Is your team getting bogged down with repetitive, mindless tasks?
Is critical data at your company getting siloed into apps where you don’t have access?
Are you getting frustrated with tasks that aren’t getting performed the right way?
For large and growing companies, the answer to all of these problems is the same thing: a Chief Workflow Officer Membership with XRay.Tech.
In this post, we’ll explain the ins and outs of one of our most popular service offerings, the Chief Workflow Officer Membership.
The CWO Membership is a great way for enterprise companies or rapidly growing smaller businesses to create more reliable results, save time on tedious tasks, and prepare your business to leverage AI.
If you’d like to learn more about XRay’s services, you can check out our case studies or our services page.
For now, let’s dive into the Chief Workflow Officer Membership.
CWO Membership basics
Let’s start with the basics. What is a Chief Workflow Officer Membership at XRay?
With a CWO Membership, our team at XRay becomes your company’s Chief Workflow Officer for as long as you retain your membership.
Whenever you want to improve a process or a workflow, we’re your first call. We design a better way for your team to work with the tools you’re already using, enhanced with automation and AI.
If one of your departments needs to see data created by another department in an app they don’t have access to, we’ll connect the pipes. If your team is wasting time on repetitive tasks, we’ll automate them with Zapier, Make, or other AI tools.
If you need to organize data, resources, and apps to make it easier for someone to get their job done, we’ll design and build a custom interface that puts it all in one convenient spot. If you want to get your company ready to use AI, we’ll help you to clean and structure your data so you can start building effective, automated prompts.
Our team of consultants will work with you to improve, update, and streamline any mission-critical process at your company.
Leverage an automated infrastructure to streamline work across teams and departments
However, the objective of a CWO Membership is not to create a series of disjointed automation, or point solutions.
When you start a membership, we help you create a reliable and scalable automated infrastructure that enables you to connect your teams, your software, and your data.
With all of your apps working together in concert, you and your team can make better decisions each day, as your choices will be informed by accurate, up to date information coming in from every relevant source of truth.
For an example of how it all works, I want to quickly tell you about our work with Boston BioProducts, a pharmaceutical reagent manufacturer and supplier.
CWO Membership case study: Boston BioProducts
We started a CWO Membership with Boston BioProducts in October of 2022. Boston BioProducts was (and still is) a rapidly growing company, and they were worried that the software they built their company on would no longer be sufficient.
Instead of continuing to use off-the-shelf apps like Magento and Quickbooks, they were considering switching to an Enterprise Resource Planning solution, which could have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software alone, would have required 10-12 months to implement, and would have necessitated their team to be retrained on a whole new set of tools.
Instead, they were able to scale their systems with a CWO Membership at a much lower cost, and got to keep using the same software they were familiar with in the process.
XRay’s solutions for Boston BioProducts
In the initial months of their membership, we built an automated infrastructure in Airtable that unifies all of their orders, so that both standard and custom orders were processed through the same ecommerce platform and other internal fulfillment systems.
Once the order is received, Boston BioProducts’ team can then approve the order with a single click in Airtable, instantly sending data to Shipstation so the order can be packed and shipped.
That same centralized Airtable base also supports an automated system for creating and logging new products, adding to their catalog of over 20,000 unique SKUs.
Boston BioProducts creates as many as 35 unique products every week to meet the needs of their diverse, global customer base.
With a simple algorithm implemented by our team, they can now create a properly formatted, unique ID for each item in Airtable. Once the item is created in Airtable, it’s automatically synced to other relevant apps like Magento and Quickbooks.
Previously, SKU creation and management happened entirely within a single Excel file, which was difficult to scale as their business continued to grow.
Results of Boston BioProducts’ CWO Membership with XRay
Because we started by building an automated infrastructure and connecting all of Boston BioProducts’ essential software, every new workflow connects seamlessly into their larger systems.
And as a result, Boston BioProducts has been able to reduce the time spent on order processing by 75%, and the time spent on creating new products by 90%.
Specific results will depend on your company and your goals, but Boston BioProducts is a great example of the outcomes you can expect from a CWO Membership with XRay, especially if you’re experiencing rapid growth and have concerns about scaling your internal systems.
CWO Membership timelines and cadence
Next, let’s look at the cadence of a CWO Membership.
By design, these memberships are highly collaborative. Our consultants will become part of your team, and will schedule regular meetings so we can share updates, address any obstacles that emerge, and set goals together.
It’s important to note that our consultants don’t just offer an expert opinion. They’ll also design and build the systems that you need.
Unlike the typical agency assembly line, your projects won’t get handed off to Junior teams that aren’t aware of the bigger picture. Your workflow consultants who understand your business will also be the ones doing the technical implementation. It's the same people every step of the way.
Advancing your workflow priorities with regular meetings and updates
Here’s how a membership usually works.
Each week, you’ll have a meeting with your lead XRay consultant and project manager, scheduled at a time that’s convenient for you.
Often, many of your key stakeholders will also need to be present at these meetings. These will be the people in charge of the various workflows that you want to automate or optimize. Essentially, they’re the decision makers or owners of a given process.
Our focus will vary somewhat based on your specific goal, but we typically begin a membership by establishing reliable centralized sources of truth.
In other words, we want to make sure that you have accurate and relevant information in all of your critical software before we begin automating any actions between your software.
Once your data is in order, we can start supporting any workflow with automated actions or AI output.
Collaborative workflow design
Your goals for what we accomplish are ultimately up to you, but we’ll always share our expertise to help you make an informed decision. You should think of us as being both a strategic and technical resource as you encounter forks in the road.
After selecting a goal to pursue, we’ll hold discovery meetings with your key stakeholders so we can document exactly how the process is conducted today, and highlight areas for improvement. We’ll also make note of what information each person involved in the workflow needs to see and act upon.
Once we understand how the process works in its current state, our team will design an optimized workflow that uses technology like low-code automation or AI as needed. At XRay, we always try to use our members’ existing software in conjunction with automation providers like Zapier and Make to build robust, cost-effective solutions.
Keeping as much of your existing tooling as possible will ensure an easy learning curve for your team and a much faster transition to the new workflow.
Prototyping, testing, and refining
After getting your approval for the workflow design, our consultants will start building a prototype that focuses on delivering the most important functionality and accommodating the most common use cases.
Once each feature in the prototype is tested and working up to expectations, we’ll move on to handling more niche circumstances.
For instance, if we were building an employee onboarding workflow, we would likely start by focusing on the process for onboarding full-time employees - assuming you’re mostly hiring full-time team members.
Once that part of the workflow is established and working correctly, we would build functionality to support onboarding part-time employees, interns, and contractors, assuming those are less common for your business.
Automating or optimizing each workflow will be an iterative and collaborative process, and we’ll need your cooperation as we test each component to make sure it meets your expectations and addresses fringe use cases.
Automate additional workflows or switch to maintenance
Once we’ve finished optimizing one workflow, we can move onto another priority. You’ll quickly notice that as we continue to expand your automated infrastructure, new possibilities open up for additional, related automations.
Or, if you’d rather put a pause on implementing new solutions, you can switch to a maintenance membership.
Coming in at a lower cost than a full CWO Membership, a maintenance plan will keep XRay’s consultants on retainer to keep your current automations up and running. We’ll also be available to answer any questions you might have and discuss your plans for the future.
No matter what your goals are, with a Chief Workflow Officer Membership, XRay becomes a strategic partner for your business, helping you to design and implement automated workflows that support your entire team. Our number one goal is to make sure that you can accomplish more with the resources and people you already have.
To learn more, check out our services page or reach out to XRay and schedule a free consultation.
Get quick low-code support with LowCodeEngineers
The Chief Workflow Officer Membership is an ideal choice for large and growing businesses who need to transform or scale their operations. However, If you’re looking for smaller-scale low-code automation support, then a full membership might not be the best fit for you.
If you need some quick help with an automation or a smaller low-code project, then you should check out LowCodeEngineers instead.
LowCodeEngineers is built by XRay.tech, and connects businesses and entrepreneurs with vetted low-code experts.
Through our simple platform, you can book sessions on an hourly basis to fix bugs in your automations, receive one-on-one low-code training, leverage the most advanced features of your favorite tools, and much more.
Just go to lowcodeengineers.com to begin, or watch our recent video explaining how LowCodeEngineers works.
Find a better way to work with an XRay CWO Membership
You and your team have your hands full simply doing your jobs. Let XRay analyze how you work and enable you to get the most out of your time each day.
With a Chief Workflow Officer Membership, your team’s work will become more consistent, you’ll have more time to devote to critical challenges as tedious tasks become automated, and you’ll be able to continuously improve your internal operations at a predictable monthly cost.
Just schedule some time here to book a free consultation call.
