Workflow is just as good as business processes
First, we need to consider a problem. Think about the cave man who makes the first wheel. The first wheel is created, invented, is a reason for celebrating. The production of the second, third, fourth, fifth wheels is just labor. From the era of the hole, to Henry Ford started to produce Ford cars through the assembly line. Until today, we have been trying to better, faster, more reliably, while spending less money to complete the work. For these goals, the business process is a very good way. This article will discuss business processes, their relationship with today's workflow and web services, and we face the challenge.
Business process: Yes, they deserve to invest
Business processes can be defined as a set of mutual relationships that have a variety of different functions. The business process has starting and end points, and they are repeatable. This definition does not reflect the thinking, clarity, detail, and time required to generate a useful business process. Useful business processes create and save money for companies.
More importantly, the value of the business process to create business processes is the intellectual assets represented by those processes. The accessories produced by the company have valuable, which is uncommitted; in addition, knowledge of how to make these accessories is equally valuable. You can get these knowledge in your business process, add new knowledge and improve it. The scope of the fitting production process is important because all of these steps will ensure qualified accessories; the steps are more or less or with this will make the cost increase or the quality decrease, or even two results.
Define the time and effort spent on the business process and make documents, it is entirely worth it. Only let the accessories manufacturing director understand the manufacturing knowledge of the enterprise, and then let him get out of the factory gate every night, this is dangerous. As long as the accessory manufacturing business process is defined, the accessories manufacturing workers can come at any time, and any accessories manufacturing workers can replace another person at any time, because all accessories manufacturing workers in the factory understand and follow the business process. We can learn, change, and evaluate then change the accessories manufacturing business process again, because the process is visible for everyone, rather than being limited to accessories manufacturing director.
Workflow: Who? what? when?
Workflow software does not create business processes, however, when you design a business process definition and add request, it is of course concentrated in the process of applying the workflow to the business process. Can workflow can be seen as who is in business processes? what? when? The answer to the answer of these issues.
Who?
Who is the participant involved in the business process? What role do they do? How did they be organized? Is the grouping flexible? Still more fixed and static? Not only people, more entities can be a workflow participant. Organizers, applications, employees, web services, and other workflows can be answers to this question. Abstract participants will make a workflow more robust. For example, you don't have to raise the risk of bottlenecks in the workflow to designate employee A or employee B must do a task, or to endure a headache for a particular employee every time there must be a list of personnel. You can allow any people with an administrator role to perform this task, which reduces the risk of generating bottlenecks, and reduces maintenance costs.
what?
What do participants do? How do they do their work? What do they want to approve? Do they do business? Do they create a document? Tracking inventory? Inquiry to supplier? Do business activities? Do you pass the information to other participants? Some workflows are completely automated, and some are composed of manual tasks that must be performed by people. More commonly, workflow is a combination of these two types. For example, to the vendor's inquiry can be one of the artificial tasks performed by people, but can also become a programmable call to the web service, which returns a price based on the supplier and the item information supplied thereto. when?
How do participants know when will I start? When is working? What is the order of their tasks in what sequentials? Are they working in a series or parallel way? If you just work, then in what circumstances? How long will each task continue? Is there a defined deadline? If the task is not completed successfully, do you want to re-come again? When a business process contains the current task that is currently completed during the day, the results of these tasks have changed them automatically, executing at any time, such people are freed, can complete other tasks, and Later, it is not necessary to wait for someone to execute.
