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Tools of the Trade |
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Workflow management
Gaining
control of documentation flow means having control of
business processes. Campbell McCracken makes the case
for intelligent and dynamic forms.
It's
a common situation — you
have a fantastic CRM system, you know all the data on
your customers, but it still takes you 15 days to turn
your documentation around. Why? Because you don't have
workflow. In general, business processes are not well
documented and can be slow. Manual processes are too
dependent on paper and are labour intensive. There is a
high risk that tasks can 'fall through the cracks' and
there is no easy way of tracking the processes and
measuring either the process time or the cost
statistics. However workflow can change all of that.
So
what is Workflow?
Originally the term 'workflow' was used to mean
the flow of information, documents or tasks. It was
associated with clerical tasks and the routeing of
documents and is generally used in repetitive processes,
especially in an office environment, such as banking or
insurance. Examples include order processing, claim or
loan approvals, new customer enrolments, customer
support, expenses, timesheets, holiday requests etc.
More recently, as more people have come to realise the
power and benefits that workflow can bring, such as cost
reduction through efficiency, improved product and
customer service, gaining of a competitive edge, and aid
to time sensitive operations, the term has evolved to
mean 'the control of business processes'.
Three Workflow Engines
|
Peter
Meehan |
'Every organisation should expect to have at
least three workflow engines,' says JetForm's managing
director of UK operations, Peter Meehan. 'The first is
the workflow for the masses (using Exchange, Notes,
Novell, etc). Here you fill in a document and pass it
from one person to another. The decision to pass it on
is made by you. There are no rules, no logic, only human
interventions. 'The second form of workflow is the
workflow within an application, such as a CRM
application.' For example, you phone a customer because
you want him to request a product brochure and then come
back to you to order something. Other examples could be
document management, including scanning and imaging, or
a mortgage processing application. 'But none of these
examples extends out to the whole enterprise,' says
Peter. 'That's where the third category — a
workflow broker —
comes in.' Once you look at the whole enterprise, there
is scope for improving the processes by using workflow.
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Nicole
Kealey |
Workflow in the Enterprise
It's
been estimated that 80 percent of business decisions are
supported by a paper form that requires one or more signatures. 'We supply
workflow solutions into banks, where they have 150 to
200 new customer enrolments a day, with documents going
out the door that same day, which is 21 days ahead of
where they used to be,' said Meehan. Nicole Kealey,
JetForm's product and marketing manager for their eprocess group adds 'The focus
is on solving the problem of integrating legacy and
corporate applications with the people who need access
to the data within those applications, and the processes
that run the business.' The lack of interaction between
people and systems seems to be a common problem. 'The
Gartner Group recognised it in their report Implementing
Business Applications in a Collaborative Environment'
says Meehan. 'Organisations need to rapidly move from
stove-piped ERP and CRM type applications to engage B2B
and B2C in 'collaborative processes' (c-commerce). Many
well-known players will find architectural and
technological barriers that create a difficult
transition to c-commerce.'
Case Study Action Technologies at
Lubrizol and at R.R. Donnelley
Last year Action Technologies won the
silver Giga Global Excellence Award for a customer
project with Lubrizol, the world's largest
independent speciality chemical manufacturer for
the transportation industry. Lubrizol achieved
that position by accepting requests to produce
custom lubricant formulations from transportation
industry customers. Producing custom chemicals
generates high returns and, not surprisingly, high
returns invite competition. Bill Bares, Lubrizol's
CEO, knew that it needed to respond faster and
more accurately than its competitors, to the
requests it received . It also needed to make sure
that any new product development it undertook, met
corporate return requirements.
In response to these changes in its
business, Lubrizol decided to create a powerful,
new, product approval process for taking a new
customer request through planning, design,
development, regulatory approval, manufacturing
development, finance and manufacturing prior to
acceptance. By its very nature, product approval
spans many departments and functions within the
corporation.
Lubrizol elected to use Action
Technologies' Metro Internet-based work management
system. Metro also allows Lubrizol to capture its
best practice so that each time it goes through
this process it can refine it and thereby embed
its knowledge into the process and manage the
knowledge that way.
This year Action Technologies won the gold
award for a project with R.R. Donnelley, a leading
North American printer and communications services
company. This workflow not only spans many
departments in R.R. Donnelley but incorporates the
customer and the suppliers too. R.R. Donnelley
realised that its educational book publishing
division 'Graphic Management' was facing a growth
challenge. Customers were requesting the division
to produce custom educational projects with
greater complexity than in previous years. For
example, five years ago the number of components
per project averaged between two and five pieces
whereas recent projects contained up to 24 pieces.
Analysis showed that the increasing
complexity was creating significant amounts of
non-value-added work for key personnel. As a
result, R.R. Donnelley decided to invest in
developing PRISM, a web-based project management
system. PRISM provides R.R. Donnelley with the
power to involve suppliers and customers in
collaborative commerce a situation where
customers, suppliers and partners create a unified
business process that enables participants from
across corporate boundaries to design, develop and
deliver new products or services tailored to
customer needs. |
Collaboration
|
Ron
Sivertson |
'There are two ends to the continuum of the
processes that you could automate,' says JetForm's
Kealey. 'There are the structured and formulaic
processes at one end, and the very collaborative and
ad-hoc processes at the other.' An example of the latter
is a marketing department in a large organisation. Any
piece that's about to be published would have to be
reviewed and approved by a certain number of people.
Workflow enables you to automate this collaborative
process to ensure that all of the steps are completed
properly. Action Technologies vice-president Ron
Sivertson agrees. 'Collaboration is key.' Action
Technologies' Metro product has been used in a number of
award-winning implementations. (See Case Study Action
Technologies at Lubrizol and R.R. Donnelley.) 'Metro
doesn't just force the collaboration it creates a
framework to orchestrate how that communication should
take place and whose action is next.'
Programming the Process
Before your manual process can be automated, it
needs to be programmed into the workflow software. State
of the art Workflow solutions will generally provide
graphical programming tools, which will allow a process
to be represented by a series of interlinking icons, one
for each task. Each task has a 'recipient' which
specifies who (either an individual, a job function, or
a group) has the responsibility for carrying it out.
Tasks can be linked together in series or in parallel
and can be made to operate when a certain condition
arises. Each step can have a form associated with it.
Although forms are generally associated as being for
human consumption, the metaphor of a form is also useful
as a means of transporting information from one computer
application to another. One of the programming devices
used by vendor Ultimus is the workflow robot, or
'Flobot'. Ultimus draws a parallel with a production
line, where humans perform some tasks and robots perform
others. 'Workflow is an information production line
it processes information and knowledge,' says
Ultimus' President and CEO, Rashid Khan. 'People might
input the information, or handle it, or receive it. But
at some stage you might want the knowledge to be
translated into a Word document, fax or email message or
written into a database. You can train the Flobots to
perform these specific functions as part of the
workflow.'
Case Study
Ultimus at Ultimus
|
Rashid
Khan |
Many commercial websites have a
registration page where visitors can submit their
details in exchange for further information, the
right to download software, etc.
Ultimus did some research into online
registration on the Internet and discovered that
50% of the time no-one follows up the registration
the information goes into a database and
gets forgotten. 90% of Ultimus' business comes
from the web, so it realises the importance of
ensuring that all registrations are followed up
quickly and effectively. To allow it to do this it
created a workflow process for that part of its
site.
When you register on the Ultimus site, a
database Flobot process is triggered, which writes
your contact information to a database. The
workflow then checks another database to
find who the Ultimus reseller is in your area
and composes an email message from the
salesman to thank you for visiting the site,
telling you that the reseller will contact you.
Next, the process informs the reseller and the
salesperson that you requested information; and
prints a letter and address label, to go along
with the requested literature. In the background,
another process monitors to check that the
response to the request happens within a pre-set
time. If it doesn't, the situation is escalated,
automatically, to management.
Ultimus have been using this workflow
process for three years and it has saved them
thousands of dollars. 'There was a situation once
where a customer was browsing our website, and
submitted a request for a salesman to call,' says
Ultimus' Rashid Khan. 'The process ran, notified
the salesman, who called the customer while the
customer was still browsing the Ultimus site!'
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For
example, suppose you need to send a letter to a customer
saying that his order has been delayed for three weeks.
In your database you have the delay time, the customer
name, address, etc. You can put a Word Flobot step in
the workflow sequence and click on the 'Train' button.
This will make Word start up. You can then type in the
actions you want Word to perform just like training a
robot. You would type in the letter to the customer,
making a Word template, and at certain points insert the
workflow variables, such as the number of weeks delay,
address, etc.You
would then say what action to perform with the form,
e.g. save it, fax it, print it, etc.
When
the workflow is installed and is running the process,
and reaches this new Flobot step, it will automatically
start up Word, load up the document template which you
created, insert the real values for the variables into
the document, perform the action that was specified and
then go on to the next step.
Ultimus has a range of different Flobots,
including ones for Word, Excel, scripting, email,
databases, XML, etc. 'We also publish an API SDK
(Software Development Kit) so that if a customer wants
to integrate Ultimus with their own application or a
third party application, they can do so,' says Khan.
Case Study JetForm at Auction
Universe
Auction Universe is a pioneering online
marketplace, where classified advertising and
sales merge with the auction process, to create a
dynamic e-commerce community, connecting people
who want to sell with those who want to buy, in
more than 6,000 categories of merchandise. The
problem Auction Universe faced was that its
customer service department was receiving more
than 200 customer requests a day regarding
commission adjustments, bid cancellations, etc,
coming in via the Web, e-mail and telephone.
'Because of the diversity of inbound
communications channels, we were concerned that
not all of the information was being captured and
the status of items in process could not be easily
determined,' says Jim Baldis, vice president of
operations at Auction Universe. 'Also, because of
the business window being 24 hours a day 7 days a
week, our customer service representatives were
unable to analyse the overall pattern of problems
in order to make customer service improvements.'
The solution was developed from JetForm
technology by one of JetForm's Certified VARs. One
electronic form was developed using FormFlow 99 to
capture customer requests from the three different
sources. Once captured, the information is stored
in an SQL Server database and used to route and
escalate customer requests to the appropriate
person within Auction Universe. So if the request
is about payment it will get routed to a different
person than if it is about the availability of
goods. |
Interfacing to applications with XML
One
area that generally causes problems in workflow is
interfacing into other applications. In the past, the
route chosen was to use Dynamic Linked Lists (DLLs) as
the interface. However both DLLs and the modern
counterpart, the interface adapter, are seen as being
time consuming, inflexible and expensive to maintain.
The trend now is to use XML (Extensible Markup Language)
as the transport medium.
However an XML form on its own is static and does
not contain all the information that it could. 'It is
not strong enough,' said JetForm's Meehan. To get round
this, JetForm has drawn up a specification for an XML
Forms Architecture (XFA) which it submitted to the W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium). XFA gives forms graphics,
templates, calculations, validation, scripting, picture
clauses, sequencing, and digital signatures. 'It's like
the three bears story — SGML is too hard, HTML is too
soft, but XML with XFA is just right.' The first
document in the two-part submission to the W3C describes
the open and extensible modelling of secure forms with
high fidelity composition, automated calculation and
validation, pluggable user-interface components, and
flexible data handling in the first document. The second
document describes a simple scripting language optimised
for creating electronic-form centric logic and
calculations.
'Imagine you are running your CRM business, and
your workflow has to go to other people outside your
department to involve them in the process,' said Meehan.
'What you can do is populate a multipage form and pass
it straight out in XML format, preferably to another
database. However the great thing about a form is that
it's also the logical way for assembling and presenting
the information to a human being. So it could go off to
four or five stop-off points in the process, collecting
signatures, or adding data before it's dumped into the
other database. This is a very simple and elegant
approach in comparison to adapters.'
Interfacing to Directories
Another big challenge is that of directories —
people, names, passwords and security. If you go into
typical large companies, they have one department with
an Access table, another with a little directory
somewhere, a third uses Peoplesoft, etc. Workflow has to
tie all of the people together and so ideally needs all
the information together in one place. One of the
technologies that has improved a lot in the last two to
three years is LDAP — Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol. Now Microsoft, Novell and others have embraced
it.
The
hope is that people will start using LDAP as a standard,
so that when you go into a large company all the
'people' information, resource information would be in a
standard directory which various applications, including
workflow, can access. 'At the moment it's still a
problem, but we can see the light at the end of the
tunnel,' says Ultimus' Khan. 'Just like XML is a big
factor, we see LDAP as being big.'
Campbell McCracken
Links
http://www.actiontech.com/
http://www.jetform.com/
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xfa.html
http://www.ultimus.com/
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