BPM Workflow

At the end of the day, BPM and workflow are about precisely the same thing: optimizing business performance. As a result, the distinction between them should now be viewed as being largely immaterial, and the emphasis should be placed instead on how they can best be orchestrated. Vendors that position and explain themselves this way – as Ultimate is well on the way to doing – should grow quickly even in this uncertain market economy. But more important, customers who adopt this perspective should be able to quickly cut through the hype and get on with enabling their businesses. And after all, isn’t that the entire point?

The real power of BPM and workflow can be unleashed only when their implementation objectives are integrally linked to issues of corporate strategy and competitive advantage. Otherwise, as the expression goes, the result too easily may be only that “we’re lost, but we’re making great time!” In addition, obtaining maximum value from BPM and Workflow means deploying them with reasonable levels of investment in time and money, and with little or no disruption of work.

Business Process Management(BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between Management and Information Technology , encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control and analyze operational (business processes involving humans, organizations, applications , documents and other sources of information. The term ‘operational business processes’ refers to repetitive business processes performed by organization in the context of their day to day operations, as opposed to strategic decision making processes which are performed by the top level management of an organization. BPM differs from Business process reengineering, a management approach poplar in the 1990’s in that it does not aim at the one off revolutionary changes to business processes but at their continuous evolution. In addition, BPM usually combines management methods with information technology.

BPM covers activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. While such a goal is hardly new, software tools called business process management systems (BPM systems) have made such activities faster and cheaper. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch.

Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks (workflow) and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in workflow, workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like Petri nets.While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software.

Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on scheduling task executions, including dependencies which are not necessarily data-driven and may include human agents.Scientific workflows found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.

Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems.

The key driver to gain benefit from the understanding of the workflow process in a business context is that the throughput of the work stream path is modeled in such a way as to evaluate the efficiency of the flow route through internal silos with a view to increasing discrete control of uniquely identified business attributes and rules and reducing potential low efficiency drivers. Evaluation of resources, both physical and human is essential to evaluate hand-off points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks.

As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains.In general, workflow techniques are appropriate only for work in which human involvement is limited to key data entry and decision points. For innovative, adaptive, collaborative human work the techniques of Human Interaction Management are required.

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Workflow

Workflow can be best understood as the movement of documents and/or tasks through a work process. It is the operational aspect of a work procedure and follows the following set criteria: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. In other words workflow handling is based on a setup of a number of workflow descriptions. The descriptions can lead to either an information or activate an action. On each description it can be set up where in the process they should be active, e.g. in the item arrival, finishing a production order, delivering a sales order, etc.

While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging software.A workflow description can be added to a number of employees, groups of employees or departments, that should be either informed or should perform an action in a given sequence.

workflow is an active function, whether routing a message from one designated person to another, or a complicated, multi-part, multi-person application with conditional steps, parallel or subordinate activities and different documents or information sources.

Workflow systems help to standardize how we process jobs. When we rely on key individuals, we are depending on them to remember what they did last time to solve a problem, or how to most efficiently move a job through production. Most of our institutional memory is tied up in these key people, and all too often amnesia strikes at inopportune moments. Standardizing processes removes many of the variables in production.

Unfortunately, many of us fail to standardize how we process jobs once they get into our shops. Workflow standardization requires a set of protocols or procedures that happen to every job, and a workflow system can introduce standards into your entire workflow.

Standards extend beyond just the abstract or routine processes, they can go into every sub process and their further sub processes to give complete control and standardization. A workflow system interface alone can help standardize job entry by providing drop-down menus for common entries on job tickets.

Underlying all workflow systems are two central ideas: decision making and routing.

First, the workflow system should be able to make decisions about a job and act based on either the job files themselves or on the intended use of the job files. In all cases, preflight is part of this process and leads either to reporting, automatic corrections or both.

Second, a workflow system should be able to route job files to one or more destinations.

Of course, most organizations need invoice, and most workflow systems make it easy to account for all of the steps in a job. Many include interaction with an existing management information system (MIS) for job tracking and billing, and several include MIS as a feature. Many include Web-based job management, which allows people from anywhere in the plant to check on and manipulate a job.

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