Small and medium-sized businesses face the same challenges as their bigger peers when customer and process numbers and, ultimately, revenue start to increase. However, unlike multinational enterprises and corporates, SMBs often lack the financial means to set up sophisticated IT departments to properly implement workflow and process automation. This is where Intuit comes in.
Intuit provides software solutions for SMBs that empower them to automate their workflows using simple forms and templates, thus digitizing their businesses. This approach quickly pays off for its customers. In fact, Deloitte’s Connected Small Businesses US report reveals the most digitally advanced small businesses in the United States are more likely to create jobs and manage to significantly increase both revenue and top-line growth.
At CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2 Srivatsan Vijayaraghavan, Senior Engineering Manager at Intuit, explained how QuickBooks — a workflows-as-a-service platform — enables SMBs to create their own workflows in a do-it-yourself manner. BPMN concepts are translated into user-friendly forms that are made accessible via a Workflow Designer. Ready-made templates for common workflows, as well as seamless integrations with various Intuit services, are also available to provide an intuitive in-product experience.
One of these services is the Workflow Automation service, maintained by Intuit’s own developer teams and powered by Camunda as the core BPMN engine. The key benefit for SMBs is that they can leverage a top-notch BPMN engine without having to raise capital to hire IT staff and build up an IT architecture from scratch themselves – a process that takes significant time and even overburden a SMB’s balance sheet.
Intuit hits a sweet spot as companies seek to automate more. The State of Process Automation report found that almost every IT decision-maker believes automation is critical to their organization’s digital transformation. Automation of workflows is the first important step in achieving that goal.
How does it work?
Intuit breaks down workflows and their respective lifecycles into three main steps.
1. Intuit developers create BPMN and DMN templates according to various workflow use cases. Customers see a simplified UI for each workflow and can decide which ones to use.
2. Customers define the workflow parameters and rules in Intuit’s QuickBooks Online product. QuickBooks is an accounting software that provides accounting applications such as accepting business payments, managing and paying invoices, and payroll functions. The Advanced Online version offers features for automating business processes such as workflow automation, batch transactions or business insights.
3. Each customer configuration is integrated with the saved templates in order to easily create process definitions in Camunda. This feature hyperscales the BMPN engine by integrating more and more SMBs, each with the ability to scale their processes on their own. Whenever customers perform actions in QuickBooks Online, for example, when they create a new invoice, they trigger a new process instance in Camunda. Each update to an existing action also signals the running process in Camunda.
Do you want to know more? Watch Srivatsan’s CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2 presentation on-demand for free and learn about which software applications SMBs are using and how to dig deeper into the workflow automation journey.
