Brief Notes on Business Automation & Workflow Management

Dr.  S.  Maurer,  
MBA Professor

workflow is a term used to describë how work is defined and how work is allocated and scheduled.

You need to learn how to design and implement a workflow application within the Notes R4 environment.  it covers a basic description of workflow and gives you some real-world examples,  and then you'll construct a workflow applications using database template supplied with Notes R4.

Integration.  enterprise Application Integration [EAI] and/or web services is critical to BPM as business processes will require data from disparate systems throughout the organization.

Inheriting future design changes enables you to create a set of databases from a single template,  and then in the future make changes to them all by changing the master template.

The word coordination is actually representative of workflow.  it means coordinating the work of a group of people electronically.  You start,  perform,  and end a process within the Notes environment; you can not only perform your processes,  but you can now have management information about the work you are performing.  information is available to answer questions: How many work items have we delivered? How long does it take to perform each step? Where are the bottlenecks?

The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations [e.g.  calculating a repayment plan for a loan] or,  when a step is too complex to automate,  will message a human requesting input.  

In order to accommodate the handling of many diverse processes in a workflow,  each different approval application is given an application profile.  You could have,  for example,  a profile for a special bid process,  a different one for employee travel expenses,  another for purchase requisitions,  and so forth.  All of these approval processes can reside in the same database with different sets of approvers and users.

These warehouse reporting systems are commonly called online analytic processing [OLAP] systems.  OLAP systems can report only on directly observed and easily correlated information.  They rely on you to discover patterns and decide what to do with them.  OLAP systems won't tell you that people frequently buy potato chips,  onion soup mix,  and sour cream at the same time,  and they won't discover that some people love any movie that contains an explosion.  The information is even too complex for humans to discover these patterns using an OLAP system.

Click on each activity,  represented by a box in the process diagram.  For each activity,  you can view a properties dialog box showing potential activity owners,  tasks,  decisions to be made,  and so on.  

For example,  one Midwest grocery chain used the data mining capacity of Oracle software to analyze local buying patterns.  They discovered that when men bought diapers on Thursdays and Saturdays,  they also tended to buy beer.  Further analysis showed that these shoppers typically did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturdays.  On Thursdays,  however,  they only bought a few items.  The retailer concluded that they purchased the beer to have it available for the upcoming weekend.  The grocery chain could use this newly discovered information in various ways to increase revenue.

Dr.  Elder says that this can be the fun and interesting part of data mining.  it is like looking into a crystal ball [and] being a wizard looking into the future.

Visitor statistics accumulate when visitors interact with items,  the web site,  or the enterprise.  Visitor-item interactions include purchase history,  advertising history,  and preference information.  Purchase history is a list of products and purchase dates.  Advertising history indicates which items were shown to a visitor.  Preference information refers to item ratings provided by a visitor.  Click-stream information is a history of hyperlinks that a visitor has clicked on.  Link opportunities are hyperlinks that have been presented to a visitor.

The experiences with the quality movement made it clear that information flows are fundamentally different from the mass and energy flows which inspired the first forms of rational workflows.

Examples of BPM tasks that your business organization [or government] performs that should be automated include:

workflow is an essential element of business process management [BPM].