Keep business agile in uncertain times with Box Relay Manual Start

The world feels unpredictable right now. To thrive in this fast-changing market, you need to build more flexibility into your business processes to handle a multitude of scenarios. Speeding up turnaround times with process automation makes rapid responses possible — enabling you to meet condensed timelines and stay ahead of your competition. 

A surefire way to drive this kind of agility is to empower your business users who are closest to the action. This allows them to design flexible business processes and deploy automated workflows that are not just efficient, but nimble as well. Also, process automation solutions need to provide the right workflow design hooks, while delivering a frictionless user experience. 

Introducing Manual Start in Box Relay

Manual Start lets you initiate a preconfigured workflow directly from a file in Box, with the added option to specify task assignees and collaborators prior to kickoff. This enables your organization to address a wider array of use cases and handle variants of a single use case by fine-tuning on a per-execution basis.

With Manual Start:

• Process ownerscreate highly flexible workflows to account for different permutations in a process
• End-users get more control over when to kick off workflows and who to involve for collaboration and task completion

Content-centric workflows that require coordination and collaboration are often in the critical path for immediate action. They rarely happen exactly the same way every time. Depending on situational factors, such as importance and urgency, individuals often have to make judgement calls on when to initiate a process and which stakeholders to involve. 

Here are some real world situations where Manual Start helps:

• An urgent sales contract for a major client needs to get fast-tracked to executive approvers in order to close. If the automated workflow can handle this exception, rather than going through the established but slower process, it can make the difference between a successful close and a lost opportunity.
• A mortgage officer handling an important loan knows, based on application details and past experience, that she needs a specific closer, underwriter, director, and VP to approve. The quicker she can specify the set of approvers and initiate the application workflow, the faster the loan gets processed.
• A procurement manager supervising end-of-quarter payments assigns incoming invoices to an on-call specialist while team members are out of office. This enables him to expedite processing and meet quarterly deadlines.

Manual Start in Box Relay makes workflows adaptable to different scenarios in a way that feels natural to users. It delivers the predictability and efficiency of automation with the flexibility to allow for human judgement. 

And we can certainly use more predictability, efficiency, and flexibility — in this most unusual time.

To learn more, check out the Box Relay community article on creating and running a Manual Start workflow.