Workflow Blog

I am a little too busy to write a blog entry this week so I have asked an associate of mine to write one for me. In her article she is drawing on the experienced gained from using a workflow management system in the HR arena.

Human Resource processes cover the entire business, whether you are discussing Travel or Leave Requests or even the task of hiring a new Employee. For every HR process, there is a series of activities that involve other people, managers and staff from at least one other department within the company.

Workflow Management or BPM can automate any HR process where people, systems and businesses interact. It calls upon the appropriate tools and supplies necessary information, business rules, check lists, task lists and reports to the Employee.

A HR process may require interaction from many departments. Therefore, HR processes are well suited for automation because typically these processes are paper based, manual and prone to error and delay.

Employing a workflow management system to automate high throughput, repetitive processes, such as Performance Reviews, can have a profound effect on every aspect of the process. For example, when the Performance Review process is automatically started each month, it can check to see which Employees need to be reviewed and creates an instance of that process in the appropriate Employee and Managers task list for action.

The steps may then follow as such:

The Employee completes their part of the Performance Review
The Manager is then alerted that the Employee has completed their part and the Manager reviews the Employees responses
The Manager and the Employee meet and discuss the results
The Manager may then enter the details of the discussion with the Employee
The Manager marks the review as complete and forwards either to their Manager or to HR
Business Rules are placed throughout each activity or step in the process to ensure that data is entered correctly and escalations occur if any of the steps are delayed unnecessarily
Everyone in the process is notified of the completed process
The results of the review can then be exported to the companies Payroll system if required
Using workflow management to automate these types of process streamlines operations by reducing the data entry to key people; thereby reducing errors. Automated steps do away with many of the Employees most mundane tasks, leaving them time to focus their energy on their jobs. A business process is structured so each instance is managed according to the same business rules, every time. This consistency provides stability in the business and predictability for Employees.
– Anna Fogarty

Well there is no tried and true scoring sheet for determining what are the best things to convert into workflow applications
However here are some guidelines as to the types of applications that will provide the highest return on investment.

1) Throughput - how many times is this process used per month.
2) Escalations - What effect does missing a deadline on one of the activities have for your organisation.
3) Number of Steps - the more steps the more it lends itself to a workflow application.
4) Number of disparate systems currently needed - a workflow application should eliminate the users’ experience of dealing with information over more that one interface.
5) Staff Turnover - Workflow Systems (at least Kontinuum) provides a more straight forward learning experience as people see how the process works, these means there is less down time for new employees to get up to speed.
6) Management Reporting - How important is it for management to see at what stage everything is at.
7) Data Integrity - What is the current state of data integrity.
Security - Is the data secure from: malicious users, the departure of key personnel.

Those are just some of the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  I am sure I will be adding to this list as the weblog progresses.