Everyday tasks in the office are often simple, repetitive, and utterly boring. They take up a significant portion of your time, and more important tasks get sidelined due to them.
Common examples of such tasks are: digitizing receipts, invoices, and reports, field tasks such as inventory management, archiving, and searching of documents required for different functions.
Unfortunately, without these daily tasks, the fabric of the corporation would unravel, and things would take a turn for the worse. So, how can this problem be solved?
The answer is quite simple. There are plenty of everyday tools that corporations can use to simplify their workflows and automate repetitive tasks. This lets employees reclaim their time and focus on more urgent tasks.
Let’s take a look at how that can be done.
Why Simplification Matters
Workflow simplifications are very useful. They provide a lot of benefits to a company. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits.
- Greater consistency. When routine workflows are simple, they become repeatable with fewer errors.
- Improved productivity. Since simplification means there is less time and effort required to do tasks, employees can get more done in the same amount of time..
- Better innovation potential. Once routine tasks are under control, you free up mental and operational capacity for higher-order work, which results in innovation.
Without workflow simplification, employees get tied up in things like doing hand-offs, coordinating across broken channels, and redoing a lot of work because it wasn’t managed properly. That’s why simplification is necessary.
Everyday Tools That Drive Simplification
Now that we have discussed the advantages of process simplification, let’s take a look at some of the everyday tools that can help you make your work easier.
Here are four tools that make a real difference, along with how each can be embedded into a workflow to simplify tasks, reduce manual effort, and boost reliability.
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
An OCR tool or image to text converter can extract the text from inside an image or scanned document. The extracted text is in the DOC, DOCX, or TXT format, which means it can be easily searched for and stored as a digital text file.
Image-to-text converters are very fast, so they save you a lot of time.
Where it fits.
If you handle invoices, handwritten notes, meeting whiteboards, or archival documents, OCR lets you avoid manual re-typing and instantly turn static text into digital files. Digital files you can easily search, analyze, or integrate with other workflows.
How to use it to simplify document workflows.
You can use OCR tools in the following ways to make your work easier.
- Use OCR to digitize physical documents as they arrive, so you no longer have a “paper” backlog.
- Set up automatic import workflows via scripts that can scan physical docs, put them into an OCR tool, and then use the extracted data to populate spreadsheets or databases.
- The searchable text output is extremely useful for reducing the time spent digging for information.
So that’s how you can simplify document workflows with OCR.
- QR Scanner
A QR scanner is a great everyday tool that can help you simplify certain workflows. However, unlike OCR, it requires some prior setup to reap the benefits.
If your organization can set up QR codes, certain things like:
- Payments,
- Login pages/portals
- Product information
- Feedback
- Other URLs
Then a QR scanner can be used to quickly interact with those processes and cut down some of the repetitive steps.
Where it fits.
QR codes are best used where you want to link a physical medium to a digital one. So, stuff like inventory management, status updates, or other specialized tasks.
How to use it to simplify tasks.
Here are some examples of where QR codes and scanners can hasten and simplify processes.
- If you deal with lots of print material, then replace any long URLs in it with QR codes. The user can simply scan the code instead of typing the URL.
- In logistics or on-site operations, use a QR scanner to instantly pull up a record, update status, or trigger a workflow rather than navigating through menus to do it manually.
- For inventory or check-in processes, embed QR codes on items or badges. Employees can simply hold up the badge to a scanner, which triggers an event rather. This is much faster than a manual lookup.
So that’s how QR codes can simplify stuff.
- Reverse Image Search
This is a bit of a contentious one because it’s more relevant to the marketing segment of a company. What reverse image search does is that it lets you upload or paste an image and find where else it appears online. It also shows different variants of the image.
The search takes less than a minute and is quite thorough. It beats manual searches any day.
Where it fits.
In marketing, content creation, and brand monitoring, reverse image search tools are used for research, finding accidental plagiarism, and detecting misuse of your media.
How to use it to simplify workflows.
Marketers can use reverse image search tools online to do the following things.
- Before publishing any content with images, run a reverse image search to verify that they are not reused or that similar content hasn’t been published before.
- Monitor your brand’s graphics and assets to detect unauthorized usage early.
- Graphic designers can fast forward their research by uploading a reference photo to trace similar visuals or find a higher-resolution version to use for their work.
A Simple 3-Step Framework to Embed These Tools
To identify the tasks and processes that you can simplify in your own work environment, just use this 3-step framework.
- Step 1. Choose one process to target. Pick something small, definable, and repeatable.
- Step 2. Map out the steps in the process and identify the extra ones. Note where manual hand-offs, duplicates, or delays occur, as these usually add to the increased time and complexity.
- Step 3. Check which tool can simplify those extra steps. Apply the tool and check how it affects the process. Start with a short test cycle to see how much time and effort the tool saves. Then start rolling it out company-wide.
If you do this, you will get all the benefits we highlighted in the “Why Simplification Matters” section.
Final Thoughts
You don’t always need a bespoke, expensive, and flashy solution to every problem. Many can be solved simply by using everyday tools that you can find for free or cheaply.
We listed three examples, i.e., QR scanners, OCR tools, and reverse image search tools. These can improve various daily tasks like document digitizing, research, and field operations.
But if you look in your own niche, you will also find such solutions. So find them and use them to simplify your workflows.
