The implementation of corporate work-flow management systems is facing a similar challenge: How do you integrate a variety of existing applications into an automated work flow that is driven and controlled by a central work-flow server? The solution many vendors are suggesting is to redesign processes, derive the work-flow model, and build applications and work-flow management (WFM) systems based on industry standards.
In today's ever-changing business environments, organizations face a constant pressure to improve financial performance as well as customer service. It's no wonder they have big hopes for process automation and demand more sophisticated work-flow management systems.
Ovum, a London-based consultancy, estimates a global annual work-flow market growth of 49 percent for the next few years and expects a market volume of $2 billion by the year 2000. Information technology (IT) analysts wit
h the Gartner Group predict that this year will see the breakthrough of work-flow technology and BPR tools in general business administration.
The basic problem standing in the way of successful work-flow system implementation is a lack of standards. Work-flow applications need to integrate with existing or emerging applications, ranging from desktop office functions to corporate transaction-processing and database applications.
The Workflow Management Coalition's (WFMC) reference model (see the sidebar "The Workflow Reference Model") aims to define the interfaces that enable process definitions, administration and monitoring products, invoked applications, and WFM systems of other vendors to interoperate at a variety of levels. Although formal industry support is strong, the WFMC has not fully formulated the interfaces. Thus, they have not had the expected impact. Regarding the interoperation of work-flow engines and work-flow-invoked applications, wider industry standards such as the Common Obje
ct Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) are expected to play a more important role.
New WFM Systems
New WFM systems provide tools to define and model processes and constituent activities (build-time functions), and to control and operate the work flow in a
run-time environment
(run-time functions). They include interfaces to applications for processing the activity steps (run-time interactions).
During the build-time phase, you translate a business process from the real world into a formal, computer-processable definition. This definition is often called a process model or process metadata. Such a process definition normally comprises a number of discrete activity steps, with associated computer and human operations and rules governing the progression of the process through the activity steps.
BPR vs. Work Flow
The core component of a WFM system is the work-flow engine. It's responsible for process creation and control of the activit
y scheduling in an operational process and interaction with tools or human resources. The WFM system is often distributed across a number of platforms to cope with processes that operate over a wide geographic basis. Applications interact with the process-control software to transfer control between activities, ascertain the operational status of processes, invoke tools, and pass the appropriate data.
However, not all work-flow-enabled products have such a clear-cut architecture. Image-processing and document management systems, for example, have supported aspects of work-flow functionality for years, and their work-flow design is often specialized and proprietary. Such systems often include repositories distributed in an organization with facilities for routing documents or even parts of documents. They form a document-centric work flow.
Initially, groupware applications supported group working via informal processes, accessing group BBSes, and scheduling applications on an ad hoc basis. As such
applications encompass business-related group interactions, they provide a framework to support organizations' work-flow management requirements. A good example is a series of work-flow applications that act on top of Lotus Notes (e.g., Onestone's Prozessware and Unilink's OfficeMan).
"Work-flow management systems are nestled between the application and organization in more or less the same fashion as middleware is between the application and system," notes Leo Bras, sales consultant for SAP in the Netherlands. "They help improve the efficiency of business processes." The most-often-quoted example for the benefits of work-flow management is insurance claims processing. Studies that work-flow systems developer Staffware (Maidenhead, U.K.) have conducted show that efficiency of insurance claims processing in a work-flow-controlled business has increased by as much as 80 percent.
What benefit is due to work-flow management, and what benefit is due to the BPR that often accompanies a work-flow project
? To answer these questions, Staffware reviewed a work-flow project in a life and pensions company. It found that BPR reduced the number of process steps from 24 to 12. Automation of the remaining 12 steps by the work-flow system provided an efficiency gain of 65 percent. "This result is quite notable for claims-processing departments of insurance companies, where efficiency is obtained by reducing the time spent working on a case," explains John O'Connell, managing director of Staffware.
Work-flow management solutions work best in environments that have highly structured tasks, have rules determining the logical transactions between tasks, use digital information resources, and where organizations want to automate and better control the allocation of work. However, without an effort by all the participants, from the people in the line to top management, and a sharp definition of processes, any BPR and subsequent work-flow automation will prove to be for naught.
Work-Flow Tools
BPR tools help analyze, model, and redefine the core business processes of an organization. They also simulate the potential effects of change in such processes as well as organizational roles and responsibilities that are associated with them. A natural extension of such tools is to facilitate the implementation of the process in an organizational infrastructure to control the work flow and associated activities in the business process.
For example, companies have widely embraced IDS Professor Scheer's Aris-Toolset as a business modeling tool for SAP R/3 implementations. It now includes a sophisticated work-flow component besides its analyzing, simulation, and applications-generation modules.
Aris-Workflow comprises a work-flow engine that integrates with clients and invokes applications via CORBA, DDE, OLE, or R/3's Business APIs (BAPIs). The big benefit of IDS's process-model-driven approach is that the work-flow system can deploy optimized business models that the modeling module derived and a
re stored in a central repository. The work-flow server interprets these models at run time.
The Aris-Workflow description model includes role- and group-based mapping techniques as well as hierarchical and organizational structuring elements. Business applications still control all operational data. However, the process model includes references to the operational data. All data references are collected in a folder that you can access, manipulate, and forward within predefined routes. This concept of data references makes it easier to control data flow, analyze data, and trigger events.
The system expresses instances (concrete examples of a business procedure) and process definitions in the same graphical representation. This lets you edit, analyze, and refine the instances and generic process definitions with the same monitoring tools. Besides monitoring such functions as statistical analysis of the process, project managers can review the process status and performance of projects and employees
on the fly. They can also change responsibilities to avoid accidental bottlenecks.
Ad Hoc vs. Structure
The opposite of structured work flow, where all the process variables are well known, is ad hoc or nonstructured work flow. You can think of it as a coordination rather than a transaction process. The process is fuzzy, and you determine the rules, roles, and routes as the work is being done. Not many systems support both structured and unstructured work flow. Aris-Workflow, however, can handle exceptions in structured work flow, which is seen as an important step toward the control of unstructured work flow.
Exception handling kicks in when there is no predefined path to handle the situation, when human input is required to determine how to handle the exception to predefined rules. Aris-Workflow supports such exceptions as further inquiries, abortion of processes, revision, reclamation, and resumption.
"Exception handling is probably one of the most complex issues in wo
rk-flow management, since individual employees have different styles of work and it's practically impossible to predict and anticipate all variants within a process," notes Helmut Kruppke, senior vice president at IDS Professor Scheer.
Aris-Toolset can interface with the SAP R/3 business objects repository. Through a similar deal, IBM's FlowMark WFM system interfaces with Aris-Toolset. The interface lets process models developed in Aris-Toolset be transferred to FlowMark for further processing.
Similar to Aris-Workflow, FlowMark separates business and application logic, letting it centrally enforce, audit, and customize business processes. It already comprises basic groupware functions. Its latest release, however, tightly integrates with Lotus Notes to address the collaborative work-flow management needs of organizations.
With the increasing importance of the Internet, developers such as Action Technologies, Staffware, and Wang are working on Web-enabled versions. Wang's Open/Workflow inte
grates with Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), allowing a user to initiate and track work-flow instances on the Internet. Action Technologies has released ActionWorks Metro, a work-flow solution for intranets. Using a standard Web browser, all ActionWorks Metro users get the same interface, allowing them universal access to a variety of resources on many platforms.
As a result of increasing e-mail and Internet-based business communications, the WMFC has defined the Workflow Interoperability Specification to include Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and Microsoft's MAPI Workflow Framework (MAPI-WF) formats.
Staffware's Global includes a Java-based client and exposes its process-definition repository to intranet or Internet users capitalizing on the IBM Internet Connection server. The newly designed architecture of the work-flow system separates presentation, application-logic, and data-access layers. The first two layers reside on the client side. The data-access layer sits o
n the server and supports Oracle, Informix, and ODBC databases. However, all three components can be fully replicated on the server.
This architecture enables the Web-based client to be treated in the same way as all other client/server applications. It makes no difference if the client is a character terminal, a Windows-based client, or a Java-based client.
Web-Enabled WFM
Web-enabled WFM systems are on the rise because software developers are trying to propel the market value of their products via integration with the Web. But integration of WFM and the Internet is important because industry experts envision that although today's work-flow projects focus mainly on intraenterprise processes, work-flow technology will soon cover interorganizational activities, including complete product-value chains.
Where to Find
Action Technologies
Alameda, CA, U.S.
Phone: +1 510 521 6190
F
ax: +1 510 769 0596
Internet:
http://actiontech.com
Reorganize Your Business
