Business process automation (BPA) is a strategic discipline that utilizes technology to orchestrate and automate end-to-end business activities and workflows. The goal is to minimize manual intervention, reduce errors, and accelerate processes, thereby freeing human capital to focus on innovation, strategy, and complex problem-solving. At the heart of this transformation is the ability to connect disparate systems and teams into a cohesive, efficient whole.
Workfront serves as the central nervous system for managing enterprise work, and its powerful, low-code automation and integration platform, Fusion, is the key to unlocking these transformative benefits. By enabling work to flow freely across essential applications, Fusion provides a single, connected solution to manage, execute, and automate work at scale.
This post will cover:
- 1. Automating campaign project workflows.
- 2. Streamlining work intake requests.
- 3. Intelligent resource management: Automating work tasks.
- 4. Creating dynamic project plans.
- 5. Automating compliance reviews and approval workflows.
- Automate business processes and project workflows with Workfront.
Here’s why clients love automating business processes within Workfront:
- Eliminates duplicative actions
- Increases speed to trigger processes via automation
- Minimizes clicks to perform specific actions
By leveraging Fusion, clients provide enhanced user experience and increase the return on investment (ROI) of the Workfront platform. Here are the top five ways our clients are already increasing ROI with work automation:
1. Automating campaign project workflows.
The Challenge: Marketing organizations are under constant pressure to deliver campaigns more quickly and effectively. However, the campaign initiation process is often a significant bottleneck. Requests arrive through fragmented channels, such as email and chat, often lacking the critical information needed to initiate work. This forces project managers to spend hundreds of hours manually creating programs and projects, deciphering requirements, linking disparate work items, and chasing down stakeholders for clarification, all of which significantly delays time-to-market and inflates costs.
The Solution: Utilizing a platform like Workfront Fusion, the entire campaign lifecycle can be automated, resulting in a seamless flow from request to execution.
- Trigger: The process begins when a standardized campaign request is submitted via an integrated portal, such as a Workfront Request Queue. This form ensures all necessary data—like objectives, budget, target audience, and key deliverables—is captured upfront.
- Action 1 (Data Validation & Enrichment): The workflow instantly validates that all required fields are complete. It can then integrate with other core systems, such as a CRM like Salesforce, to automatically pull in additional context, including budget codes, regional data, or target audience segments, thereby enriching the request without manual effort.
- Action 2 (Object Creation): Based on the request type (e.g., "Product Launch," "Digital Ad Campaign," "Virtual Event"), Fusion automatically creates the appropriate high-level Program and all necessary child Projects within Workfront.
- Action 3 (Templating & Linking): The correct, pre-approved project template is automatically applied to each new project. This template includes predefined tasks, dependencies, timelines, and role assignments, ensuring consistency and adherence to best practices. All new projects are automatically linked to the parent program for holistic visibility and reporting.
- Action 4 (Notifications): Key stakeholders, such as the marketing manager and creative lead, are automatically notified via their preferred channel (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email) that the project has been created and is ready for kickoff.
ROI & Benefits: This automation directly addresses the need to streamline marketing and sales processes, which is a primary use case for BPA. By automating the administrative setup, production managers and project teams can focus their energy on strategic planning and flawless execution, dramatically accelerating campaign delivery.
Workfront in Action: A financial services client was spending hundreds of hours each year manually creating and linking programs and projects from integrated campaign requests. By implementing automation with Workfront Fusion, they eliminated this manual work, allowing their production managers to focus on executing each campaign effectively and on time, driving a clear and immediate return on their investment.
2. Streamlining work intake requests.
The Challenge: Creative, marketing, and operations teams are often overwhelmed with high-volume, quick-turnaround requests for assets such as social media graphics, website updates, sales collateral, or minor copy edits. A single master request might necessitate the creation of dozens of small, individual projects. Manually creating these projects one by one is a tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming task for production managers, creating a bottleneck that prevents creative work from even beginning.
The Automated Project Workflow Solution: Workfront Fusion can transform this inefficient process into a fully automated work intake gateway.
- Trigger: A user submits a multi-project request through a dedicated Workfront Request Queue. The intake form is intelligently designed to capture the master details and allow the user to specify the number and type of individual deliverables required (e.g., "5 banner ads," "3 social media videos," "2 blog post layouts").
- Action 1 (Parsing the Request): The workflow intelligently parses the data from the single master request to understand the individual project requirements.
- Action 2 (Iterative Project Creation): Using a looping function, the automation iterates through the list of required deliverables. For each item, it automatically creates a separate, correctly templated project in Workfront.
- Action 3 (Data Population): Each newly created project is automatically populated with the core information from the master request (e.g., campaign name, due date, key messaging), ensuring consistency. At the same time, each project remains a distinct object that can be tracked, assigned, and managed individually.
- Action 4 (Consolidated Confirmation): The original requestor receives a single, consolidated notification confirming that the work has been accepted, along with direct links to all the newly created projects for easy tracking.
Return on Investment: This automation directly delivers on key benefits that users value most: it eliminates duplicative actions and dramatically reduces the number of clicks needed to perform a specific action. By automating this intake process, writers, designers, and production managers are freed from administrative burdens, enabling them to dedicate more time to high-value, creative, and strategic work that drives business growth.
Workfront in Action: A leading retail giant was spending an excessive number of hours manually converting single requests into multiple quick-execution projects. By designing an automated scenario for this conversion, they freed up significant time for their creative and production teams, enabling them to focus on work that promotes growth and value, rather than repetitive data entry.
3. Intelligent resource management: Automating work tasks.
The Challenge: In high-volume, fast-paced work environments, manually assigning the right people to hundreds or thousands of individual tasks across numerous projects becomes a significant operational bottleneck. Resource managers often find themselves spending most of their time on tactical, low-value traffic management—clicking through projects and assigning tasks—instead of focusing on strategic, high-value activities such as capacity planning and resource forecasting. This not only slows down project velocity but also risks misallocating talent.
The Automated Project Workflow Solution: Intelligent automation can transform resource assignments from a manual chore into a strategic, data-driven process.
- Trigger: A new project is created in Workfront, and its status is updated to "Ready for Staffing."
- Action 1 (Role-Based Assignment): The workflow automatically identifies the specific job roles required by the project's template (e.g., "Senior Designer," "Copywriter," "Front-End Developer").
- Action 2 (Integration & Logic): Fusion applies predefined conditional logic. For straightforward assignments, it can automatically assign a designated team or a specific user to all tasks associated with a particular job role within that project.
- Action 3 (AI-Powered Recommendation): Looking ahead, more advanced workflows can leverage AI for even greater intelligence. By integrating with Workfront's native resource management tools, automation could check team members’ real-time availability, skill profiles, and current workload. AI can then analyze this data, along with historical project information, to recommend or even automatically assign the best-fit, available user for the job, ensuring optimal resource allocation.
- Action 4 (Confirmation & Handoff): Once resources are assigned, the relevant team members are automatically notified of their new tasks. Simultaneously, the project's status is automatically updated to "In Progress," signaling that work can officially begin.
Return on Investment: This automation directly enhances project management efficiency and predictability. It enables a critical strategic shift for resource managers, allowing them to move away from tactical assignments and focus on developing accurate resource forecasts and long-term capacity plans. This is vital, as effective resource management is one of the most critical factors in meeting project deadlines and budgets.
Workfront in Action: A client in the healthcare industry found the manual assignment of users to tasks to be incredibly tedious within their high-traffic work environment. They implemented automation to handle resource assignments for newly created projects across multiple job roles. This allowed their resource managers to offload the tactical work and concentrate on the more strategic and impactful task of developing accurate resource forecasts.
4. Creating dynamic project plans.
The Challenge: Using master templates is a cornerstone of efficient project management, providing a standardized starting point for repeatable work. However, these templates are often built to be comprehensive, containing tasks that may be irrelevant for specific project variations. This forces project managers to begin every new project with a manual review process, painstakingly deleting inapplicable tasks and adjusting timelines. This repetitive activity not only delays the project kickoff but also introduces the risk of human error, where a critical task might be deleted by mistake or an unnecessary one left in.
The Automated Project Workflow Solution: Automation can transform static templates into dynamic, intelligent project plans that are perfectly tailored to the specific needs of each initiative.
- Trigger: A new project is created in Workfront from a master template. During creation, the user populates a custom form field that defines the project's specific nature, such as "Project Sub-Type" or "Deliverable Format."
- Action 1 (Conditional Logic): The workflow immediately reads the value in this custom field (e.g., "Digital Only," "Print Component Included," "Video Asset").
- Action 2 (Task Identification & Removal): Based on a predefined set of rules associated with that sub-type, Fusion programmatically identifies all tasks within the project plan that have been marked as inapplicable for that specific workflow. For instance, if the sub-type is "Digital Only," the automation will instantly find and delete all tasks related to "Print Production," "Shipping," and "Physical Mockup Review."
- Action 3 (Timeline Adjustment): After tailoring the task list, the workflow can automatically recalculate the project's duration and key milestone dates based on the remaining tasks and their established dependencies, ensuring the timeline is accurate from the very beginning.
Return on Investment: This automation provides an immediate and enhanced user experience for project managers, directly increasing the ROI of the Workfront platform. By eliminating a tedious and error-prone manual step, it allows PMs to begin project execution more quickly and with greater confidence. It establishes a more organized, predictable, and efficient process, ensuring that every project plan is lean, accurate, and perfectly aligned with its objectives from day one.
Workfront in Action: A client in the retail industry leveraged a single master template for all newly created projects. However, each project manager was required to manually review and adjust the project plan by removing tasks not needed for a particular project type. They implemented automation to handle the removal of these inapplicable tasks automatically, empowering their project managers to bypass the manual setup and move directly to project execution with greater speed and accuracy.
5. Automating compliance reviews and approval workflows.
The Challenge: For organizations in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, compliance is not optional; it is a critical business function. The process of ensuring that all marketing and project materials meet strict legal and regulatory standards is often manual, cumbersome, and fraught with risk. Teams may be required to manually create separate compliance projects for every marketing initiative, a process that consumes considerable time and effort. The approval workflow itself can become a black hole, with projects stalled for days or weeks while teams chase stakeholders for sign-offs, creating significant delays and a poor audit trail.
The Automated Project Workflow Solution: Automation can embed governance directly into the project lifecycle, creating a streamlined, transparent, and auditable compliance review process.
- Trigger: A marketing project in Workfront reaches a predefined milestone or status, such as "Ready for Compliance Review."
- Action 1 (Conditional Project/Task Creation): Based on the project's type or other metadata, the workflow automatically initiates the correct compliance process. This could involve creating a new, linked sub-project specifically for the compliance team's review, or it could add a standardized set of approval tasks and proofing workflows directly to the existing project.
- Action 2 (Automated Handoff & Notification): The designated compliance team or a list of specific approvers is automatically assigned to the review tasks. They receive an instant notification with all relevant documents and assets attached or linked directly within the task, eliminating the need to search for information.
- Action 3 (Approval Routing & Escalation): The workflow manages the entire approval sequence. If an approver fails to respond within a specified timeframe (e.g., 48 hours), the system can be configured to send automated reminders. If there is still no response, the approval can be automatically escalated to the approver's manager to prevent bottlenecks.
- Action 4 (Status Update & Audit Trail): Once all approvals are secured, the parent project's status is automatically updated to "Approved," signaling that the next phase of work can begin. Critically, the entire sequence of events—who approved what and when—is automatically logged, creating a complete, tamper-proof audit trail for future reference.
Return on Investment: This automation is a powerful example of reducing both business risk and process redundancy. By automating the process, project teams are given valuable time back to focus on their core competency—developing high-quality assets—while the organization gains confidence that regulatory requirements are being handled consistently and transparently.
Workfront in Action: A client in the financial services industry was required to create a separate compliance project for each marketing project. This manual process consumed a considerable amount of time over the course of a year. They implemented automation to manage the entire compliance approval process, eliminating unnecessary manual tasks and allowing their project teams to focus more on developing assets while also strengthening their governance framework.
Automate business processes and project workflows with Workfront.
Business process automation is far more than a tool for incremental efficiency; it is a powerful catalyst for strategic business transformation. By systematically automating critical project workflows, organizations can unlock exponential value, achieving massive ROI, dramatic increases in productivity, and significant reductions in costly errors. The benefits extend beyond the balance sheet, fostering a more innovative and engaged workforce and delivering a superior experience that builds lasting customer loyalty.
The power to achieve this transformation is more accessible than ever. With intuitive, low-code platforms like Workfront, the ability to design and deploy sophisticated automations is no longer confined to the IT department. Business leaders and process owners are now empowered to connect their entire work ecosystem, eliminate friction, and orchestrate success at scale. By embracing automation, organizations can stop managing a chaotic series of tasks and start conducting a symphony of strategic execution.
Want to see these principles in action? Watch the overview video and discover how Fusion connects your entire work ecosystem.
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