The Fastest Way to Insights on Salesforce

Written By: Kramer Reeves, EVP – WORK-RELAY

Beyond Collaboration: Prioritizing Work Coordination for Innovation

Many of you have spent a two-decade journey in the software industry witnessing a series of announcements and releases—many incremental, some monumental—that aim to enhance productivity, efficiency, and eventually bring transformation.

Yet the current landscape, according to Harvard Business Review’s 2023 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 global participants, reveals a startling fact: employees still spend nearly 60% of their time communicating, leaving only 40% for creation and innovation. Think about that. While we often emphasize the importance of collaboration and communication, HBR raises a crucial argument—how can genuine creation and innovation thrive, when communication dominates?

The answer lies in the coordination of work (not collaboration). Accelerating and automating the coordination of work, especially the complex, time-critical, repetitive work found in your mission-critical business processes—is key to success. By doing so, you and your teams can bring better products and services to market, faster. McKinsey & Company supports this sentiment, emphasizing that poor coordination between functions not only slows decision making, but also and hampers the mobilization of resources to the most pressing issues.

The Transformative Role of Model-Driven Software for AI Readiness

As mentioned in Work-Relay’s v7 demo, software has come a long way in the past 20 years. The seminal articles of “Software will Eat the World” from 2009 eventually evolved to “Models will Run the World” in 2018. Today, we are at a point where both are true and Artificial Intelligence is no longer a distant future—it’s the present reality. The culmination of model-driven software, AI-models, process models, and data-models have become the backbone of the nearly nine trillion (yes, trillion!) dollar IT industry. Now, while navigating the impact of these advancements, it’s clear models are key for software, data, operations, and AI to truly hit transformative levels.

As the journey of digitizing work at scale unfolds, the transformative influence of model-driven software is evident. Already, it has brought automation, insights, productivity, efficiency, acceleration, coordination, and more, to enterprises globally. In turn, this wave of innovation enables enterprises to bring ever-improving products and services (except for the DMV…why can’t that experience be delightful?) to our doorstep. At the core of digitized workflows stand model-driven applications. Additionally, digitized environments offer tremendous amounts of data. This serves as an opportunity for data-driven decision making and, more significantly, a space where AI models can go to work.

But first, you need to digitize the work.

Work-Relay’s Role in Digitization, Acceleration, and AI Readiness

Let’s take a step back to confirm the business problem you are up against and how Work-Relay offers a solution.

At its core, Work-Relay digitizes your processes—the granular units of work, including steps or tasks owned by both humans and systems. These units, when aggregated, make up the mission-critical processes that run your business.

Those Units of Work (UoW) encompass four key concepts including:

1. The Work to be completed: your deliverable
2. The Sequence in which to complete the deliverable: understanding dependencies
3. The Resource to complete it: the person, bot, team, or system
4. The Time in which to complete it: defining the duration

Each UoW represents a step or task within a process. Work-Relay visualizes, digitizes, and coordinates all these UoWs/steps and processes within a process model. Companies have used this approach to digitize, accelerate, and coordinate extremely complex operations. This spans across hundreds of systems, involves thousands of participants and users, all while collecting managing huge amounts of data.

Incorporating Work-Relay into your strategy positions your company for the impending AI revolution. Yet, it’s important to remember that AI remains about solving some of the most basic, common, and continuous business questions you’re trying to tackle.

At the end of the day, as a leader you want answers to these questions:

• What happened? Was it good or bad?
• What caused any issues? What are the root causes?
• What will happen? Will it be good or bad?
• What should happen? Ideally, it will be great.

Answers to these questions are within reach. However, achieving these answers require a strategic focus on digitization, coordination, and, ultimately, gaining insight. And that insight is attainable with the right data collected from executing operations.

The Journey to AI: Using Work-Relay to Collect, Curate, and Unleash Data Insights on Salesforce

To visualize these concepts, take a look at a large Neostella customer in the Consumer Packaged Goods industry. This organization wanted trending analytics to proactively route work based on skill levels, availability, and timing. With Work-Relay, this customer successfully reduced their time-to-market from 120 days to just 15 days in a critical product management process.

You may already be aware that Work-Relay is the only software specifically designed for repetitive, time-critical, and complex business operations on Salesforce. But that’s not all. Many of you likely execute similar complex operations as ‘projects,’ and in Work-Relay, a project is just a collection of processes where time and resources are integral elements.

By using Work-Relay, you can digitize, coordinate, and accelerate the time-to-market for your mission-critical products and services. You can manage these operations as repetitive projects in Salesforce. The next step? One word: data. With Work-Relay Version 7, the focus is specifically on harnessing your data’s potential and preparing it for the AI landscape.

In a nutshell, to improve operations, you need collected and prepared data so analytics can pave the way for AI. Work-Relay plays a crucial role in your AI readiness. Each Unit of Work (UoW) emits data, which Work-Relay collects, curates, and presents for AI models to ingest, delivering valuable insights. Join us on this transformative journey, where Work-Relay stands ready to prepare and guide you every step of the way.