Nintex: Enhancing Productivity through Workflow Automation

John Burton, CEO

Until now, workflow automation has resonated more with the conversion of paper documents to digital forms and enhancing content management systems to enable better access to the data, than with a business process improvement that achieves efficiency and upholds accountability. Toiling in an ultra-competitive marketplace, organizations demand more. To keep up with market dynamics, businesses must look for solutions beyond just managing isolated documents. They need solutions that—by using digital content—streamline their processes, bring more efficiency, automate repetitive processes and free up resources to focus on core business activities.

To that end, the advent of newer technologies such as cloud and mobility – combined with an improved workflow engine in Microsoft SharePoint software – has played a pivotal role in enabling workflow automation to evolve dramatically to meet the requirements of the demanding markets. In fact, new age workflow solutions put users in the driver’s seat; users can define new workflows themselves and customize it whenever needed, without the need to code the internal logic.

One company leading this transformation is Nintex, which through the course of its inception recognized by empowering everyday users, like business analysts, to automate workflows and solve their own business problems, organizations become more efficient and boost their productivity.

Nintex CEO John Burton explains, “Nintex helps organizations worldwide transform how work gets done because you can easily tackle basic functions to company-wide processes with clicks, not code.”

The Founder’s Motivation:
In 2006, Australian entrepreneurs Brett Campbell and Brian Cook discovered that most IT departments are often busy automating complex and critical processes and handling security and compliance issues. As a result, departmental groups try to do their own IT automation in some way; after all, they need to get their work done. On one hand, the processes undertaken in IT are typically high transaction volume and involve very specific, structured data. In contrast, a line-of-business department typically deals with an unstructured process comprised of human interactions, forms, records, documents and videos. This content usually resides in different types of application content repositories, including Dropbox, AWS or Box. This diversity makes such processes too complex to automate, so people get exasperated as soon as the traditional tools become obsolete and difficult to use,or when they require extensive programming, something with which process owners are not familiar. Campbell and Cook set out to tackle this business challenge by simplifying this cumbersome process.

Driven by their desire for flexibility, the opportunity to be creative, and the power to shape their own future, Campbell and Cook founded Nintex in Melbourne, Australia. They strongly believed that through technology, they could reinvent the way people work. Nintex’s workflow automation platform was created to do exactly that: It gives process owners a shot at designing innovative workflows and taking complete control of their businesses.

Nintex CFO Eric Johnson adds, “As a result of our technology and business approach, Nintex has grown to more than 6,000 customers in more than 90 countries.”

The company that started its operations from Australia has quadrupled in size since its inception. Currently, it is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington – a suburb of Seattle. Nintex has development teams in Malaysia, Southern California, and Bellevue as well as in Melbourne. It also has large sales and support operations in London, Bellevue, and Melbourne. Nintex is growing rapidly to meet industry demands, which is clear from its new offices in Tokyo and most recently in Dubai.

Path-breaking Innovations in product development, user interface and cloud services
Nintex provides workflow automation software, mobile and cloud services that enable organizations of all types and sizes to automate everyday business processes quickly and easily. Simply put, Nintex’s workflow automation connects people, processes, and content. It helps coordinate the activities of the workforce and allows access to digital content directly through the business processes. This enables processes to flow from place to place and from person to person. The diversified business processes that organizations can easily streamline with the Nintex workflow automation platform include leave requests, content approvals, and IT help desk requests, among many others.

Nintex helps fill in the gaps between IT and line-of-business users, giving non-IT people the power to design and manage their own workflows.

From automating workflows and forms, to document generation, the Nintex platform leverages the world’s largest technology ecosystems, including Office 365, Salesforce, SharePoint, and other enterprise services platforms. With Nintex, IT professionals, business analysts, SharePoint administrators, and Salesforce users are empowered to efficiently build and use workflow and document generation solutions that enhance productivity.

With document generation technology from Nintex, businesses benefit from an end-to-end solution that increases the quality of engagement between their own sales team and customers. Users of Nintex’s Drawloop document generation app are more responsive during the sales cycle, which means they can close deals faster, leading to more revenue. Additionally, with the Nintex Connector for Salesforce, companies can build automated workflows that communicate with their CRM systems, as well as synch content and data online or offline. Customers can capture data, including geolocation, videos, images and barcodes; create new records; and trigger any workflow and document generation through the integration between Salesforce, Nintex and Drawloop (which Nintex acquired in July 2015).

Nintex helps fill in the gaps between IT and line-of-business users, giving non-IT people the power to design and manage their own workflows. Its platform, which includes Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms for SharePoint and Office 365, streamlines processes on and between today's most-used enterprise-grade content management systems and collaboration platforms, deployed either on-premise or on the public cloud. Adopting Nintex’s workflow automation software offers several benefits. It streamlines communications in the businesses processes, which means no more email approvals or follow-ups.

Everything is consolidated into a dashboard, and managers can instantly view bottlenecks in the process and address workflow events appropriately. An owner is created for each step in the workflow and the entire process can be monitored in real time. By introducing this level of information transparency and establishing clear approval hierarchy in the business processes, organizations can achieve greater accountability and work more efficiently. The results are more conspicuous when processes span across departments and across geographies, even when multiple organizations are involved. What’s more, Nintex workflow automation minimizes costs due to manual errors and inefficiency.

Workflow automation made easy
Today, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies are making significant inroads in the business world. Nintex designed Nintex workflow automation with mobile devices in mind. Nintex technology unites the various systems in use across the entire organization, empowering mobile users to take full advantage of the cloud, and boosting collaboration and productivity.

Nintex firmly believes that those who take part in a process usually know it best and are the ones who usually have great ideas about how to improve it. Its automation platform has been designed with two key design criteria in mind. First, it must be easy to use and second, it should leverage existing investments in the enterprise content systems, like SharePoint and Office 365, with which users are already familiar. The prowess of Nintex’s workflow platform lies in the fact that end users build the actual day-to-day business workflows and they can do so after minimal training and with no programming skills. It’s that easy to learn.

John adds, “Nintex can be used by non-technical people to easily build enterprise-level workflow applications from simple to a sophisticated level.”

A unique business model:
In addition to offering innovative technologies, Nintex conducts business in a unique way. While it is a software and cloud services company that builds and supports automation products, it also works hand-in-hand with 1,500 partners that offer professional services like consulting, implementation and training. This approach allows Nintex to focus on what it does best: Product Innovation. An extensive network of worldwide partners sells and implements solutions for Nintex. This model has ensured that Nintex’s technology is sold and backed up by services in different geographies, business cultures, languages, legal environments and industries.

From a technology perspective, Nintex gives users the capability to design their processes with clicks rather than code. People can build solutions in hours or days, not months or years.

“Customers love Nintex because when you begin to better manage everyday routines, it adds up to more productivity, a stronger bottom line, happier people, and opportunities for teams to focus on more strategic endeavors,” says John.

Committed to the future
Satisfied customers, continued innovation and extensive resources have been the recipe for Nintex’s success. In 2015, Nintex earned several prestigious awards, including: Microsoft Office and SharePoint Application Development Partner of the Year, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and Seattle Business magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.

There appears to be no stopping in Nintex’s rapid growth trajectory, which is fueled by the rising global demand for solutions that improve the quality and speed by which people interact with each other and content.

“When we build powerful software that’s easy-to-use and delivers fast results, it quickly becomes contagious,” concludes Eric. “We’re focused on helping people do more of what they do best.”