Automate your organization’s editorial and business approval processes with Writer’s preconfigured workflows.
Let’s say you are working on an important business document, a service-level agreement (SLA), or standard loan agreement for a customer. You will have to share the document with all the stakeholders from different departments, like sales, technology, customer support, and legal. You will also have to prompt everyone to review the document within a specific period, follow up with those who haven’t reviewed, discuss the changes suggested, and, once everyone is onboard, finalize the changes and get the document approved.
While just reading this can make you dizzy, imagine actually taking all these steps to get a document approved. Anytime you collaborate on a document with multiple teams, things are bound to get complicated. You need a system that creates a sense of order.
Enter Writer’s multi-stage document workflows!
Writer’s multi-stage document workflows allow you to streamline and standardize business processes, as well as the process of creating, reviewing, and approving documents across an organization. Simply initiate the workflow to notify the designated actors—reviewers, assigners, and approvers—who can either suggest changes or approve the document.
Writer’s approval workflows include many convenient capabilities to streamline your organization’s document lifecycle management and approval processes.
1. Purpose-built workflows
Writer features four ready-to-use workflows with the option to specify a due date. Reviewers or approvers will receive email reminders to act on the documents before the deadline. This eliminates the hassle of sending multiple reminders and follow-ups to get your documents reviewed or approved.
Review workflow: It’s always better to have a second pair of eyes take a look at your work. Get your team members, peers, co-authors, or subject matter experts to review your document, and offer suggestions for improvement. This is a perfect way to achieve writer-expert synergy for case studies, white papers, and more.
Approval workflow: Efficiently receive formal document approval from your manager or process owners. For example, you might want your manager to approve an offer letter you drafted for a new hire, or a loan officer to approve your loan document. This workflow facilitates prompt approvals for any type of document.
Editorial review workflow: Send your document to your editorial team for review. Include a due date so they can prioritize and delegate it to the right editors, and complete the approval on time. No more delays in publishing your monthly blogs, newsletters, or campaigns.
Review and approval workflow: Get your articles reviewed by your leads, experts, or collaborators, and then approved by your manager or designated DRIs in a sequence. For example, when you are replying to an RFP/RFQ, you would want your manager to review it and then send it to your sales director for approval.
You can use one or more workflows to meet your specific document management needs.
2. Custom workflow triggers and post-workflow actions
Workflows can be triggered automatically or manually, as needed. For example, you can set the workflow to automatically start as soon as the document owner marks it as “Ready.”
Once the workflow is complete, you can use the prebuilt actions library to add a watermark to the final document, rename it, move it to a specific folder, publish it on your desired platform, and more. You can even configure your own post-workflow action. Maybe you’ll automatically order a pizza for your team once your document is approved!
3. Controlled collaboration
Control who can do what and when. At every stage of the workflow, only designated collaborators will be able to work on the document.
For example, once a document is submitted for review, only the reviewers will be allowed to make changes to it. The others can only add comments.
4. Real-time document status and email notifications
Easily identify your document’s stage in the process with the in-product status notifier. As your document progresses through the workflow, you can view its stage–Ready for Review, In Review, Changes Suggested, In Approval, and Approved–right at the top of the document.
Writer also keeps all stakeholders informed about the document status with real-time email notifications.
5. Visual workflow status tracker
View your document’s journey through the workflow to see its status and act accordingly.
6. Document review dashboard
Easily view the status of all documents that you’ve submitted for review, as well as the ones that are awaiting your action, right from your Writer dashboard. There’s no need to navigate to different pages or views, or sift through your emails to track your documents.
7. Detailed workflow history and audit trails
View a comprehensive history and audit trail for all workflows to satisfy compliance regulations with answers to these three important Ws: who performed what action and when. Click the Time link in the workflow history to view versions of the document at each stage.
Workflow history also helps you identify which stage of the workflow is consuming the most time, so you can identify ways to enhance your workflow or processes.
That’s all for now. Configuring custom workflows, enabling workflows for specific folders, role-based access to editing tools, and more, are in the works.
Take our new workflows for a spin and let us know your thoughts and feedback at support@zohowriter.com.
Happy writing!
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