“How to increase productivity in the organization, at work, and in the routine?” is one of the most frequent searches on Google. In companies of any size, productivity tends to increase when processes become more efficient, predictable, and measurable. This is because time is no longer consumed by manual tasks, rework, and approvals without traceability.
In practice, productivity suffers when repetitive operational activities take up team hours. Billing, financial approvals, internal controls, and complex business rules are still executed manually in many companies, raising operating costs and reducing scalability.
A consistent strategy of Digital Transformation acts directly on these bottlenecks by structuring processes, automating controls and providing visibility of performance in real time.
What is productivity and why it matters
Productivity can be understood as the relationship between what is produced and the resources used to produce. In Wikipedia, for example, productivity is basically defined “as the relationship between production and the factors of production used (...) The greater the ratio between the quantity produced by the factors used, the greater the productivity.”
In the business context, the practical implication is direct: if the team spends a large part of the working hours on manual and repetitive tasks, the organization produces less than it could with the same resources.
How digital transformation increases productivity
Digital Transformation applied to productivity usually materializes on three fronts that complement each other.
1) Process Flows (BPM)
With process flows, it is feasible to implement initiatives of BPM (Business Process Management) in an environment designed for the reality of the business, with defined rules, steps and managers.
This allows:
- standardize critical routines (purchases, payments, billing, compliance);
- reduce dependency on parallel controls (spreadsheets and emails);
- adjust processes as the operation evolves, without starting from scratch.
2) Automated controls
With digitalization and automation, controls no longer depend on manual execution and start operating with automatic rules and validations.
Examples of automation with a direct impact on productivity:
- approvals by grant and amount;
- validation of internal limits and policies;
- auditing of decision steps and trails;
- automatic registration of deadlines, managers and pending issues.
This type of control improves information consistency and reduces time spent checking, correcting, and reprocessing.
3) Real-time information
Access to information in real time provides a reliable operational view of what is happening and what is stuck, with immediate reflection in management and prioritization.
Practical impacts:
- quick identification of queues and bottlenecks;
- monitoring SLAs and approval deadlines;
- decision-making based on current operational data;
- reduced effort to generate manual reports.
Where to start in your organization
An effective starting point is to map processes with greater volume, greater risk, and longer cycle time (for example: financial approvals, billing, payments, and compliance). Then, define simple operational indicators to measure gains: cycle time, rework rate, SLA, cost per transaction, and volume processed per person.
