Workflow and BPM Software for Companies
R2 Docuo is the Workflow and BPM software used by everyone from small businesses to large corporations to automate their business processes: from procedures, case files and requests to purchasing, HR and administrative workflows.
Let’s start at the beginning. To understand what Workflow Management Software is, we first have to define what we mean by workflow.
For some time now, in the world of team management, the word Workflow has been widely used to describe the expected way of carrying out any task, activity, procedure or piece of administration.
A workflow is a collection of steps to follow, tasks to perform and decisions to make, until you reach a final situation in which the work is considered finished.
Workflows can be carried out by anyone from individuals to teams of dozens of people, and they can involve anything from a few steps executed in minutes to dozens of stages spread over months.
Workflows can be defined by drawing a simple sketch on paper, by describing each step in a document (procedures) or by using various technical diagrams and graphical notations. They can also not be defined anywhere at all and simply live in the heads of the managers who organise the teams (which happens often).
A workflow can be controlled manually or by computer. The software programs that help companies with this task go by various names: Workflow Management tools, Workflow Management Software or BPM software (Business Process Management).
Whatever name is used, these are tools that bring together people, computers and processes with the aim of increasing efficiency and reducing errors.
What problems does it solve?
Even when the workflow is clear, organisations face several common challenges, namely:
- Standardisation. Getting everyone on a team to know the workflow and try to work to it.
- Exceptions. Spotting when work is not being done as expected and finding out why.
- Task assignment. Distributing the steps of the work among different people on the team.
- Coordination. Speeding up communication when one person finishes a step and it is the next person’s turn.
- Spotting bottlenecks. Detecting steps with too much workload, or steps with too little.
- Spotting waste. Detecting steps that, however necessary they may have seemed at first, really are not.
- Delays. Detecting when a task spends too long at one step.
- Deadlines. Keeping track of the maximum time available to reach a given state.
- Effectiveness and capacity. Determining the volume of work the process can take on without sacrificing the quality of the results, causing delays or missing deadlines.
- Efficiency. Determining whether, with the same resources, the capacity of the workflow could be increased by removing unnecessary steps, creating shortcuts or reassigning people to different tasks.
- Automation. Getting a computer to carry out as many of the workflow’s steps as possible, leaving for humans the stages that call for more creativity, professional judgement or experience.
- Reporting. Summarising the key data on a workflow’s performance over a period of time, graphically and concisely.
Which tasks can be automated?
The tasks that Workflow Management Software can automate range from automatically sending alerts and notifications to coordinate the people on a team, to the automatic creation of documents and emails from templates, the electronic signing of documents or the integration of different systems (for example, telling another piece of software that it has to invoice a service when a particular step in the process is reached).
With the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, the ability to automate workflow steps with AI has grown enormously: it can now summarise information, answer complex questions about documents or requests, make decisions within the workflow or even produce drafts of complete documents or technical replies.
Which business processes can it be applied to?
Workflow management tools can be applied to practically any business process that is carried out in a repeatable way.
The most common cases are case, request and procedure management, legal contract management (here we explain how to design a contract workflow), commercial quote management, purchasing processes, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, review and approval of technical documents, and human resources.
In more sector-specific territory we find engineering projects, both in component manufacturing and in construction (BIM methodology), audits and certification processes, the creation of wind and photovoltaic farms, fibre optic rollouts and much more.
And which ones not?
Workflow tools are not recommended for business processes that do not have a set of repeatable steps, such as graphic design or writing software.
Even in those kinds of processes, however, workflow tools can be used to keep track of the stages of the work at a “macro” level (pending, in progress and finished) or in the use of agile methodologies and their scaled versions (SCRUM and so on).
What kinds of diagram are used to represent workflows?
There are three main notations for representing workflows graphically:
Flowcharts
This is a graphical representation focused on the flow of information and decision-making, using a set of symbols and arrows.
Advantage: it describes the decisions to be made in order and clearly
Drawbacks: because it focuses on decisions, it does not clearly represent the states the process can be in.
Finite state machines
Also known as finite automata, this is the most widespread notation thanks to its simplicity. It is a graphical representation of a set of states (circles) and transitions (arrows connecting two states):
Advantages: its simplicity. With just two symbols (circles and arrows) it describes the workflow precisely, including every possible state.
Drawback: it does not describe the logic behind the decisions or the parties involved in them.
BPMN notation (Business Process Model and Notation)
This is a modelling standard with a very technical graphical notation that describes the full range of possibilities of a business process:
Advantage: its level of detail and precision, including the assignment of tasks to the different actors
Drawback: its complexity (it uses around 60 different symbols to represent elements and concepts such as activities, events, gateways, sequence flows, association flows and so on)
How does it work?
Workflow control tools let you set out the steps of the workflow using the different types of diagram described in the previous section.
Once the workflow is configured, users create the documents or tasks in the system and move through the workflow by “changing the state” of those documents.
The system can be configured to carry out automatic tasks when the state changes in a process (for example, sending the customer an email with their quote when it is “sent”, or even creating the quote document itself).
State changes can be manual (users press a button) or automatic (the Workflow Management Software does it by itself when a condition is met).
You can also schedule tasks to run when something stays too long in one state, for example alerting the sales team when a quote has been in the “Sent to customer” state for a long time.
Workflows for cases, requests and procedures
Outside technical circles hardly anyone says “workflow”. The person running administration, purchasing or customer service talks about case and request management: a request comes in, a record holds its data, a few steps have to be taken and a decision is made at the end. That is exactly a workflow, only described by the person who lives it every day rather than by the person who models it. We develop that point of view in our guide on what case management is and how to automate it.
In R2 Docuo every case is an element of the data model: the customer defines its fields, states and rules, and the document is just one more piece, not the centre. That is why many of the processes our customers set up have no document at all: supplier onboarding, non-conformities, purchase requests. The procedure starts with a web form, moves through states on a Kanban board, sends emails and generates documents on its own, and ends with an electronic signature if needed.
Two details matter when a case holds sensitive data or is reviewed by an auditor: R2 Docuo is certified under Spain’s National Security Framework (ENS) at its HIGH level and offers a Windows desktop application alongside the web version, a combination that is rare in the sector.
Workflow tools and document management
Although workflow tools can be used to control, manage and optimise any process, workflow systems have a particularly important application in document management.
The great volume of documentation generated in any office usually follows a certain number of paths or processes that tend to repeat themselves and can be modelled as a workflow scheme and therefore automated in a tool.
That is why Document Management Software and Workflow Software are often combined, offering both sets of features in a single tool. Hence the ambiguity between the terms “Document Management Software with Workflow” “Workflow tool supporting document processes“, “Enterprise Content Management software” (or ECM, as a way of bringing the two concepts together), “Business Process Management Software” (or BPM) and “Content Service Platform“ (or CSP)
Tools that make it possible to implement an optimised workflow are in particular demand among large corporations today. They make teamwork easier and remove any doubt when it comes to deciding on the working method for a given process. Above all, they allow administrative and commercial activities to be decentralised, with the resulting benefit for coordination in large companies.
What advantages does it bring?
The advantages cited by every productivity specialist include the following:
- Better monitoring and control of processes thanks to a standardised working method.
- Better overall productivity and efficiency between departments. It saves execution time on the vast majority of processes.
- Many of the problems that can arise within a work process are known in advance, so the workflow scheme lets you get ahead of possible failures and anticipate the solutions.
- It makes information flow more easily within the company itself and therefore reduces response times between departments and with customers and suppliers.
Planning ahead and putting tasks in the right order has always been a guarantee of effectiveness in any project. With business globalisation, manual control is often impossible, and in any case a well-thought-out cloud workflow management application saves companies a great deal of time, money and grief.
Proper integration with the data the company already holds — emails, delivery addresses, invoicing data and other kinds of database — makes administrative work within any company enormously easier