Is your business organized for change?

An interview with Founder and CEO Andreas Martin

 

 

Describe your solution in a few sentences.

Flowers is organizational management softwarethat combines workflow automation and resource planning. Flowers enables tasks and resources to be seamlessly integrated and automated at any level of the business, and provides unparalleled transparency into what’s happening across the company. Flowers was designed to connect teams, work, apps and people in a flexible, easy to use solution so companies can organize work more efficiently and get work done faster.  

Why did you create this company?

My co-founder Daniel and I worked for lots of other companies in commerce, retail, pharma, etc., and noticed there are so many things that go wrong on a regular basis at the organizational level, and it’s the same things no matter which industry or company.  We asked ourselves, how can there be no solution that handles processes like vacation requests, sick leave, etc.? There’s cumulative damage from little mistakes but that’s totally avoidable if work is organized well.  

The problem isn’t just that things go wrong, but also what usually happens after. There’s an emergency meeting to try to find fault, optimize, create spreadsheets, and make everything more complex to double-check everything but it doesn’t work. People end up using tools that aren’t fit for purpose and that slows companies down.  

That’s where Flowers can help - no other tool solves this organization layer.  Fragmented tools that solve a single use case create double work and double inputs. Whereas a tool that connects the dots between tools, teams, and company resources to provide seamless automation and transparency creates enormous value.  

What’s special about your company?

First of all, Flowers isn’t a single solution for a specific use case but a one-stop-solution able to solve a wide variety of organizational issues that come up in teams such as communication, approvals, task management, transparency, automation of repetitive tasks, deadline management, reducing complexity, reducing errors, etc. Other solutions can do part of what Flowers can do but they can’t offer the same level of flexibility and transparency.

Second, Flowers software is built around templates that can be reused. This isn’t a new idea, but our workflow templates go far beyond simple conditional logic and don’t require any coding. Customers can include documents, pictures, videos, links, formulas, scenarios, and customer-defined resources in any workflow for full transparency.  It’s incredibly flexible and our customers have sometimes surprised us with what our own solution can do!!

Finally, we believe our business model is the future of software, i.e., customers pay only per use with no hidden costs, plus it’s super easy to implement and use, adaptable to changing business needs, and highly scalable. Too many solution vendors charge for features or services customers don’t actually use and that’s absolutely not on.  

What is enterprise-grade workflow automation, and what does it mean for customers?

We use this term to describe the value of Flowers. ‘Enterprise-grade’ refers to a quality of software that usually only larger enterprises can afford to buy or build. At Flowers our mission is to deliver this quality of software to SMEs and SMBs.  We don’t want to create features only one or two key account customers can use. We aim to create 100% what all customers can use, and make everyone a key account.

What is Organization Management Software?

The world is getting more complex and global with changing tasks, requirements and regulations. How people work is changing, there are more specific use cases, teams are more horizontal, generations are also different. To put it simply: Companies need to organize better. Organization management software helps companies do exactly that by automating work to reduce errors and delays and providing transparency into what’s happening across the business.

What gets me up in the morning is that companies doing really important things will be better able to accomplish their mission because we take away their organizational complexity. Too many companies implement a bunch of different tools because they have to digitalize, but they end up creating more complexity instead of reducing it. The tools don’t talk to each other, and they aren’t flexible enough to support all the use cases, so they can’t deliver on key business benefits.  

What’s the most important benefit to customers?

We’ve talked about transparency, flexibility and ease of use - and these are important - but the most important thing is creating a sustainable competitive advantage. For example, with Flowers the COO or department head can see how many workflows are running across the business, how many are delayed, how many were completed, and where there is potential to optimize for greater efficiency. That’s a competitive advantage. The CFO can make better predictions and cost estimates by having all purchase and resource allocations orchestrated in a single solution. That’s also a competitive advantage.

In today’s business climate companies can’t afford to do nothing.Imagine two companies in the same industry that have the same suppliers, pricing, number of employees, service levels, etc. One of them implements Flowers to reduce errors, improve reliability, and provide better service to customers for a lower price. Which customer wouldn’t go with the company that has better, faster, cheaper service?  

What ‘killer feature’ does the product offer today?

Aside from being able to automate any recurring task, our Resource Planning feature enables customers to include any kind of company resource such as contacts, inventory, suppliers, etc., in any workflow.

Let’s unpack this a bit: First, customers can easily define company resources like customers or laptops with attributes like name, address, VAT, model, invoice number, etc.  Next, they can create resource lists - such as a customer list or asset list - that can be connected, eg. a customer can be connected to a contract, or an employee can be connected to a company laptop. These can be included and managed in workflow.

What can you do with this? Just as an example, if your customer contracts have a renewal date, you can set up an automated contract checking process with different options like keep, renew, cancel, review, etc. No contract deadlines pass unnoticed and no information is lost.

It’s a real game changer in terms of connecting company resources and processes for full automation and transparency.  In the past companies would need to implement hugely complex solutions to achieve this level of business optimization but with Flowers you can automate in under an hour.  

Want to learn more about how Flowers software can help your business get work done faster? Book a free demo today:

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