Workflow Management

Introduction 

Workflow management software is a set of tools that manages the process of collaboration of certain recurring enterprise projects or day-to-day workflows.  Generally in companies of any size, there are many types of work that require collaboration among people within the company.  Without the help of workflow management solution, collaboration among employees becomes extremely difficult with majority of the communication among members done in manual fashion.  DigiCentury provides workflow management solutions customized to any situation. 


Challenges


There is much inefficiency when collaboration among many employees is required to complete a task or a project: 

  • Communication inefficiencies: Managing the communication flow among stakeholders.  Often, there are many versions of email discussions flowing around the company and oftentimes stakeholders are not on the same page
  • Version control inefficiencies:  Work units are also being passed around among stakeholders without synchronization.  At some point no one knows who has the latest version, and there may be two versions without different changes applied to them.
  • Process inefficiencies:  The lack of process control built into the task or project means stakeholders may not properly follow pre-defined procedure, thus resulting in further confusion. 

While strictly defining and enforcing task or project process may alleviate some of the aforementioned inefficiencies, having a system centralize the management of tasks offers the ultimate relieve manual process simply cannot accomplish.  DigiCentury provides customized management solution customized to any recurring tasks or projects your business engages in, thus greatly increases the efficiencies when processing these tasks. 


Solutions 


Document Collaboration Solutions 


Document collaboration is oftentimes a huge part of the daily tasks to be accomplished by employees.  Project document, company policies, memos, external documents, and external filings, all requires collaboration from people of different departments and unique expert domains.  While collaborating between two people may be easy, the complexity increases exponentially as collaborator increases.  Coupled with approval process for document generation it becomes almost impossible to manage.  Document Collaboration Solutions allows multiple people to work on the same document by breaking it down to components.  With build-in workflow logic, the software streamlines document creation and approval process with maximum efficiency. 


Business scenario: 


NextStudent specializes lending in the educational market.  Many colleges and institutions have Financial Assistance Office that maintains a list of “preferred lender” the school uses and recommends for students’ financial borrowing needs.  In order to be on this list, the schools oftentimes sends a huge Request for Information packet to multiple lenders in order to ascertain which lender offers the most competitive terms to be on the “preferred lender list.” 

The Request for Information document generally includes hundreds of questions relating to the lender’s company information, financial terms, business processes, certifications, backend information systems, borrower benefits, and a wide variety of student loan-related questions.  At NextStudent, the Request for Information document generally handled by Educational Lending Department.  However, because the questions in Request for Information generally require knowledge involving the expert domain of other departments, Education Lending Department distributes questions to external departments for answering.  Using internal email system and spreadsheet tracking, communication among document workers and versioning control quickly becomes impossible to manage as the number of RFI document increases. 

DigiCentury therefore proposed a workflow management system called RFI Management System.  The RFI Management system parses the original RFI into component questions.  The project manager can create several workflow templates and assign questions to the created workflow.  For example, a question may require both expertise in Finance and Accounting and approval from Compliance and Legal, a workflow can be created to forward a question to be worked on by Finance department and Accounting department sequentially and the answer approved by Compliance and Legal concurrently.  With all questions in an RFI document assigned to different workflows, the Project Manager can now simply track the status of each individual question as they are being worked on.  Individual workers can also manage their workload by looking at all pending questions that he needs to process. 

The RFI Management System combines document collaboration function with build-in workflow management, allowing the client to effectively and efficiently manage the RFI creation process. 

Document Knowledge Base