Here is a common process that happens today at many companies: Your team is managing multiple customer implementations at the same time. Each implementation goes through many phases, starting with specification, sourcing, installation and signoff. Each phase requires different people to be engaged, different deliverables to be generated, different signoffs to be captured. This is a human based business workflow.
Workflows exists in every business. Traditionally, the term has been used to describe transactional based processes, for example, credit card information is submitted on a website, the information is sent to the banks for approval and to the billing system for invoicing, which in turn sends it to the shipping system for delivery. These types of transaction workflows require very little human intervention and primarily relay data between systems based on rules. They are typically automated using business process management (BPM) tools or custom coded applications.
Human based workflows on the other hand are usually manually managed and tracked. Meetings, phone calls, paper trails, spreadsheets, emails and other desktop applications are typically the tools business users utilize to help in this area. In most cases, there are many inefficiencies as a result of the inadequacy of the tools utilized. Also, it is very common to have a general lack of visibility into the status of what is going on or where the bottlenecks are.
In addition, many of the human based business workflows usually include intellectual property or process innovations that help give the company an edge over its competitors. In some cases, they apply to a small vertical industry only. Because of these factors, it’s difficult to find any off the shelf applications to address the area. Many companies feel stuck or that there only option is a custom developed solution.
Tools like Interneer Intellect solve that problem and cater to the human based business workflow market. They enable the business users to capture their workflows using simple drag and drop capabilities that are intuitive and easy to use. They incorporate many features that are needed to automate and streamline the business process: web accessibility, collaboration, database backend, workflow automation, template based, easy reporting, business intelligence, document management, project tracking, scalability, multi-user etc.
As technology and the web evolves, companies are realizing that more and more of their processes should be automated if they want to gain efficiencies, visibility and cut costs. With the advent of tools like Interneer Intellect, this can be accomplished very rapidly, easily and cheaply.
