Uses vary, benefits accrue, yet workflow remains something of a mystery

Workflow used to be no more and no less than the movement of documents or tasks through a business process. But a lot has changed since the 1980s when workflow technology, known as imaging, was first used to support basic business processes.

Today, workflow solutions take many forms. They can be “message-based” and embedded in almost every category of enterprise software; they are offered as stand-alone solutions; and they serve as cornerstones to middleware platforms. Yet the idea that workflow processes are either initiated by a document or result in a completed document persists in many quarters.

Consider workflow as a map of tasks, including the building blocks to accomplish robust and scalable queuing, universal connectivity, work-item transport, user definition, security, administration, and a repository for work-in-process. These building blocks create a workflow system that helps organizations specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of tasks through a business process—and in some cases, beyond the four walls of a company.

Workflow also is available as part of business process management (BPM) solutions that contain tools for modeling, building, executing, orchestrating, and monitoring a constructed process model. The goal of workflow in BPM is flexible user applications that map detailed business process requirements while integrating to ERP and best-of-breed applications.

The difference between workflow and BPM—explains Peter Kastner, a research VP with Boston-based Aberdeen Group—is that BPM treats system-to-system interactions in addition to those involving humans, which is the particular domain of workflow.

Both BPM and workflow are integral to middleware and service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure products introduced in recent years by the largest global technology and application providers, including IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. This middleware layer is the current answer to easing intractable enterprise integration problems and promoting agility in automating business processes.

What's most impressive about workflow today, according to Kastner, “is that the nonprogrammer can build sophisticated workflow applications without a lot of IT hand-holding. That means BPM users can take charge and impart agility to their business processes. Just as important, the applications are developed visually. Results can be tested and changed even before being rolled out for training.”

Specifically, with current BPM software users can define business processes using graphical tools so that they—not IT—can create the steps, conditions, and rules necessary for governing the business process.

In addition, standards—most especially the Business Process Execution Language, or BPEL—“are getting to the point where a workflow can be generated on one machine and then run on another,” says Kastner. “In other words, a workflow could be developed using tools from, for example, BPM vendor Fuego, and be run on Oracle Fusion middleware.”

Aberdeen Group says about half of the world's 10,000 largest companies are using BPM.

“Twenty percent of companies depend on their ERP vendor for workflow,” says Kastner. “Thirty percent do workflow outside of ERP. And 50 percent have nothing. But the adoption rate is pretty rapid at this point. It's delivering enormous value in all the industries we've looked at.”

Davis Controls—an Ontario-based manufacturer and distributor of instrumentation and control products—uses e-Synergy, a workflow solution from Exact Software that has replaced email as the primary tool for internal communications.

“With email, all conversations are private,” explains Neil Montgomery, president and CEO of Davis Controls. “With workflow, discussions are public and keyword-searchable.”

Exact's e-Synergy is not the type of solution normally associated with an ERP vendor, yet users say it brings information about people, products, and processes together with ERP transactions in a single multifunctional database, allowing them to do things not possible otherwise.

Because of its Web-based interface, any employee—regardless of whether he or she has an enterprise system license—can leverage information in the ERP system and make use of Web-publishable documents to create workflows.

At Altman Lighting, Roger Pujol, assistant general manager, set up 25 common business processes—including requests for literature and bills of material changes—to be executed within e-Synergy.

“Wherever there is a potential for miscommunication, I set up a workflow. I'm not a programmer, and I've been able to do this in-house.”

Exact Software, with revenues of $278 million in 2006, markets Exact Globe ERP and e-Synergy in all major software markets. Here in the U.S., Exact has absorbed the product lines and installed bases of a number of acquired ERP software vendors. Altman runs Exact's Macola ES, synchronized with e-Synergy. Pujol says ERP is about transactions, while e-Synergy is about information. Besides solving document-management challenges by means of a common repository and eliminating multiple databases, accountability is established.

“Take something like a request for an item number,” says Pujol. “It would get passed all around engineering with no action. By means of a workflow, the person responsible is clearly identified.”

Both Montgomery and Pujol agree that the big challenge in rolling out e-Synergy was getting people to change the way they work.

“Workflow changed our culture and mind-set. There weren't technology issues. It was getting the mindshare and employee buy-in that's important,” says Montgomery. To get the needed participation, Montgomery actually disabled email communication for several employees.

“The return-on-investment,” Mongtomery concludes, “comes from the many ingenious solutions that are found once the system is in use.”

Perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of the limitations of paper and even HTML forms—both with their own particular drawbacks, like manual data entry on paper, and difficulty in printing HTML forms—the world's largest enterprise vendor, SAP, forged a partnership with Adobe Systems to better handle documents in an area where documents are the name of the game: global trade services (GTS).

GTS—the successor to SAP R/3 Foreign Trade—is a composite application that exchanges data with multiple applications and the ERP system to establish a centralized management platform that automates the handling of electronic customs forms. Specifically, SAP GTS enables trade management, such as export & import management and trade preference management.

By leveraging Adobe technology, SAP enables SAP NetWeaver—the SOA platform in which GTS is now powered—to address people-centric processes integral to trade management. Once optimized, the result is a single unified view of activity and the assurance that trade processes are managed consistently.

Of course, NetWeaver itself is meant to streamline processes as well as create new ones, but according to an Aberdeen report, SAP Global Trade Services: Poster Child for SAP NetWeaver Value, Adobe software adds more functionality to NetWeaver Application Server, including the following:

• Using Adobe forms, trade forms on the GTS screen can match exactly what's on a paper trade document to reduce training requirements, increase productivity, and allow faster user acceptance;
• Company analysts can tailor the GTS trade forms or build new ones depending on their needs without hand-holding from IT or outside consultants; and
• Some companies optionally license Interactive Forms that can be created and posted to an enterprise portal and distributed via email outside the enterprise.

Furthermore, SAP NetWeaver's four components—Application Server, Portal, Business Intelligence, and Exchange Infrastructure—allow companies to control processes and data whether they are from SAP or non-SAP applications, and whether the documents are used outside or inside the organization. With these capabilities, consistent trade processes can be implemented—the key goal of workflow.

All these examples illustrate the efficacy of workflow applied to business processes that begin or end with a document. Other advances will make workflow much more useful as it is applied within ERP systems. One limitation for workflow is that not everyone is equipped with an enterprise system license, which constrains the number of stations at which the workflow can be “exposed.” Heightened interactivity between enterprise business applications and the desktop will increase the value of workflow, allowing a wider range of workers to be engaged with it.

Combined with the power of composite applications derived from SOA-based infrastructures, workflow increases the ability of managers to derive streamlined, automated work processes while remaining flexible enough to adapt rapidly over time in a world of constant change.