Process Modeling &

Workflow Management Newsletter

What are your Workflow requirements?

Most organizations now operating SSA Baan for some time are sharing the same desire: How can we automate our Baan SSA transaction processing with the help of Workflow? And most of all, how do we achieve this key improvement knowing that the following business requirements are key to us:

1. That the Workflow solution needs to be fully compliant with SSA Baan and DEM (to be able to leverage the significant SSA Baan investment we made over the last several years)
2. That the chosen solution needs to deliver a true web-based integration platform, to enable Business Process Automation across the company, B2B/B2C partners, global processes and various applications and systems including, but not limited to, SSA Baan.
3. That the Workflow component needs to be embedded into a broad BPM business solution that is able to address Process Modeling, BPR analysis & Continuous Improvement, and corporate wide Knowledge Management.
4. That the implementation of the Workflow solution cannot exceed two months and must be done with minimum use of our internal resources.

If the above scenario is familiar, you might be interested to know that FTS, with SSA Baan since 1996, have undergone a comprehensive analysis of Workflow solutions, resulting in the following conclusion:

“It was concluded that EZ-Workflow, developed by DynaFlow Modeling & Workflow Solutions Inc., was the only workflow solution able to fulfill all of the above requirements. In addition to being compliant with all SSA Baan releases, EZ-Workflow’s flexible web-based infrastructure enables it to integrate with various internal & external processes running various business applications.”

New Workflow-enabled processes for quicker and safer implementation

Today’s market is imposing increased pressure on all organizations to improve the efficiency & consistency of their internal processes, often with little budget and resources. It is for this reason that a new library of Workflow-enabled processes has been developed and is now available. Catering to diverse functional areas of your organization, these pre-defined components enable a low cost approach to convert daily time-consuming and paper-driven transactions to fully automated processing.

For example, Workflow-enabled employee expenses report or purchase requisitions are not only submitted online by the employee (who can track their statuses in real-time), they also trigger all the required approval notifications to be sent to the appropriate Managers/Supervisors. The same benefits can be said for the transaction types below.

Pre-defined Workflow components by functional areas:

HR / Payroll / IT

• New Employee procedure (including HR resources & IT access)
• Employee Vacation Days request
• Employee Expenses Reimbursement request
• Employee Time Sheet

Purchasing / Finance

• Purchase Requisitions Approval (any sources and formats)
• Capital Appropriation request
• Fixed Assets Disposal/Transfer

Information Technology (IT)

• Application Customization request

Fully compliant to all releases of SSA Baan but also applicable to non-Baan areas/organizations, these Workflow-enabled cases come complete with pre-configured online forms, dynamic workflow routes and rules, implementation support, documentation, etc… to ensure a rapid implementation and a ROI of only a few months.

For more information:

• Read detailed information about each cases at http://www.dynaflow-dem.com/Menu/WorkflowScenarios.html
• Read the recent Press Release at http://dynaflow-dem.com/Menu/Press.html
• Attend the BWU session #6 or #7 (see details below)

BWU Workshop sessions you do not want to miss …

Again this year, the SSA Baan Users community will meet and exchange valuable product & implementation knowledge related to SSA Baan. If you plan to attend or know someone who will, the Business Process Management discipline is well represented by the 3 following sessions:

• Session #5 (Thursday, October 21th, 4.15pm)
  “BPM to insure consistent processes and to facilitate Sarbanes-Oxley Compliancy” by Herman Miller
• Session #6 (Friday, October 22th, 9.30am)
  “How Workflow Management Significantly Enhanced Our Fujitsu Operations” by Fujitsu Transaction Solutions
• Session #7 (Friday, October 22nd, 10.50am)
  "Business Process Management (BPM): the low cost alternative to leverage your SSA Baan investment”, by DynaFlow Modeling & Workflow Solutions Inc.

DynaFlow now a BWU Patron member

Launched in 1997 to provide world-class expertise and business solutions in the disciplines of Process Modeling, Knowledge Management and Workflow Automation, the DynaFlow Center of Expertise is stronger than ever. With its SSA Baan certified EZ-Process Suite, extending DEM to full web-based Business Process Mgmt (BPM), and counting major organizations such as FTS, Siemens, Solar Turbines, Herman Miller, MD Robotics, Comcast, etc… as reference customers, DynaFlow extends even more its SSA Baan commitment by becoming a BWU Patron member.

United in our mutual mission to cater to all SSA Baan users, and acknowledging the good work done by BWU along the years, DynaFlow is happy to team again with BWU. We invite you to test our commitment to facilitate and improve your Baan implementation(s) by visiting us during the upcoming BWU 2004 Partner Fair, held in Montreal on October 19-21. Located at booth #9, it will be a pleasure for our professional staff to address any BPM/Workflow questions, to provide you with valuable documentation and to demonstrate any of the EZ-Process modules.

As a simple “Merci” to all visitors, DynaFlow will give away one 75% discount voucher applicable on any EZ-Process module of your choice, representing a value of up to $20,000USD (applicable on the base EZ-Process components). Simply make sure to visit us at booth #9 and leave us your business card. The draw will be done on Friday October 22nd, at the end of BWU session #7.

Did you know that Business Process Management (BPM) included

Business Process Management was already recognized in the academic world from the fifties and sixties as an important ingredient in the Quality Management approach. The books of Hammer and Champy in the eighties revived the attention of business managers for Process Management, Process (Re-)engineering and Workflow Management. Till today, BPM is gaining ground. Many companies learned that BPM is strong when facing rapidly changing requirements due to the dynamic world we’re living in today.

According to Gartner, Business Process Management (BPM) “wins the ‘triple crown’ of saving money, saving time and adding value.” Seldom granted, there are good reasons to grant this crown to BPM:

1. save money by automating the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away the non-value-adding activities such as routine decisions, transfer of data or forms etc. and providing end-users with tailored task-lists;
2. save time by changing business processes if technology, government or competition requires. With today’s tight integration of process definition and underlying application, the changes in the definition can be deployment and communicated virtually immediately.
3. adding value by opening up a range of functions that can be leveraged in a truly BPM minded company. Think about process (quantitative) analysis and optimization. Think about quality certification (e.g. ISO), requiring procedures to be created and published. Think about compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley), imposed on many organizations.

Business Process Management (BPM) includes several disciplines, as listed below:

• Process Modeling, ensuring that explicitly modeled processes are defined and made available to all other BPM components.
• Process Documentation, ensuring that the process definition (WHAT tasks are to be performed) is complemented with the enhanced (HOW are they to be executed) documentation.
• Process Certification, to become certified with standards like ISO and to ensure a release control of your processes to your Intranet community.
• Process Collaboration, to deploy process knowledge (Intranet/Extranet publication) from a high-level perspective as well as the transaction/application view, and to provide users with work team collaboration features to leverage this knowledge into enhanced productivity.
• Process Optimization, to enable analysis and simulation of quantitative process data in order to calculate bottlenecks, throughput times and costs, required to perform continuous improvement.
• Process Compliancy, to reach control over integrity of processes in order to be compliant with governmental rules and regulations (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley).
• Process Automation, also called Workflow Management, to achieve integration between users, processes and related applications and to automate the routing and assignment of tasks by pre-defined processes and business rules.