WORKFLOW

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What is Workflow, what are the software elements?

Workflow Management Software

Many companies today are reorganising: the top-down command-and-control hierarchy that has typically characterised business is out. Smaller, independent, self-directing business units are in. The goal of this "process reengineering," as it is called, is to develop a better mechanism for allowing work processes to become market driven. With the growth of client-server-based PC LAN networks, the existing technology and information infrastructure is already in place to meet this goal. All that is needed is some vehicle for automating these reengineered processes within the client/server topology. Workflow management software is fast becoming a vehicle to do just that.

Note:

1. In September 1994. Wang acquired Bull's workflow and imaging business world-wide, along with Bull's federal systems business and its U.S. customer services business. FileNet began shipping its long awaited Visual WorkFlo in December 1994

2. Prices and product status quoted are as identified at September 1995

Introduction

Workflow has its foundation in the idea that business processes are actually sets of tasks done in a prescribed order that incorporate information from various sources. The earliest workflow management systems concentrated on managing the flow of information as it is processed, shared, manipulated, and compiled.

An example is a company's hiring process. Whenever an employment offer is made and accepted, a routine process is set in motion. Information regarding such things as the new employee's payroll deductions, insurance benefits, photo ID, telephone number, and office location is collected, reviewed, and routed to other departments for processing. Information may be routed as paperwork or sent electronically as a message or a form. Departments that process new employee information-Payroll, Benefits, Security, Facilities Management, each have their own work to do based on the new employee information and their own procedures governing how to do it.

This traditional implementation of workflow is primarily concerned with automating existing operations. As global competition heats up, however, companies are searching for ways to apply workflow management tools to reinventing the way they currently do business. For these organisations workflow management involves looking at business processes as networks of human relationships augmented by data and material flows. The goal is to first make these relationships explicit, then to automate both the actions that operate these relationships and the involved data and material flows.

Hence, workflow management software is increasingly being used to initiate and develop applications by, for, and within the workgroup. Emphasis on automating data flows and the existing tasks involved in the movement of data is giving way to the automation of the actual actions that define and operate the work itself, not just the supporting data flows. This transition coincides with the increasing trend toward right-sizing, where the concern is achieving greater workgroup productivity by empowering workers through client-server computing.

Approaches to Workflow Management

How an organisation approaches the management of its workflow will determine which workflow management tools are appropriate to the organisation. There are four types of workflow, and each requires a different management approach:

• transaction-based
   
• ad hoc
   
• object-oriented
   
• and knowledge-based.

Transaction-Based Workflow

Transaction or case-based workflow is traditionally found in "production" departments in which workers perform related tasks where the output is often the company's product (e.g.. insurance claims processing, bank loan application processing, or pharmaceutical case report form processing). This type of workflow also characterizes certain administrative operations such as processing purchase orders expense reports, time sheets, or human resources recruitment. Workflow management tools for these environments must support sophisticated routing, the capability to interface with other programs for automating certain work functions, and extensive work-in-process reporting.

Ad Hoc Workflow

Ad hoc workflows arise from the specific temporary needs of a project team whose members become active and inactive depending on their function within the group. For example, a new drug development team consists of a workgroup whose members come from many departments-chemical compound development, animal testing, human testing, regulatory liaison, packaging, and advertising. Each member has a specific role to fill in the process of obtaining approval for the drug. Since this process is temporary, workflow management software must provide tools that let the members themselves initiate and build the processes for the group. Some workflow management packages offer graphical tools, designed for nonprogrammers, that allow team members to customise their own desktop environment, design repetitive workflows and track progress on open work items. These tools must allow users to dynamically change the workflow process as the workgroup's requirements change over time.

Object-Based Workflow

This type of workfiow is characterised by interactive development tools whereby users can graphically depict and change its existing workflow process. The focus is on automating the relationships within the process to obtain greater productivity. In this type, workflow management is a network service separated from the applications and transaction processes it controls. These services provide the capability to move work electronically between applications according to a user-defined workflow activity map. "Work" can consist of various combinations of images, data, messages, etc.

Knowledge-Based Workflow

This type of workflow goes one step beyond object-based work-flow and assumes that a new model for the organisation's processes is required if the business is to truly benefit from workflow automation. Here, workflow development is linked to the concept of business reengineering. which contends that many of today's top-down job designs, workflows. and organisational structures are from a different competitive era when technology was limited, markets were highly regulated, there was no threat from overseas competitors and the labour force was predominantly low or semiskilled. With knowledge-based workflow, an analysis of the current process goes beyond understanding who does what, when and how. It also questions why and identifies ways of measuring whether or not current methods are obtaining desired results. Here, more visual programming tools are required that allow workers to build and test workflows "on-the-fly." Ideally, these development toolkits would be front-ended with a set of CASE tools or business process modelers that would assist non-programmers in the design of new work processes.

Workflow Components

No matter how workflow is managed each approach must provide tools for handling the interrelationships between the five components of a business process:

• People
   
• People are performers of the various tasks at each point in the business process. For example. some people compile information, others review it, others may approve further courses of action.
   
• Procedures
   
• Procedures are rules for processing such as "all employees level 20 or higher automatically receive free life insurance benefits."

- Information

As travelling images within a process. information is the way to make the process visible to all performers and customers and the means to accumulate value throughout the process. Information is not the process. rather. it is the way to make the process visible. establish a tracking capability. and maintain a historical record of accumulated work.

- Task

Tasks are steps or activities (also called work steps or actions) that must be performed at each point within a business process and must be consistent with the workgroup's overall procedures. For example, opening a spreadsheet application and calculating the federal tax rate for a new employee with three dependants is a task.

- Management

Management is the capability to monitor the flow of work and take appropriate action.

Workflow management software defines the relationships between these five components. including what occurs, under what conditions, at what priority, and under whose supervision or discretion.

Selection Criteria

Before applying workflow management software to automating a work process users should first establish what that work process is and what steps can and should be automated. In other words which steps need to be performed by humans and which can be better performed by computer automation. For example, the purchasing department super-visor is responsible for assigning purchase orders to the accounting clerks for processing. Will the supervisor continue to handle this or can a rules-based routing scheme be implemented that will automatically place all scanned images of incoming purchase orders in a central queue, to be monitored by the workflow software, or distribution to the individual clerks' electronic mailboxes? The more steps to be automated, the greater the functionality that will be demanded from the workflow software.

Not all workflow software packages provide the same level of automation Some software packages claim to be workflow applications when they merely support sequential routing of images from one user's electronic mailbox to another. They do not provide for exceptions: nor can they handle more than one type of data, such as word processing documents and spreadsheets along with image data. Hence, users should be aware of the minimum feature requirements for building workflow management applications.

Rules-Based versus sequential Routing

Workflow programs must provide some type of information routing. The simplest sequential routing, moves information from one person to the next on a predetermined list. But what it an exception occurs (such as the absence of a signature for approval)? Is there some mechanism for a system administrator to override the predefined routing scheme? Another mechanism would be rules-based routing, which defines the routing path according to certain rules or logic: e.g.,

if-then-else. (Note that information should be any data type or object that is required in the work process. The system should be able to handle forms, images, files, folders, etc. Often, what data types the system will handle will determine whether it is useful to a particular type of application.)

Parallel Processing

Another routing scheme which should be supported is parallel processing. This allows work to be routed to multiple queues or in-baskets for simultaneous processing. This is particularly useful when a work item must go through several work steps where the processing order is not important, or where two different, but not contradictory steps must be performed first before the work can move on to a third step. Parallel processing also has the added advantage of being able to use idle resources to speed up processing time.

Role Assignments

Rather than assign an action or step of a workflow to an individual person, it should be possible to assign the action to a role: for example, the "Issue Cheque" step in an accounting procedure should be routed to the role: Accounts Payable Clerk. The administrator then would be able to assign any operator to that role as required without having to change the routing program. This provides for those instances when the original person assigned to an action step is away (e.g., on vacation) and work needs to be reassigned.

Deadlines

Workflow management should allow the the setting of deadlines. Each action (step) should have a deadline assigned to it, and backup actions should be defined (for example: reroute the case to the supervisor) when the deadline is missed.

Work-in-Process Tracking

All objects of a workflow must be monitored by the system so that the process status is visible to management at all times. For example, managers should be able to query the system at any time to evaluate the number of outstanding cases, unpaid invoices, unapproved travel and expense reports, etc. The status of all work-in-process queues should be available so that work can be shifted, as required, and bottlenecks are eliminated. The proper users should be alerted when actions are overdue or have been pending beyond a specified amount of time (for example, an accident claim is awaiting a police report for further processing).

Not just anyone should be allowed to initiate a workflow process, view status reports, reroute a document, or modify a screen within a workflow. The workflow program should be able to specify who can perform these functions. In addition, some mechanism must be in place to perform electronic signature verification (often accomplished by requiring a user to enter his or her password ID) before the workflow is allowed to proceed to the next step.

Integration With Other User Applications

Sometimes the next action or task in a process is not to be performed by another person, but by another computer application. For example: if the next step requires that a form letter be sent to the patient indicating that the doctor's report is required for further processing, the workflow program should be able to launch a word processing program to open the form letter, fill in all the necessary information from the central database and print the letter.

Document Rendezvous

When documents come into the system, the workflow management program should be able to match the new document with existing documents that pertain to it and clip them together before it is routed to the next action step. For example: a customer's folder is automatically retrieved in response to an incoming letter from that customer. The letter is then forwarded with the folder for processing.

Functions Automated by Workflow Management Software

What workflow functions can be automated?

Most workflow management development tools can be used to automate one or more of the following:

• Information routing
   
• Task processing
   
• Work-in-process reporting

Information Routing

The simplest routing that can be automated is based on a predefined set of processing steps (routing path) associated with a form or document to be processed. When both the normal and exception processing flows along the routing path arc predefined, routing automation is said to be rules based.

In many implementations a database table stores paths for each transaction type, for example: all property damage claims go to the property clerk, all casualty claims to the casualty clerk. By examining specific entries on the claims upon entry in the system the workflow software will automatically route the document per the rules set up in the database table.

When routing cannot be predefined by a set of rules but is conditional upon information brought into the system at various steps in the process conditional routing routines apply. For example: all purchase orders that exceed the sender's signature authority are automatically routed back to the originator.

Workflow management software must be implemented over a network in order for routing to occur. Work is routed through electronic mail (e-mail) or a network's LAN transport, such as NETBIOS. Routing based on e-mail usually places incoming work in a particular person's in-basket. LAN transport based routing deposits work into queues for which access privileges are assigned.

Task Processing

At its most complex, workflow management automatically triggers processes that perform the tasks necessary to complete a business process without human intervention. In the case of a new hire, for example, identifying the new employee as a level 20 at the start of the workflow would automatically generate application forms for executive life insurance with most information fields already filled in with pertinent applicant data.

In an auto insurance claims processing operation, a workflow management program would automatically check the policy database for type of coverage, calculate potential payment based on damage and deductibles, and generate requests for police reports and drivers' records before routing the claim form to the claims examiner. Once the claim has been processed and approved the program will trigger the check-writing process producing a cover letter to the insured, queuing it to the printer, and recording the entire transaction in the claims history database.

Automatic task processing capabilities vary among workflow management packages and depend on the availability of development tools for interfacing the workflow program to existing applications software: For example: via application programming interfaces (APIs) or Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) to existing databases. Many Windows-based workflow management development languages allow for exchange of data among different applications (e.g., word processing and spreadsheets) via Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

Work-in-Process Reporting

Work-in-process reporting tracks the location of outstanding items, what steps have been completed and whether or not processing is on schedule. Workflow management of transaction-based workflows often includes extensive work-in-process capabilities that assess current work volume, backlog and age of backlog. This alerts users to the location of bottlenecks within the system so that tasks and/or documents can be rerouted. This type of software can also be used to produce ad hoc management reports.

The Role of Databases in Workflow Management

Workflow management software stores its routing instructions in a queue. Workflow queues are nothing more than database tables with queue entries (i.e., work to be processed) stored as records. Attributes associated with the queue entries (e.g.. the next role in the process, its address etc.) are stored as fields in the records. In some implementations, the database serves as a repository for such things as processing rules, procedures, associated tasks, and information assembly criteria.

Typically, all workflow software requires its own database whether it be proprietary or derived from a standard database, such as Oracle. In order to fully integrate with other applications the software should provide some way of allowing other applications to access the data within the database. An example would be:

to obtain information on the amount of money collected on invoices routed through the workflow so that the information can be input into a spreadsheet program. In addition, workflow programs should also be capable of accessing data from other databases to complete their tasks: e.g. a workflow application that sends form letters to overdue clients should be capable of accessing the clients' names and addresses from an existing mainframe database.

Workflow Management Development Tools

The intent of workflow management development tools is to give the actual system users the ability to program a workflow application. Currently however workflow management software is not an off-the-shelf technology. Even vendors who now provide graphical flowcharting tools for end users to develop some limited function applications also provide sophisticated tools, intended for programmers for designing "mission-critical" production-oriented workflow applications for the enterprise. Most vendors caution that an organization's initial workflow development must be performed under the guidance of an MIS professional. Most workflow applications programs will still require extensive scripting for all but the simplest operations. However, once in production development tools are now available that allow users to make workflow modifications without the aid of MIS.

Hence, the trend is increasingly to provide more functionality in graphically oriented flowcharting development tools that can act as front ends to traditional scripting tools for more complex application development. This front end now serves two purposes: to assist end users in describing the workflow process to MIS at the onset of development and to allow end users to make routine modifications to the workflow "on-the-fly."

In general there are five types of development tools employed in building workflow applications:

• Workllow configuration tools-allow users to build a workflow management program by responding to promptod questions in menus or by using a graphical tool that produces an onscreen flowchart. Some packages provide simulation and analysis modelling tools for testing a workflow program before any code is generated.

• Scripting tools-are used to code the workflow management program. Object-oriented scripting tools allow developers to point and click on lists of typical workflow functions such as "suspend" or "print." and code is automatically generated for executing those functions. Scripting engines are often used in conjunction with workflow configuration tools to automatically generate code based on the desired configuration. Scripting tools may also be 4GL languages specifically designed for creating workflow programs.

• Electronic forms generators-are used to design screens for information capture. The generated forms may contain intelligent fields that automatically prompt other processing actions. Graphical forms generation tools provide designers with features found in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) such as scroll bars, radio buttons and pull-down menus. Some workflow software packages accept screens designed with other forms' design tools, such as Object Vision.

• Interface tools APIs, RPCs and other interface tools allow workflow processing programs to automatically open application packages such as word processors and spreadsheets at appropriate points in the work process.

• Reporting tools-allow users to develop customised reporting mechanisms for monitoring both individual and group performance. Ad hoc reporting capability should also be available. These tools should be able to provide meaningful data on the status of all active and inactive processes.

Market Perspective

Because it is a systems function, workflow management software is very rarely sold as a separate package, but is more likely integrated with other computer application products such as document imaging, electronic mail (e-mail), or office automation. Vendors of workflow management development tools usually market their products to third party vendors who will integrate their workflow capabilities into their proprietary office products. The extensive upfront development demanded of workflow applications lends itself to distribution through value added reseller (VAR) channels. The vendors whose products are profiled in this report lead the industry not only in their product innovations but also in their vision for future development in this area. They include those who integrate workflow into their applications products as well as those who provide workflow development tools to support other vendors' development efforts.

Current Applications

While the trend is moving toward using workflow software to reengineer new business processes on a workgroup or project basis, most workflow applications to date have been implemented in heads-down, mission-critical production environments. Experience in these situations has shown that work processes that lend themselves best to automation are those where:

• The process is well defined and rules or conditions can be identified (there are few exception conditions)

• Fixed delays or deadlines are involved such as those associated with government regulations, contractual obligations, accounting periods, customer service and sales lead follow-up

• Paper flow is involved

• Many people are involved

• Tracking progress is important

Related Technologies

Examples of successful workflow management applications that have been implemented in production departments have involved such processes as:

• Bid and proposal routing and tracking
   
• Engineering change notice distribution
   
• Automated purchasing requests
   
• Tax management
   
• Property transfer
   
• Handling customer service and complaints
   
• New drug registration
   
• College enrolment
   
• Human resource recruiting and hiring
   
• Claims processing and management
   
• Jet-engine turbine blade design

These implementations along with other early adopters of workflow management software provide evidence of the software's capability to improve response times and time-to-market, decrease error rates, improve customer service, and provide more compliance to standards by streamlining and managing the work through computer automation.

Future Trends

Workflow management software is changing to reflect new business paradigms and restructured organisations. The trend toward client/server architectures, GUIs, multiple database access and growing use of PC LAN based networks will continue requiring open, flexible, scaleable workflow products. Workflow management software will continue to migrate out of the production department and into the workgroup, with development tools that empower end users to initiate workflows in response to market demands. For example: FileNet announced WorkFlo Custom Controls for Microsoft Visual Basic, and, as part of Version 4.0 of its WorkForce Desktop and WorkShop software released Callable WorkFlo which allows users familiar with PowerBuilder and Visual Basic to create frontend interfaces to FileNet's imaging and WorkFlo applications that were developed with its WorkFlo System Development Kit.

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