Monthly close processes drag on for weeks. Essential HR onboarding tasks get lost in the shuffle of paperwork. Procurement routinely struggles with invoice processing, causing vendor payment delays that strain supplier relationships and disrupt inventory planning.
Sound familiar? The frustrations of manual processes know no bounds within an organization — and if you’re dealing with any of these issues first-hand, you’re likely watching with envy as your competitors use AI-powered automation to remove the friction from their day-to-day activities.
But knowing where and how to begin with automation, especially when you’ve relied on paper processes and spreadsheets for years, can feel overwhelming. Plus, if you’re battling internal resistance to automation and AI, adoption can feel nearly impossible.
That’s why we gathered up the best automation advice from eight Nintex experts who’ve helped transform the workflows of countless organizations. These aren’t theoretical concepts, either — they’re hard-won insights from people who’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.
You’ll learn how to identify the problems worth solving and avoid the common pitfalls that derail automation projects. The payoff? Faster processes across every department and streamlined workflows that enable your employees to focus on strategic work.
Align leadership vision with frontline reality
Successful process automation projects need champions at two levels — and these champions don’t always want the same things.
At the top, you need executive sponsorship. Without C-suite backing, automation initiatives often get deprioritized with competing demands.
“Executive sponsorship matters — not just for accountability, but because it signals importance,” says Chris Ellis, Director of Solution Engineering at Nintex. “If leadership is behind it, people take notice.”
But executive buy-in alone isn’t enough. You also need engagement from the frontline users who’ll actually use the automation, like financial analysts and accounting specialists. They understand the daily friction points that executives might miss.
Take global pallet supply company CHEP, for example. “Their entry into the Nintex world was kicked off by an internal survey where a number of employees said it took too long to find process information,” explains Ellis. “It’s a great example of executive leadership listening to their workers.”
By starting with employee feedback, CHEP identified automation opportunities that would genuinely improve day-to-day work.
That kind of bottom-up insight is most valuable when it’s part of an ongoing conversation between leadership and frontline teams. “Every process should have a feedback loop where, whether in the process’s documentation or the workflow tool, feedback from the folks in the trenches can make its way back to the process owner,” advises Jay Tomlin, Senior Director of Product Management at Nintex. “That feedback should include what’s working well, and what could be better.”
When executives understand frontline pain points and employees see leadership commitment, automation projects have the momentum they need to succeed.
Start by solving a single bottleneck — and then replicate elsewhere
When you first dive into automation, you may feel tempted to try to solve everything at once. But that’s a recipe for burnout and frustration. Instead, Nintex experts recommend identifying the best solution to a single bottleneck first — getting a quick win and some buy-in before applying your new knowledge elsewhere.
“Look for processes that face regular change—whether from shifting regulations, compliance updates, or continuous improvement initiatives,” says Brian Rieb, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Nintex. “These are ideal automation candidates because they need flexibility built in. Solve it once with the right structure, and you can apply that same pattern wherever similar processes exist.”
Consider your company’s finance operations. If invoice approvals frequently get stuck in your accounts payable (AP) process, similar approval bottlenecks likely exist in expense reporting or budget requests. Solve the underlying approval workflow once, and you can apply the same automation framework across multiple areas.
But how do you crack open that first bottleneck in the first place? Often, the best solutions come from the people closest to the problem.
“The people doing the work know where it breaks,” Rieb notes. “Give them tools that match their understanding of the process, and they’ll build solutions that actually work — not what someone in IT thinks should work.”
Your AP clerk, for example, probably knows exactly where the invoice process breaks down, and your budget analyst understands which approval steps create unnecessary delays. Give these frontline experts flexible, no-code or low-code tools like Nintex to build automation solutions that fit how work gets done.
Be strategic in what you choose to automate
The biggest automation failures usually stem from choosing the wrong processes or automating them poorly.
“Automation project failures are rarely a technology problem,” notes Jonathan Butler, Group Product Manager at Nintex. “It’s a visibility problem, or an understanding problem, or a decision problem. Someone says, ‘We’re going to do it this way,’ but they don’t understand how the end user interfaces with the automation.”
This disconnect happens when leaders focus on what looks inefficient from the outside without understanding how the process works on the ground. Your month-end close, for example, might seem chaotic, but it has manual checks to prevent errors. Fully automating those safeguards could create worse problems than the ones you’re trying to solve.
Even more dangerous is trying to use AI and automation to fix broken processes.
“People are using AI in random ways,” says Niranjan Vijayaragavan, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Nintex. “You have to know what you’re trying to fix and what the actual process is. Software and AI should aid in the automation of your process, which is in service of your business outcome. Your process should not be defined by the software you have.”
Before automating anything, create a process map of your current state. Figure out why each step exists by talking to the people who do the work every day.
Just avoid being so fixated on getting automation wrong that you end up doing nothing at all.
“One method is to think through the overall automation and workflow before jumping in. And the other one is, ‘Just go do it, and you’ll figure things out,’” says Suvrat Joshi, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Nintex. “They’re absolutely contradictory, but I think both are awesome!”
Sometimes you just need to start somewhere, even if you don’t have everything figured out quite yet.
Conduct a trial run, then scale quickly
The most successful automation projects begin by testing an approach with just a few employees, with a goal of expanding the impact once the process change has been trialed, measured, and optimized.
“Instead of making a change and rolling that out to everyone, start with a small group,” Tomlin recommends. “For example, break off a sub-team of 5 or 10 people and have them try a new way of doing that process. And then, if you’re measuring the total cycle time of that process, you can see whether it was a good or bad idea to make that process change.”
Stay open to any input your testers might have. “Co-creating processes — building with people rather than for them — makes a big difference,” says Codi Kaji, Director, Product Management at Nintex. When team members help shape the automation instead of just receiving it, they become invested in its success.
The pilot approach protects you from expensive mistakes while giving you real data about what works. Just as importantly, it minimizes the disruptions that workers experience, which can quickly turn them against your automation efforts if handled poorly.
After the pilot, you’ll know how to refine the process, making it as effective as possible before introducing it organization-wide.
Monitor and adapt as your business evolves
Once your automation is live and scaled across the organization, the work isn’t done. One of the most critical phases is just beginning: ongoing monitoring and adaptation.
“A lot of companies build a process once and forget about it,” says Alex Burton, Vice President of Engineering at Nintex. “They get it working perfectly, but they never go back to it.”
The danger lies in assuming that what works today will work forever. Your business shifts constantly — new employees join, technologies evolve, and market conditions change. A process that fit your organization perfectly six months ago might now create unnecessary friction.
“That’s risky because the process as they built it may have been great for that point in time, but as your business shifts, the process may no longer suit the way you work,” Burton explains.
Your frontline users become invaluable during this monitoring phase. They’re working with the automation daily, which means they’re the first to notice when something stops working as well as it once did.
“Let’s say your automation raises a task that goes to your VP for spend approval,” Burton says. “And you know, after running this process for a year, that your VP will always approve requests under a certain dollar amount. He approves it every single time, but that two-day approval step is still in the workflow. He’s busy, so he always takes the full two days to approve. Why not just encode in the logic that if a request is under that dollar amount, it’s always approved to start with? That’s not something you would have wanted to do when you first built the automation, but eventually you can.”
This is the kind of inefficiency that creeps in over time. The key is establishing systems to catch these opportunities. Tools like Nintex Insights can monitor for efficiency erosion, but you also need regular check-ins with the people using these workflows to understand the changes that metrics might miss.
Your next step toward automation success
You might not have the perfect tech stack or unlimited budget for a digital transformation, and that’s okay. Getting your first automation wins is more about aligning stakeholders, focusing on real bottlenecks, avoiding common pitfalls, and building momentum through smart, small steps.
Your finance team doesn’t have to stay buried in manual processes. With the right approach, you can create streamlined workflows that give your team time back and your leadership the visibility they need.
Ready to explore what’s possible? Request a demo — and learn how automation can transform your organization.
