In medium-sized companies, where different processes involving various entities are present and necessary, the communication and interaction problem is certainly an important factor.
Even today, many organizations still use paper documentations and require exclusively "physical" signature approval of the necessary documents. In this way, however, energy and manpower are consumed in an impractical manner, slowing down the production processes and they do not always succeed in providing good visibility on the real state-of-production at the requested moment. In this scenario, updated information on the state-of-advancement for a new product, for example, or the production of infrastructures, or a new service offered, is not easily obtainable.
The conclusion is a waste of energy which could be easily curtailed, in terms of time and costs, by the use of the right technologies. Tools, able to automatically send information and documents by e-mail, keep track of all the interactions and allow all the information concerning the process to be made easily available. This can be done with the automatic generation of appropriate customizing reports, which offer remarkable added value to organizations.
The use of these workflow management systems guarantees the accomplishment and the retrieval of updated data in real-time, in a continuous, systematic and shared way.
With the adoption of these technologies it will be simple, for instance, for management to monitor the activities concerning staff selection processes rather than those concerning the analysis of sales data.
Furthermore, system users will enjoy the huge benefits from the use of these tools. In technological settings, inside of which some functionalities for workflow management are supplemented, it is possible for a project designer to memorize product modification. It is also possible, without any further operations, to send the approval request by e-mail to the competent people in an automatic manner, thus keeping the interactive chronology within the system.
In the following list, you will find the main advantages deriving from workflow automation:

• increased velocity and accuracy of the processes and document flows
• automation of manual operations, such as data input, strongly reducing human errors within the processes and a remarkable decrease in the requested times
• strongly reduced number of bottlenecks due to approval authorization and information distribution management within the company
• real-time monitoring of the various production processes and documental flows
• reduction of company operating costs
• increased customer satisfaction
• better sales results and new customer acquisitions due to easier internal company communication.

In conclusion, by using technology for workflow management means that a company is a cut above with respect to its competitors less technologically advanced.