivity. EWM can reduce the number of emails by 20% or more.
- Reduced meetings: constant meetings are also a common source of bottlenecks, eating up workers’ valuable time. By facilitating real-time virtual collaboration, EWM can reduce meetings’ needs and improve the quality of existing meetings.
- No more missed deadlines: eliminating siloed, disconnected apps and minimizing scattered information, which can help the enterprise to ensure on-time delivery of work.
- Efficient resource management: with EWM in place, management can have a better view of who is working on which task, the progress of tasks, hours being spent, and which staff is currently being overworked. This can facilitate better resource management, improve the team’s morale, and ultimately improve productivity.
Closing Thoughts
Enterprise Work Management, or EWM, will facilitate enterprises with more practical work execution from the bottom up.
EWM will facilitate transparent and accountable collaboration in real-time, which can help improve the productivity and efficiency of the whole enterprise in executing work. With EWM, the enterprise can achieve its objectives faster while using fewer resources, ensuring work is finished on time and within budget.
