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Bring order to the workplace
How to choose and implement workflow solutions
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Anadi Misra, Anil Chopra and Sanjay Majumder
As the old saying goes, 'experience is the best
teacher', meaning all theory is waste till it's put to practice. Last month,
we took you through workflow automation strategies with the help of a fairly
simple example from a BPO company. This time we're actually putting the theory
into practice and taking you through setting up some commercial as well as Open
Source solutions for workflow automation and business process management. The
concept of workflow automation is nothing new. In fact, just about every
organization already has some amount of automation already in place. A small
organization receiving customer orders via email has already done some amount of
workflow automation. The orders come through email and are forwarded to the
accounts people, who put it into the accounting application, raise an invoice,
and mail it back to the customer. A larger organization would probably deploy
ERP to handle the same job because it's done at a much larger scale. So
what's the need for a workflow solution you might ask? In the first case, the
workflow automation is completely ad-hoc. You have email in place, so you're
using it to speed things up. In the latter case, while ERP definitely helps
automate, how do you ensure that all the processes in it are adhered to? How
well is it being monitored? Is there an escalation procedure put in place to
ensure that the processes are being followed? Can you pull out individual
productivity reports that tell you where the bottlenecks are? Chances are that
at least some of these things are not possible with your current setup. That's
where a workflow solution comes into the picture.
There are several different types of workflow solutions
available, for organizations of all sizes. For instance, if you already have
Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino, then both products allow you to establish
simple messaging based workflow solutions. If the organization has several
different applications working across various divisions, and you'd like to
establish communication between them, then you'd probably use BizTalk Server
to establish that workflow. If you already have some enterprise business
applications running, but need to monitor them closely and ensure that the
processes they've automated are enforced and run smoothly, you could look at
OmniFlow. These are all basic examples, which in no way mean that those are the
only capabilities of the products we've talked about. They're just a few
scenarios that they're capable of handling. The value of a workflow solution
is determined by how well you can map your business processes to it. Will the
workflow solution help you to define the process and create a logical flow for
it? How much coding would be required to link the various steps? Would you need
to recruit developers especially for the job? How much would the workflow
solution cost? And more importantly, how much of a change would you need to
bring into the workplace to use it? These are just a few questions you need to
ask when choosing a workflow solution. In this story, like we said, we've
actually tried out various workflow solutions, both Open Source as well as
commercial to see what it really takes to implement workflow in the office.
Choosing a workflow
solution
Steps involved in modeling automated workflow in your
organization, before implementing it 'live'
Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow automation
have proliferated into many organizations today. BPOs, banks and other financial
organizations, and even production houses have all either exploited these
technologies for their benefits or are transiting towards them. BPM and workflow
might seem similar at first glance, but a careful analysis reveals the
differences between the two approaches. BPM encompasses the analysis of the
business process both in its current state and its possible developed stage,
i.e., as it is and as it will be. The exercise mostly precipitates into
developing more efficient processes or integrating technology into certain areas
to improve the overall productivity of a system. It includes manual activities
or processes and represents the conceptual level of the enterprise while keeping
the technical aspects segregated from the entire exercise. Workflow modeling on
the other hand is more inclined towards the technical aspects of implementing an
automated model for existing tasks or processes. It focuses primarily on
processing digital office or business documents and does not consider manual
processes or facilitates at the conceptual level of decision-making. It provides
assistance in these activities.
 Analyze your business process
Major factors that affect this exercise are complexity of the
existing system, the environment in which the proposed system will work, and of
course the costs involved. Complexity depends upon the various sub processes
outlined to complete a business task. It doesn't simply mean the intricacies
of the existing system but a broader perspective encompassing the optimal
utilization of resources, processes, and even users along with the system. The
environment generally includes the existing infrastructure in place. This means
that choosing a solution can only be done after the business requirements have
been finalized and questions like what needs to be automated; who are the end
users involved in the system; where and when the activities will take place; and
cost factors such as ROI have been analyzed. Only then can the right workflow
model be chosen.
Identify requirements and the
target users
Bringing in the end-user during identification of the solution that
best suffices your needs is a good option. This is very important as it gives a
better picture down to the workers' level.
The important questions that need to be answered over here
are which end user receives what information; what action succeeds the receipt;
how should this information be utilized; is there any scope of improvement in
the way the information is utilized. Analyzing user requirements gives a more
discrete view of which tools will be best suited.
Change management
A workflow solution has to be able to seamlessly integrate into your
existing IT infrastructure. Thus the scalability and adaptability with
heterogeneous environments is a desirable quality for any workflow or BPM
solution being implemented. Despite having an infrastructure in place, there
might still exist processes or systems that require a complete change or make
over to either increase the productivity or provide a more centralized
architecture to the existing system. There can be two approaches to this, to
re-engineer the entire process (the classical monolithic approach of
development) or to introduce the new system in phases.
Bringing in a change to existing system has its own
challenges; particularly the cost factor becomes one of the most important
metrics here, as an organization might want to first be reassured on the
perspective gain from the new system and particularly the period after which the
organization recovers the cost incurred. In other cases, change might be desired
to improve or centralize the organization structure itself for efficiency
purposes. For example a bank might decide to proliferate operating branches in a
geographical area and concentrate a major chunk of the processing in a single
centralized office for that particular area. Whatever be the reason industry
experts would always accept the fact that this remains one of the most typical
stages in an implementation till date.
Patterns of
an automated workflow process
During the stage of charting out the anticipated process, three patterns of
workflow implementation are available. The Independent pattern is one in which
each component of the workflow process is completely independent of each other.
In such implementation processing, any component is independent of the other.
This pattern can be applied in scenarios such as processing requests for loans,
wherein the evaluation of limit and verification of the applicant can go
independently. In the Sequential Pattern, each work component is dependent on
the preceding component. In this case the preceding component controls the
workflow through subsequent components. The scenarios where such a pattern can
be employed are workflows addressing requests by an employee from his immediate
seniors or from another department. The third pattern is Interdependent or
Network pattern in which each component of the work is dependent on one or a
number of other components being completed. In this case the preceding
components control the workflow through subsequent components. A process for
creating weekly roster for employees within a particular process in a call
center is a scenario where such patterns can exist. The process finalizing the
roster would be dependent on processes for forecasting call flow, process
calculating number of employees available in the coming week, process scheduling
the login hours and break schedules for various teams etc. Once these steps have
been performed, we have enough useful information to look into the available
products and choose the one that would provide the best solution.
Workflow products and technologies
There are many commercial and Open Source workflow solutions
available. But while choosing a solution, you also need to be clear about what
you need. Is it a tool for BPM (Business Process Modeling) or WfM (Workflow
Management).
Microsoft Exchange for instance, is a messaging and
collaboration server. It enables sending and receiving messages in the form of
electronic mail and other forms of interactive communication. It can operate
with clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, etc. It is also useful in
implementing message based workflow implementations. We've given a sample
application on this platform in this story.
Lotus Domino is another product on the same line. This also
provides a message driven solution for workflows. Microsoft SharePoint is
another product that can be used for workflow automation. It's basically a
portal application that provides features such as content administration,
document repository, message board and e-mail notifications.
Other workflow solutions include PDF Workflow technology,
developed by Oce of UK, which is based on Adobe Acrobat. It's basically an
implementation of a document/image driven workflow. The obvious advantage is the
reduced transfer time achieved due to the usage of PDF files.
Some vendors have also implemented workflow solutions based
on wireless/mobile technologies. For example, Intela Trac developed by SAT Corp
is industry workflow automation software used on rugged mobile handheld devices.
On the Open Source platform, there's Enhydra Shark, which is developed in
Java. It complies with WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) and OMG (Object
Management Group) specifications. You can integrate this solution with a Swing
Application or a Java Web application also. Another similar product is Bonita.
Omniflow is another BPM solution, which keeps you away from
the hassles of programming while implementing a solution. Plus, it can be
integrated with your existing ERP infrastructure and other existing automated
business processes. Page(s) 1 2 3 4
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