Workflow Management and Workforce Management

A relatively new IT branch is becoming increasingly important these days, with the major aim of transforming business processes within a company to work processes and implementing these in accordance with the fundamental business objectives.

This emerging field called workflow management performs partial or full automation of workflow in business organizations by the use of pioneering IT solutions. For organizations like public utility companies, telecommunication comapnies, post offices, parcel delivery companies, where processes consisting of a long series of work elements that involve several functional units of the organization and a number of employees occur in great numbers, the automation of workflow and the introduction of a workflow management system can result in an enormous amount of cost saving.

Recently, IT experts all over the world have realised the importance of workflow management systems that provide a firm basis to the solutions supporting the operation of big companies. Based on results from various surveys and case studies, it is easy to prove that the workflow module plays an increasingly important and central role among the IT systems supporting corporate activities. This module uses predetermined conditions, e.g. levels of qualification, units of organization or working hours, to allot work among the employees, and ensures that each process be performed within given limits, i.e. by observing cost limits, deadline constraints and other parameters.

The fact that the last decade saw an increasing number of investments in Workflow Management (WFM for short), as well as high-level customer satisfaction and return rate figures, all equally indicate that this business branch has matured: the new millennium has started in the spirit of WFM, in the same way as the concept of CRM was dominating the business world a few years ago.

A central workflow management system provides several advantages for a company. The system guarantees a transparent way of accomplishing business goals for each and every one of the employees. Evaluation of efficiencies of both the full process and each of its individual activity elements provides an excellent opportunity for feedback to the original business processes, thus enabling permanent optimization of the whole organization. These days, when we live a period of corporate fusions, it is not a unique case that, after the acquisition of a company, it faces the challenge of having to accommodate to the business philosophy of the parent company, to its business goals, as well as to its business processes. Workflow management system offers a simple solution to this issue: by extending its functions to the new partner the WFM system and applying the same rules uniformly to the old and new parts of the organization as well.

The advantages of the application of a central workflow management system, especially in the services and manufacturing sectors, are so considerable that books on them alone could fill whole libraries. A carefully designed workflow management system that performs business processes can easily become a decisive factor in the competition between various companies.

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