Road to 10x: How we multiplied productivity by maximizing AI and Workflow Automations

At Symph, we're all about creating technology solutions that solve people’s and businesses’ problems. But something slows us down.

Repetitive tasks.

We've all been there— stuck doing repetitive, monotonous tasks that just drain our energy and motivation. The little things that pile up and end up taking us away from the exciting, innovative work we want to focus on. Aside from slowing us down, they also introduce errors and sometimes even chip away at team morale.

‍Enter AI. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been noticeable recently. We figured we can use this technology to solve the problem of doing these kinds of tasks. 

Using AI to automate tasks has been a game-changer for our team: Currently, we have been using the tools such as AirOps and n8n the most to automate our workflows and maximize the built in AI capabilities.

This has allowed us to speed up our tasks and save our team’s time so we are more efficient, and the best part: we can spend more time focusing on bigger picture, higher-impact, truly innovative work. 

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Before and after AI

There have been multiple parts of our workflows across our different projects and departments that we have automated using AirOps and n8n. Below, we share a few of them: how we used to go about the process, how we automated them, and the impact the solutions made for our team.

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For Sales: Creating Statements of Work (SOWs) and Job Orders (JO)

‍Before

Putting one SOW together was a real headache. The sales team would have to go through discovery calls, compile a list of features and requirements, get estimates from different teams, and then manually write up the entire SOW document. It was a tedious, error-prone process that sometimes took up a whole day, if not more.

‍What we did

Tim and Raven from our team built an AI-powered tool that automates a huge chunk of this SOW creation process. Essentially, the tool takes an input (transcript from the initial discovery call, or an initial list of features the Sales team lists after talking to the client), analyzes it, and automatically generates the first draft of the SOW. It captures most of the key requirements, features, and even includes preliminary estimates based on our historical data.

‍Now

One of our sales reps recently had a discovery call with a potential client. After the call, she just uploaded the transcript of the call into our AI tool. Within seconds, it created a comprehensive document draft that covers all the key features the client mentioned during the call.

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We use a chat platform command (/generate-job-form)  to request for a generated Job Order and Statement of Work 

Once generated, you get links to your Job Order and Statement of Work

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From there, we just have to review, make a few edits, and get the final sign-off from the relevant teams. What would've taken days in the past can now be done in 10 minutes!

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For Devs

With the help of AI tools, our dev team has been improving a lot in terms of code generation, readability, and response suggestion tools. One best example we have is the GitHub PR Descriptor made by Ronnel. 

‍Before

A typical scenario would be: a developer pushes a branch to GitHub, they create a Pull Request (PR) in GitHub, and spend a good 5-10 minutes writing a description for the PR.

‍What we did

Ronnel created an n8n workflow that listens to POST request events. As soon as the developer creates the PR, the workflow will go through the code changes in the PR and update the PR description accordingly.  

‍Now

With the new workflow, as soon as a pull request is created, a description of the PR is created within seconds. With this, creators of the PR don’t have to spend some time giving context (which usually takes around 10 mins), and this also provides reviewers with an understandable context of what the PR entails.

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Updating PR Workflow:

Before

When we have a feature to be pushed in a branch (e.g QA for the QA team to test), we would also need to push those same changes in a different branch (e.g development) for it to have the same changes.

What we did

We created a workflow (Shoutout to Pauline!) that handles this automatically instead. Whenever we call the magic word “senk”, it handles this for us.

Now

Whenever we mention this magic word, the workflow would just handle the updates for us, instead of us handling the latest updates.

For the whole team: Writing accomplishments

One pain point most people in our team have been experiencing is writing and submitting accomplishments. 

Accomplishments are summarized reports of what we did during the day and their impact on the project. These are sent regularly to our clients as our way of keeping them in the loop of the project progress. 

Our fast-paced environment involves juggling different tasks across different projects, departments, and clients, and so keeping track of everything we do and sitting down to review and summarize them at the end of our day (sometimes midday) to send these reports can be a challenge. This often turns into a time-consuming chore.

Before

We have an in-house application that we go to to submit accomplishments. Part of what makes this tedious is the number of buttons we have to go through to be able to submit. Aside from that, it approximately takes a Sympher about 5 to 15 mins to write and submit a day’s accomplishments.

What we did

With the help of automation and AI, the team created various tools that make submitting accomplishments easier.

Now

One of the tools that we made is a command that goes through our platform for communicating internally, summarizes them, and writes them up in accomplishment format right away. We can then just copy and paste this, review and do tweaks if needed, then submit.

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Another one is a command where we don’t have to go through that previously mentioned in-house application at all. We would just have to list all the things we’ve done, and that submits accomplishments already for you in the in-house application that we have. 

This task used to take us 5 to 15 minutes every day. With the help of these tools, we get the work done in less than 5 minutes.

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For the whole team: Checking leave credits and checking HMO coverage

Every now and then, our team needs to check their leave credits and review our HMO coverage as the needs arise. Seeing how much time and effort it took us to find and collect this simple information, we created custom commands on our chat platform to trigger automation. 

‍Checking leave credits- Before

When checking our remaining leave credits, we relied on Notion as the authoritative source. 

To verify how much leave credits has been used or how much leaves you still have, we had to check Notion and also confirm when the information was last updated. This allowed us to account for the leaves filed since the last update and determine the remaining leave balance.

‍What we did

We created the /leave-credits command that when entered by any Sympher, prompts n8n to check the number of leaves they have used, the number of holidays left, and gives back that information to them.

‍Now

Because of the new command that we can use, we don’t have to go out of our chat platform anymore to check and manually compute our leave credits.

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Checking HMO coverage- Before

When checking HMO coverage before, we always had to ask our HMO provider account manager in a Viber group chat. Although that helps, it is not always the best solution for finding the information we need especially when we’re in a rush (like medical emergencies).

What we did

Antonio, one of our developers, created a command that allows us to ask an AI assistant about HMO-related inquiries instead of waiting for a response from someone. We configured the AI to have access to the same files and information that our HMO representative uses, including our current HMO subscription details. This includes the list of accredited doctors, hospitals, and the coverage included in our plan.

Now

 We just have to input the /hmo command in our chat platform and ask our question, and the AI immediately outputs the information we are looking for. We can still ask the HMO representative for confirmation or if we need more details, but the tool already helps out a lot for our initial inquiries. 

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Impact

These are just a few examples of the many workflows we streamlined and automated using AI. Our teams also use existing task-specific AI tools to be more efficient in their work. For instance, our marketing team has significantly cut down their content production time thanks to AI-powered writing assistants like ChatGPT, Canva, and Perplexity.AI. They're able to write content faster by up to 2 days.

These results have amazed us, though it's not just about speed and efficiency. 

By automating these manual, repetitive tasks, we've been able to free up our team's valuable time and brainpower to focus on more strategic, high-impact work. Morale has improved, creativity is flourishing, and we're able to deliver better results for our clients.

Conclusion

The theme might seem like the whole "AI is taking over" threat and that sounds kind of scary. But that’s not exactly the case. From our experience, AI has been a total game-changer when it comes to optimizing our workflows and boosting productivity. By strategically implementing AI solutions across different areas of our business, we've been able to reduce errors and ultimately deliver better results for our clients. 

And we're just scratching the surface of what's possible.

If you're still relying on manual, repetitive processes in your organization, we encourage you to explore how AI could help streamline things. Start with AirOps and n8n. It has worked for us, and it shall for you. Trust us, your future self (and your team) will thank you for it!

If you need to consult what these possibilities are for your business, message us and we can explore together what we can do with AI to help you optimize effort and costs.

Of course, technology is just one part of the equation. At the end of the day, it's still about having a team with the skill and dedication to embrace change and innovation. AI is here to help us get things done faster, and humans in the loop is what makes it not only fast but also use-case driven. When you combine that human element with the power of AI, well, that's when the real magic happens.

AI is not here to replace us, it’s here to help us.

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