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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