How To Build Workflows and Forms — For Dummies
In a world in which speed matters, businesses need agility and flexibility to quickly modify their processes and business practices in order to stay competitive. Traditionally, large companies have hampered process agility by locking themselves into monolithic systems, processes, and workflows.
Different business process management (BPM) suites have unique strengths and weaknesses. However, a common weakness among many BPM solutions is the lack of agility. Highly skilled developers and months (or even years) of coding are typically required to build and customize business applications. By the time an application is delivered, the business process may have changed, requiring further tweaking of the application and many more months of development time. As a result, businesses are stuck with outdated and inflexible applications and processes.
The rapid pace of modernization and evolving customer expectations is increasingly driving organizations toward business process transformation in the quest to achieve process excellence. Low‐code business application platforms enable companies to rapidly build and deploy applications that are customized to meet their unique business needs. Unlike traditional BPM options, the opportunity to transform quickly and immediately realize the benefits are greater with low‐code business application platforms.
Choosing the right solution for business process transformation will provide easy access to information and quantifiable results, while being agile, scalable, and powerful will give your business the tools it needs to stay ahead in a highly competitive market.
Foolish Assumptions
It’s been said that most assumptions have outlived their uselessness, but I assume a few things nonetheless!
Mainly, I assume that you are a line‐of‐business (LOB) manager or department head in an organization of some sort — perhaps a small or medium business, large enterprise, nonprofit, or military or government agency. This book is written primarily for nontechnical readers who don’t necessarily work in an IT department. Or perhaps you’re an IT leader or influencer interested in gaining a better understanding of how to support line‐of‐business leaders across your company.
I also assume that you’re looking for a workflow and forms solution to help you automate critical business processes in your organization, and you don’t want to become a software developer. You need a solution that’s as easy as drag‐and‐drop so that you can get up and running as quickly as possible.
If these assumptions describe you, this article is for you!
Icons Used
Throughout this article, I occasionally use special icons to call attention to important information. Here’s what to expect:
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You won’t find a map of the human genome here, but if you seek to attain the seventh level of NERD‐vana, perk up! This icon explains the jargon beneath the jargon.
Thank you for reading; hope you enjoy the book; please take care of your writer! Seriously, this icon points out helpful suggestions and useful nuggets of information.
This icon points out the stuff your mother warned you about. Okay, probably not. But you should take heed nonetheless — you might just save yourself some time and frustration!
Where to Go from Here
With my apologies to Lewis Carroll, Alice, and the Cheshire cat:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat — err, the Dummies Man.
“I don’t much care where . . . ” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go!”
That’s certainly true of Easy to Build Workflows and Forms For Dummies, which, like Alice in Wonderland, is also destined to become a timeless classic.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any chapter will get you there — but Chapter 1 might be a good place to start. However, if you see a particular topic that piques your interest, feel free to jump ahead to that chapter. Each chapter is individually wrapped (but not packaged for individual sale) and written to stand on its own, so feel free to start reading anywhere and skip around to your heart’s content. Read this book (even though it’s in article format!) in any order that suits you.
I promise you won’t get lost falling down the rabbit hole!
Chapter 1
Recognizing How Workflows and Forms Help Drive Efficiency
In This Chapter
▶ Moving beyond manual, paper‐based workflows and forms
▶ Recognizing the key characteristics of modern business applications
The benefits of automating processes are clear. In a study by Cognizant, about half of the companies surveyed anticipated automation would significantly improve their business processes within three to five years. Unfortunately, three to five years is too long in today’s competitive business environment.
In this chapter, you explore the benefits of automating your business processes and solutions that can help you achieve business agility through process automation and excellence.
Automating Workflows to Increase Efficiency
Almost every part of a successful business relies on information being available to the right people at the right time. Nevertheless, information flow is often hindered by manual business processes that are outdated, inefficient, and inflexible. Relax, it’s not your fault!
A business can only go as far and as fast as the information that powers it.
Consider the following all‐too‐common scenario: A core business process is initiated by someone searching for a form located somewhere on a shared network drive, and then printing a copy and manually entering the required information. The paper‐based form is then routed from desk to desk or office to office for the necessary approvals, often delayed because someone is out on business travel or otherwise unavailable. After the form has been approved, someone else must log into multiple, disparate systems to enter the information from the form and collate the data. Throughout the entire manual and time‐consuming process, multiple opportunities for errors arise, along with numerous potential bottlenecks such as lost or improperly routed forms and missing or incorrect information.
These manual, paper‐based processes simply can’t keep pace with the modern digital workplace. Already, workers are looking elsewhere. For example, according to International Data Group (IDG), 79 percent of employees use cloud‐based file sharing and collaboration tools, such as Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive, for work‐related purposes.
Why do people bring their own devices to the office and download their own applications (“apps”) to get work done? The modern worker is tech savvy, and employees find ways to work around infrastructure limitations and rigid, outdated processes.
According to Gartner, a digital workplace leverages the technical literacy of cross‐generation employees — Millennials, Gen Xers, and even Baby Boomers — to do the following:
✓ Enable new and more effective ways of working
✓ Improve employee engagement and agility
✓ Exploit consumer‐oriented styles and technologies
IDG reports that organizations expect the consumerization of IT in the enterprise to improve user satisfaction and productivity, process efficiency, collaboration, and business agility. In fact, data shows that companies are eager to keep users productive wherever they go and whenever they work:
✓ According to Manufacturing Business Technology, 55 percent of manufacturing professionals expect to increase their use of mobile technologies.
✓ According to Workflow Magazine, 74 percent of businesses that deploy mobile devices are motivated by a need to accelerate communication, and 63 percent of businesses deploy mobile devices to let employees work away from their desks.
Modern business apps must do more than simply enable users to read and reply to emails from their mobile devices. Users must be able to seamlessly complete routine tasks whether in the office or in the field, across all departments — for everything from customer onboarding and invoice approval to complex process management and analysis.
Organizations are well aware of the benefits of automating their business processes. According to a study by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, companies are automating 25 to 40 percent of their workflows, and businesses that automate processes are reducing costs by 15 percent year over year.
Yet many organizations are frequently frustrated by the high costs and long timelines associated with the development of custom workflows and forms to support automation. Those costs can be especially discouraging for businesses that want to extend workflows to their mobile users.
Transforming and Optimizing Your Business to Be More Agile
Automated workflows and forms can transform a business into a more productive, responsive environment — but those business apps need to accommodate rapidly changing business needs, a mobile workforce, and disparate line of business (LOB) systems.
Modern business apps that support critical workflows and forms must be
✓ Automated
✓ Scalable
✓ Flexible
✓ Fast to implement
Paper‐based workflows are typically flexible, fast, and easy to implement but do not scale well and are, by their nature, manual (see Figure 1‐1).
Many businesses develop “one‐off” custom apps for specific business workflows. Although such solutions can be highly automated, they are not easily modified, do not scale well, can take months or even years to implement, and can be prohibitively expensive to develop and maintain.
A low‐code business apps platform is an innovative solution that provides automation, scalability, flexibility, and agility to support critical business workflows and forms. In Chapter 2, you learn how you can use this solution yourself, without the help of a developer, to automate your business workflows and forms.
Chapter 2
Building the Business Case for Process Transformation
In This Chapter
▶ Recognizing the need for a better business case
▶ Driving new and existing revenue opportunities
▶ Delivering a better multichannel customer experience
▶ Extending business applications to all your internal and customer‐ facing processes
In this chapter, you discover how to leverage customers and revenue to help you reframe the business case for a business applications platform solution through a modern lens.
Business Process Transformation
A recent online survey conducted by Forrester Research found that although 33 percent of companies are implementing or using a BPM solution and an additional 30 percent are interested in using BPM, only 17 percent of companies made a formal request for BPM last year (see Figure 2‐1).
The reason for such a wide interest‐to‐investment gap? According to the Forrester report, executives are scrutinizing capital expenditures more closely and demanding a clear case for the “cause and effect between investment and rapid business benefits.” BPM is in a gray area with a reputation for taking too long to deliver measurable results, costing too much for upfront software and skills development, and delivering ambiguous results that are hard to quantify.
So looking at business transformation with applications, workflows, and forms is a better approach for organizations looking to build a more relevant business case for executives. Solutions that meet the following requirements are well positioned to meet modern business needs:
✓ Speed up execution for revenue growth opportunities
✓ Simplify customer processes for convenience and engagement
✓ Use digital transformation to anchor the case for business process transformation
Speed Up Execution for Revenue Growth Opportunities
Although the business case for cost cutting and process efficiency is well documented, a more compelling case for executives today is revenue acceleration. According to Forrester, enterprise architects who have “cracked the code for revenue‐side benefits” have often focused on redesigning processes to accelerate customer acquisition and revenue. This means looking at processes that could create additional revenue opportunities, such as quote to cash, mortgage origination, underwriting, contract management, and a host of other processes. If streamlined more efficiently, these kinds of processes could not only cut costs and improve efficiency as a result of fewer risks and manual errors, but also actually net significant revenue for companies through the creation or identification of additional revenue opportunities.
Low‐code platforms with drag‐and‐drop design tools are an ideal way to build these types of processes because business and technical users can use them to quickly and easily build flexible, customizable applications that speed up processes and increase revenue acceleration opportunities.
Simplify Customer Processes for Convenience and Engagement
Customer service interactions and experiences are typically only “skin deep,” Forrester reports, with great visuals but lacking the touchpoints needed to complete transactions and service requests. This lack can create frustration and inconvenience for customers. Business process management systems can be great at automating the various touchpoints that are needed to provide a smooth experience for customers, but it’s important to take into account the end-user experience to ensure an intuitive, streamlined experience for customers across multichannel platforms.
Another important factor to consider when choosing a business applications solution to automate customer‐facing processes is agility. Customer‐facing processes change as quickly as the market, and solutions that streamline these processes need to be agile enough to keep up. Many systems are built more for internal, backend processes rather than customer‐ facing ones. An application can take months to design, which might be adequate for an internal process, but when used for a customer‐facing process, further changes to the process might be needed by the time the application is finally deployed. Unfortunately, making changes to an application can take several more months of development time, and in the meantime, customer needs may change yet again.
Finally, mobile capabilities are also important when building and running customer‐facing applications. Customers are increasingly engaging with businesses through tablets and smartphones, and they expect the companies they engage with to provide an intuitive mobile experience. Some customer transactions can be complex, creating a cumbersome experience for customers, but according to Forrester, this doesn’t mean you should avoid building mobile channels for these transactions. Just make sure that the solution you use simplifies this experience for customers and makes it easier for them to connect the dots.
Use Digital Transformation to Anchor Your Business Case
For long‐term impact, thinking about digitization across the entire organization is critical, from internal processes to customer‐facing ones. Many internal processes support customer‐facing processes and can be optimized to better support this engagement.
According to Forrester, speed is the top priority for digital businesses, and low‐code platforms are the new breed of BPM platforms to deliver “rapid customer‐centric innovation.” The capability to rapidly deliver solutions will allow organizations to scale these apps across the entire organization.
With the right solution, business process transformation can be the differentiator that helps your organization increase revenue and provide digital operational excellence that sets you apart from your competition. Now more than ever before, companies need to view business process transformation through a lens that captures more than just the automation of core processes. The solution you choose should also have the speed, agility, and flexibility needed to adapt to your organization’s and customer’s unique requirements.
Chapter 3
DIY Process‐Based Workflows
In This Chapter
▶ Empowering users in the digital workplace
▶ Supporting users anywhere and on any device
▶ Delivering transformative results with the business apps panacea
▶ Replacing “shadow IT” applications and processes with scalable solutions
In this chapter, you explore how a “do‐it‐yourself” (DIY) platform can help jump‐start your organization’s process improvement and process excellence initiatives.
Isn’t It IT’s Job to Build Apps for Us?
Many organizations have traditionally viewed application development as an IT function. However, today’s digital workplace (see Chapter 1) requires employers to leverage an ever‐ expanding base of individual technical skills throughout the organization.
The reality is that IT department resources are seriously constrained and can become bottlenecks for process improvement and process excellence initiatives. Many IT departments are locked into rigid software development life cycles that can take months to deliver even relatively simple business applications. From requirements definition to coding, testing, and maintenance, such formal processes — even those labeled “agile” — can be too slow and inflexible to keep up with the dynamic and rapidly evolving needs of the business. Teams of developers, business analysts, and project managers add to the cost and complexity of such projects.
But what if the users who understand their own day‐to‐day challenges best had powerful, easy‐to‐use, drag‐and‐drop tools that enabled them to access the data and build the applications they need for themselves? A low‐code business application platform can empower your users to automate and optimize workflows and forms in a fraction of the time — and at a fraction of the cost — required for traditional IT development efforts. You really can do it yourself!
Overhauling Your Workflows for the Mobile Age
Companies today are under more pressure than ever to identify process bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and eliminate them through automation. To do this, IT and business leaders typically target manual workflows and paper‐based forms because they are cumbersome, time‐consuming, and can’t easily accommodate today’s mobile workforce.
Business process applications can breathe new life into tired, manual workflows. They can streamline processes and connect disparate line‐of‐business (LOB) systems so that users can work smarter and perform tasks faster. And when business applications are supported on mobile devices, employees can work more efficiently wherever they go. However, it can be challenging for resource‐constrained IT departments to quickly design and update apps that work with multiple platforms, such as tablets, smartphones, and email.
IT departments and users alike would benefit from business process automation that simplifies the design and rollout of apps for the mobile workforce.
Demand meets modernization
What if a wind‐power technician needs access to documents while in the field but can’t remotely access the company file repository? The solution is simple: She can upload the documents to a secure enterprise cloud‐based storage service and access them on her smartphone’s cellular network wherever she goes.
You’ve probably already felt the impact of similar scenarios in your organization. According to IDG’s Enterprise Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise Study 2014:
✓ Ninety percent of employees use consumer‐oriented, cloud‐based services, like Skype and LinkedIn, for their work.
✓ Seventy‐nine percent use cloud‐based file sharing and collaboration tools, such as Dropbox, Microsoft SharePoint, or Microsoft OneDrive.
✓ Forty percent of employees use their own smartphones for work.
The bring your own apps (BYOA) trend — an extension of the consumerization of IT and bring your own device (BYOD) — is hard evidence of what users already know: Current business processes are not fully meeting users’ needs. If they were, users would not feel compelled to find their own solutions from outside sources.
More and more businesses are embracing the move to a mobile, digital work style. They need to support workers who are on the go, working online and off. Yet many IT leaders feel that productivity gains and other benefits of mobility remain out of reach because outdated manual processes hinder progress toward modernization.
Many IT directors understand the complexity involved in connecting information from critical LOB systems to mobile workers on a variety of devices with different form factors. According to 78 percent of business managers and executives in a recent MIT Sloan Management Review survey, achieving digital transformation will become critical to their organizations within the next two years. However, 63 percent said the pace of technology change in their organization is too slow. To automate a workflow with a custom business app, IT typically needs to devote extensive time and costly development resources to planning, coding, testing, and rollout.
Companies embracing mobility
Mobile devices may have started as a BYOD challenge for companies, but they have now found a permanent home as a productivity boost. Cloud‐ based storage and apps expand the limits of what users can do with a handheld device.
According to the Intel IT Center, “Employees report saving an average of 57 minutes a day using mobile devices — that’s nearly an hour of productivity gained each day by simply providing a different way to work. Think of the productivity benefits you could gain by scaling this flexibility across your entire organization, ultimately reducing the cost of doing business”.
Empowering mobile users
Numerous workflows can be created or enhanced using mobile‐centric design principles. For example:
✓ Customer service employees performing equipment maintenance or repair can access manuals from cloud‐ based storage, input customer information in forms, and even order parts through a back‐end database, all from a tablet or smartphone.
✓ Field service technicians for utilities, city road maintenance crews, or cable companies can create workflows to dispatch service reps to jobs, based on the workers’ current locations. Field workers can use mobile devices to submit maintenance requests or fill out forms indicating completed work, even when connectivity is unavailable.
✓ Home health care workers, such as visiting nurses, occupational or physical therapists, or hospice workers, can use mobile devices to securely access patient information from clinic or hospital systems. The health care providers can also submit patient vitals and other data, and even get digital signatures for approval of procedures, by using built‐in DocuSign integration.
Automating workflows to increase efficiency
How can you quickly and affordably make your business mobile? Before answering that question, consider what a transformed, modernized business process might look like.
A modern business application:
✓ Automates workflows and forms, increasing productivity and reducing errors.
✓ Eliminates manual processes and costly delays.
✓ Empowers employees to work smarter and faster by providing all the information they need, in context, on any device.
Some examples of common workflows and processes that can be easily and affordably automated with a low‐code business application solution include:
✓ Account management: Get a complete view of customer information and bring the right people, approach, and solutions together to better meet customer needs.
✓ Customer service: Increase service levels to customers by driving efficient communication, improving purchasing timelines and providing better issue resolution.
✓ Product introduction: Take new products to market faster with collaboration, tracking, compliance, and automation.
✓ Billing: Reduce errors, expedite revenue generation, and more efficiently manage billing through workflows that supply the right data to the right people in the billing process.
✓ Employee Onboarding: Ensure that new hires are productive on day one, with automated processes that move from application to benefits enrollment, equipment ordering, computer access, credit card ordering, and more.
✓ Inventory management: Track, report, and automate inventory management to ensure that the supply chain continues to run efficiently so that customer revenue streams flow smoothly.
The Business App Dream: Build Apps Fast, Run on Any Device, and Access Data Anywhere
Many companies have found process nirvana with custom, easy‐to‐use business applications that can run on any device — from a browser to a smartphone. These apps address specific LOB needs, such as the onboarding of new customers, in a way that can dramatically increase efficiency.
The promised, transformative results include:
✓ Streamlined processes
✓ Empowered mobile workers
✓ Powerful insight into business trends
✓ Better, data‐driven decision making
No doubt, organizations are always looking for ways to work smarter and faster. They need tools that allow them to quickly create system‐spanning forms, and they need reliable workflows to securely deliver information to the right people at the right time.
For example, onboarding apps might need to use data from across services and systems — such as Box, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and Microsoft SharePoint — whether on premises or in the cloud. To be effective, business apps should accommodate any system that users rely on and should not require complex coding.
Most companies can’t afford to design and maintain multiple, customized versions of every app for different form factors. Every small update would require another round of development changes, testing, and distribution.
Companies are turning to low‐code, drag‐and‐drop software platforms and tools that support fast, responsive app design. As a result, these organizations are able to roll out new or updated apps rapidly, for all form factors.
Responsive design is an approach to web design that optimizes a website or web‐based application for optimal viewing and navigation on any device or form factor.
Managing and reporting capabilities are in high demand as well. A good management dashboard allows managers to view and act on all tasks from a central location, while detailed out‐of‐the‐box reporting displays how their processes are performing and helps them identify trends or efficiency gaps that can improve risk management and forecasting.
An agile business applications platform with these characteristics delivers value to end users and businesses in days or weeks, instead of months, and companies report drastic reductions in their development costs.
Future Proofing with Scalable Apps You Can Build Yourself
As organizations grow, their business applications must scale easily to support new and emerging needs. Current “shadow IT” applications and processes — which exist in organizations far too frequently — can be critical to everyday business workflows, but are unknown to, and therefore unsupported by, corporate IT departments. These applications and processes may consist of elaborate spreadsheets that have been built, maintained and “password‐protected” by individual users over the years, or cloud‐based services and applications such as Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
Deploying a low‐code workflow and forms platform empowers users in every department to replace these shadow IT applications and processes with scalable front‐end applications that integrate easily with complex, disparate backend systems — that they can build themselves!
Chapter 4
A Day in the Life . . . : Exploring Department Use Cases
In This Chapter
▶ Managing HR processes
▶ Optimizing Operations workflows
▶ Standardizing Purchasing procedures
▶ Driving Sales and Marketing processes
▶ Integrating Finance systems and forms
▶ Bringing IT all together
In this chapter, you spend a day in the life of some of your peers from different departments at Everest, Inc., a fictitious oil and gas (O&G) exploration company. After walking a mile in their shoes — or, if you prefer, reading this chapter’s pages — you’ll have a better understanding of how a single business applications solution can help you automate workflows and processes across departments and benefit everyone in your own organization!
Automating HR Processes and Workflows
HR processes affect all employees within an organization even before the first day, until their last — and every day in between. These processes are often manual and time consuming, requiring multiple levels of approvals across department systems. Building automated HR applications and workflows can increase process visibility, eliminate redundancy, and reduce manual errors.
Maria is a human resources manager at Everest. Some typical workflows and processes for which Maria is responsible include:
✓ Recruiting: Although the HR department has a defined process, every department seems to do its own thing when it comes to recruiting new employees. Job descriptions aren’t standardized and are often incomplete, outdated, or nonexistent. New opportunities aren’t consistently posted internally and are often advertised on different websites. Recruiters are sometimes used without proper approval. Finally, the entire interview process is disjointed and confusing. As a result, filling a vacant position takes far too long, and job candidates are often discouraged by the process.
✓ Employee onboarding and exit interviews: The onboarding process for new employees is a manual, paper‐based process that takes days to complete. Forms are often misplaced, office equipment and space isn’t ready when the new employee arrives, and system/ network accounts never seem to have the right permissions. What does it cost your business when new hires are sitting idle because onboarding was inefficient? Also, when an employee leaves the company, HR is often left second‐guessing as to whether the entire offboarding process was properly completed and whether any risk is associated with the departure.
✓ Travel and training requests: Travel and training request forms are paper‐based and can take days to process. After approval, an entirely different paper‐based process is required to process expense reimbursements and check requests.
✓ Performance reviews: Performance reviews are far too subjective and inconsistent. Managers often struggle to meet review deadlines and resort to copying and pasting performance “nuggets” between different reviews.
Everest’s HR department has tried for years to standardize and automate its onboarding process. Maria envisions a process that tracks new employees as soon as they begin the recruiting process and ensures that they have everything they need on their first day to ensure a great start. Rather than tell IT to give a new employee the same laptop that Gavin has, new equipment requests would automatically be routed to the appropriate hiring manager for approval and then forwarded to Oleg in Purchasing for procurement. And instead of instructing IT to copy Katia’s permissions on the network, an intuitive form would help the hiring manager assign the appropriate network permissions based on the new employee’s actual role and then automatically create accounts and assign permissions, requiring IT to simply verify that the account is set up correctly and activate the account on the new employee’s first day!
Maria asks Isaac, the IT director, to recommend a solution that will help her automate various HR processes for her department.
Building Flexible Operations Workflows
Operations workflows and processes vary greatly across industries and individual companies. Some common examples include:
✓ Compliance: Various governance controls, such as industry regulations, policies, and procedures, are often tracked in spreadsheets and monitored with logging utilities across multiple disparate line‐of‐business (LOB) systems.
✓ Claims/case management: Claims and case managers need a single view of a client or customer with all relevant information.
✓ Contract review/renewal: Numerous new and existing partner contracts must be regularly reviewed and negotiated by department heads and legal counsel. This review is often a manual process that results in potentially costly oversights.
✓ Scheduling: Assignments for field technicians and operations personnel often become routine and mechanical, resulting in inefficiencies that can go unnoticed for years or costly coverage gaps that are noticed immediately.
Edmund is a district manager at Everest. He is based primarily in a regional office but frequently travels to train employees, ensure compliance, and inspect operations. The weekly report from well #TX592 is a growing cause for concern because its unplanned downtime is trending upward. Hydrogen sulfide and CO2 emissions also regularly spike above acceptable levels. Edmund decides to visit the well with its foreman to see what is going on. The following example describes Edmund’s current well inspection and remediation process with an automated process:
✓ Edmund downloads and prints the paper forms he will need to fill out while in the field.
✓ Onsite, Edmund takes notes using a form and clipboard, and captures information he knows will be required in other forms.
✓ Edmund takes photos with a digital camera to document needed repairs.
✓ Edmund phones the office to start the purchase process for replacement parts.
✓ Edmund returns to the office to complete his paperwork and upload the photos into various systems.
✓ Edmund logs the compliance violations he noted and notifies management about them via email.
On his long, unproductive drive back to the office, Edmund daydreams about having a mobile app that automates and modernizes the current process and allows him to work more efficiently. Edmund’s dream app would enable him to
✓ Open an Inspection app on his tablet and check a box to indicate that he needs to work offline. The app accesses various office systems and prepopulates relevant data into the forms he will need, storing them for offline use.
✓ Onsite, he fills out forms and logs compliance violations in the Inspection app on his tablet.
✓ He takes photos with his tablet to document needed repairs and automatically uploads them to the Inspection app.
✓ The Inspection app prompts him to order replacement parts. He taps Yes to initiate the purchase process within the app.
✓ While Edmund is on his way home, his tablet uses his carrier’s cellular network to synchronize the Inspection app with his office systems.
✓ The Inspection app alerts management about the compliance violations and starts an automated workflow to purchase needed replacement parts.
One day, Edmund shares his dream with Isaac, Everest’s IT director.
Smart process applications
Smart process applications are a new generation of applications used to support highly variable, people‐intensive business activities that may be subject to frequent change. In a recent Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) online survey, information professionals were asked to weigh in on the applicability of smart process applications, the experience of using them, the drivers for improved case management, and the feature sets required of modern case management. Here’s what the surveyed professionals said:
✓ Fifty‐eight percent say case handling systems are important to customer experience management.
✓ Sixty‐seven percent say case handling systems are important to legal and regulatory compliance.
✓ Fifty‐one percent say at least half of their processes are not straightforward or predictable.
✓ Forty‐four percent say their #1 pain point is customers’ expectations for speed of response.
✓ Flexible workflows are the most important feature for modern case management systems.
✓ Eighty percent want automated classification, recognition, and routing of inbound content.
✓ Fifty percent say it is essential to be able to interact with workflows and add comments.
The top three benefits of smart process applications, according to users, are faster, more consistent customer response, faster end‐to‐ end process times, and flexibility.
Managing Your Supply Chain with Smart Purchasing Apps
Oleg is the Purchasing manager at Everest. As is true of many other purchasing managers, Oleg must deal with daily challenges that could be alleviated by streamlined purchasing processes, faster approvals, and easier access to critical information that would enable better purchasing decisions. For example, Oleg would like to automate the following purchasing processes at Everest:
✓ Spend management: Bring together real‐time information on spend analysis, sourcing, procurement, receiving, payments, and account management to track and manage spend across the entire organization.
✓ Vendor contract and performance management: Enable collaboration, tracking, and management of vendor contracts by centralizing information in a vendor management system, and use workflows to automate the vendor contract life cycle and ensure that contracts are signed and renewed on time. Establish and monitor performance metrics to ensure vendor performance and compliance with established standards.
✓ Requisition processing: Provide buyers with the tools they need to make better purchasing decisions, follow policies, and streamline requisition processes for verification and approval.
✓ Inventory management: Provide real‐time views of available inventory and automatically prompt managers to re‐order critical parts and supplies at an established minimum threshold.
Oleg shares her ideas with Maria over lunch one afternoon. Maria encourages Oleg to talk to Isaac.
Leading the Way to Greater Revenue for Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing departments are driven by rapidly developing opportunities that require agility and responsiveness to meet the needs of an ever‐demanding client base.
Sally in Sales works closely with Mark in Marketing. They interact with clients and potential clients at different points in the sales funnel, but must address similar workflow challenges together, including:
✓ Campaign and deal management: Various marketing campaigns, including advertising and email marketing, must be managed and analyzed for effectiveness. Similarly, sales promotions and deals must be actively managed to maximize sales revenues.
✓ Request for proposals and quotations (RFP/RFQ): Manually creating RFPs and RFQs is time consuming and error prone, which can lead to missed opportunities and costly mistakes. Far too often, RFP responses are copied and pasted from old RFP templates, and inevitably an old client name or some other piece of irrelevant and possibly sensitive information end up in the new RFP response.
✓ Lead flow processing: Hot, warm, and cold leads require different touchpoints and must be properly handed off between marketing and sales teams.
✓ Client onboarding: Similar to onboarding new employees (discussed earlier in this chapter), onboarding new clients must be an efficient, customer‐centric process that can be completed quickly and easily.
Take a closer look at the sales process. Currently, each new opportunity requires Sally to
✓ Collect business cards or take notes on paper when she is meeting potential new clients because she doesn’t have access to Salesforce Sales Cloud, her customer relationship management (CRM) system, when she is out of the office
✓ Turn her notes and business cards over to her assistant when she returns to the office, and then wait for the new customer data to be entered into Salesforce
✓ Log in to Microsoft SharePoint or a cloud‐based storage service, like Box, on a laptop to locate, download, and print or email product marketing materials to the prospect
✓ Determine product availability from a back‐end SAP database
✓ Generate a quote from Salesforce and obtain manager approval of the quote
✓ Obtain a customer signature for a purchase order
✓ Scan the signed purchase order and associate the digital version with the customer’s Salesforce record
✓ Confirm and generate the order for shipment from various suppliers around the globe
Frustrated by this slow and cumbersome process, Sally asks her IT director, Isaac, whether a way exists to automate part or all of this workflow so that she can use her smartphone to enter data and kick off the sales process when she is out of the office. The new app would enable Sally and her teammates to access data from multiple LOB systems, such as Salesforce and an SAP product database, on a single form. She could even access forms when she’s offline in a remote area or while traveling. The data she enters would automatically sync with the company’s systems of record as soon as her device reconnects. Sally could also enter customer data once and kick off an automated workflow to check inventory, generate a quote, get approval, and create a purchase order.
Modernizing Your Financial Processes
Within the finance department, organizations face more pressure than ever to identify gaps in their financial framework in order to better manage budgets and costs. Enterprise systems help, but they are built to handle large‐scale processes and aren’t flexible enough to handle exceptions or more granular processes without customization. It can also be difficult and cumbersome to leverage the data in enterprise systems for performance tracking and analysis.
Bill is the controller in the finance department of a firm that struggles with the following financial operations:
✓ Budgeting: Financial information is often scattered across disparate LOB systems, including “one‐off” spreadsheets, that make it challenging for managers to get a complete picture of the information they need to make well‐informed budget recommendations and decisions.
✓ Expense claims management: Expense claims and credit card reimbursements are error‐prone processes that require employees to manually complete paper‐based forms, attach receipts, and route them to approving managers every month. The finance department must then manually enter the data from these paper‐based forms into the system of record before issuing checks to employees.
✓ Internal auditing: Audit teams often struggle to gain visibility into key business processes. Audit trails, if they exist at all, are often incomplete and spread across disparate systems. Creating reports is a time‐consuming and arduous process.
✓ Invoice processing: Invoices are received by different departments and managers via email and regular mail every month. The invoices must then be manually reconciled, coded, and approved. With different terms being used for practically every invoice, payment is often delayed or late, which incurs additional fees and sometimes strains vendor relationships.
Bill is looking for a solution that will enable employees to easily manage their monthly expense reports and receipts and also enables the finance department to automatically reconcile the monthly expense reports with data in the on‐premises back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, cloud‐ based ADP payroll system, and paper‐based travel requests and authorizations that are maintained by Maria in HR. Bill goes to Isaac, his IT director, for help.
Getting “IT” Done
In addition to the various requests from Maria in HR, Edmund in Operations, Oleg in Purchasing, Sally in Sales, and Bill in Finance, Isaac, the IT director at Everest, has a few projects of his own:
✓ Help desk ticketing system: The help desk currently receives service requests from users via phone and email. Without a ticketing system, the help desk is unable to prioritize issues and meet internal service level agreements (SLAs).
✓ Change management database: The Change Advisory Board (CAB) meets on a regular basis, but change requests and approvals are communicated via email and manually entered into a stand-alone Microsoft Access database.
✓ Document management: Everest’s online storage requirements are growing rapidly due to duplicate files stored across multiple disparate systems throughout the organization.
✓ IT service catalog: The IT department needs to do a better job of communicating the wide array of services that it provides to the organization, and streamline the request process with a self‐service portal.
✓ Project management: Everest uses Microsoft SharePoint, but project managers must manually enter status updates from various team members in Microsoft Project because most LOB managers don’t know how to use Project and don’t have the time.
Isaac realizes that with Everest’s current software tools and IT resources, it will take months to deliver any one of these projects, and it would likely take years to undertake the entire project portfolio!
Undaunted, Isaac looks for another approach to tackling the various process and workflow challenges that Everest’s department heads are facing. He realizes that he doesn’t have to invest in a major coding effort if he can automate workflows and forms from a business process automation platform.
With Tallyfy, Isaac can solve all these business problems by creating mobile‐ready forms and automated workflows — with minimal coding. Tallyfy’s integration framework makes it easy for users to interact with multiple siloed business systems in a single interface, while data remains secure in its system of record. Reusable app components allow for quick modification of apps as platforms and business needs change, without needing an extensive development and test effort.
Isaac’s team begins by rolling out a new service catalog and help desk ticketing system. IT works closely with HR, Purchasing, and Finance to integrate key processes such as onboarding/offboarding, requisition, and inventory processing and delivers the new application in weeks instead of months. Because Tallyfy uses responsive design, IT can build an app once and it will automatically conform to any device, including tablets and smartphones.
If Isaac had relied on internal or contract development teams to develop apps from scratch, the time, effort, and resulting costs would have significantly reduced or eliminated any possible return on investment. In addition, every time the needs of the business changed or a business group needed a modified app or workflow, Isaac would have had to initiate another time‐consuming development effort.
By designing apps with the Tallyfy platform, Isaac was able to roll out business apps quickly, with little or no code. Isaac took advantage of reusable components to rapidly create new apps for other departments, leveraging the experience that he, Maria, and Oleg gained while building their initial pilot app, without redesigning from scratch (see Figure 4‐1).
Chapter 5
Ten Key Components to Transform Business Processes
In This Chapter
▶ Evaluating business process application solutions
▶ Empowering users and supporting changing needs
▶ Integrating tools easily and ensuring accessibility
▶ Allowing for standardization, mobility, and measurable results
In this chapter, you learn about ten important evaluation criteria to consider when choosing a business process application solution for your organization.
Tools to Empower All Users
Intuitive visual tools that empower all users, even those with few or no technical skills, to create business workflow‐ and form‐based solutions will ensure that end‐user requirements are always met.
Time to Market
The velocity of a business must be supported by a solution that can be established, but easily modified, to support the rapidly evolving needs of the business. Look for a solution that includes capabilities like reusable and easy‐to‐modify components.
Flexible Integration Options
To maximize value, it’s important to find a business process automation solution that will integrate seamlessly with your existing systems so that your users can access all the information they need without requiring lots of technical knowledge to access other systems of record, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.
Provide Data Security
The solution should integrate with external LOB data in a way that is secure, such as by providing a conduit to where the data is stored rather than storing the data directly in an application. Ideally, applications that you build will adopt the security parameters of the underlying systems of record so that data adheres to the company security measures already in place. Data security is one of the most important issues to think about when considering any new technology. Ensuring that your business process automation technologies will keep your data secure before buying can save a lot of headaches further down the road.
Information at the Point of Need
The solution must give users a way to easily access information anytime, anywhere, and from any device, so they can access critical information and tasks even when they’re on the go.
Standards for Building, Integrating, and Proliferating
The solution should be scalable in a way that allows standardization across departments and regions. It should also be agile and flexible enough to allow processes across the business to be automated in a short amount of time and updated just as easily.
Balance between Power and Simplicity
A solution doesn’t need to be massive to be successful, but it should be able to handle a wide variety of process‐workflow patterns and complex event handling and rules. It should also be able to manage data across disparate sources.
Mobility without Additional Code
With a much more mobile workforce, it’s critical to find a solution that easily enables mobile access without a lot of additional development work. Look for a solution that fully supports mobility, without writing more code.
Enable Process Improvement
Automating a poorly designed manual process won’t fix existing process problems, but finding a solution that gives you insight into bottlenecks and other process pitfalls and inefficiencies will. Choose a business process automation solution that provides metrics and reporting dashboards that you can use to look for opportunities to improve all your processes.
Measurable Results
The platform should be able to provide real process improvement that can be measured. The platform should be able to actually measure how instances are performing in terms of cycle time, data expectations, and consistent use, enabling companies to make objective judgment calls and decisions with regard to change.
