When a new program or tool is invented, it is almost always to make someone’s life easier. This could be the consumer, a professional or a business. In essence the program is designed to work for you, doing the things you can’t or don’t want to do. But what happens when your becomes so focused on entering and extracting information from one program just to put it into another one? At what point do you start working for the software and not the other way around?

There are many things that people excel at, creative thinking, problem solving, emotional intelligence, and flexibility…. Reading and entering data is not one of them. So why is it that a large bulk of peoples time seems to be moving information between software packages?

Well one reason is that many of the programs that people work with are not integrated with one another. They need someone to move and change the information to fit their way of working. What this does is create hours of time where people who are full of creativity and ideas are essentially copying and pasting information from one box to another. This is compounded by the fact that many of these programs are specialist and need people with knowledge in the field to use them properly. What you end up with is a professional who, instead of using their expertise and experience to provide the best service possible or come up with innovative ways to improve the industry, is stuck working for the programs that are supposed to be supporting him/her.

Why is this the case and how did we get here?

A big issue is that different software is developed by different companies and the are usually designed to perform a specific task not complete a workflow. This results in most people needing to combine different programs in order to get the functionality that they need for their unique way of working.

What do you get when you combine programs from, sometimes competing, companies that are not designed to work together? As you have probably guessed, you end up with a workflow that involves many in between, workaround steps that are not only inefficient but also leave huge gaps for human error.

How can you solve this?

Fortunately, more companies are realizing that they can improve their market share by providing a way to streamline this workflow and provide open APIs that let a programmer access the software at a more functional level. What this does is open a path of communication between the companies software and another program. It takes some technical knowledge but through this, it is possible to effectively benefit from several programs and get the most out of their combination without all the manual, time-consuming steps in between.

You may be asking yourself, how does this help me? I’m not a programmer and I don’t know how to work with APIs. Fortunately at Flawless Workflow, we have a solution. We provide custom programming services that can take your long complex work processes and design a streamlined solution where you don’t even have to buy any new software!