Developing an Enterprise Workflow Solution Modern Business Manager MBM

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Developing an Enterprise Workflow SolutionModern
Business Manager (MBM)

• Presented By Nourah A. AL-Rossais
• Supervised By Dr. Ghazy Assassa
• May, 2007

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The Need For WF

• Inefficient business processes and the manual
  collection of data can lead to reduced
  productivity and costly delays.
• The next must have application for business in
  the 21st century is Workflow Management System.
  WF solutions enable organizations to improve both
  the efficiency and the effectiveness of the
  processes that drive business operations.

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The Need For WF Cont.

• Even though WFMS has been around for some time,
  it is only recently that the major companies have
  decided to invest in this area. According to an
  abstract of marketresearch.com (2006) the
  investment in business process management (BPM)
  is to quadruple to 2.4 billion by 2011. Thus,
  investments show that BPM is an area where
  companies focus.

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What is WF?

• Workflow is a software that allow the automation
  of business process during which documents,
  information or tasks are passed from one
  participant to another in a way that is governed
  by rules or procedures.

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Characteristics of WFMS

• The emergence of BPM is driven by the following
  characteristics
• Eliminate costly paper work and manual routing.
• Improve how people work together, give them the
  ability to communicate together easily and
  efficiently.
• Reduce errors and improve accuracy and
  accountability.
• Enhance privacy and security.
• Communication can be further improved using
  mobility.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied

• Academic
• The University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL.)
  with a student body of 26,000, is using workflow
  system in student applications via Internet.
• Student records, finance, accounting and
  personnel, making the campus one of the most
  technologically advanced in the country.
• Workflow management system applied in the
  University of Southern Queensland, which is the
  leading e-learning university in the world.
• The web based system consists of four building
  blocks teaching workflow, learning workflow,
  admin workflow and infrastructural workflow.
  Those are the main learning sub-systems in the
  e-learning environment.
• Feedback from students and instructors who
  indicates that the performance of e-learning
  process is enhanced and the average grade of
  e-learning students is much higher than other
  traditional students.
• This approves that WFMS serve e-learning which
  become one of most important mean for the future
  education, especially for universities.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied Cont.

• Financial
• Swiss Bank Corporation (SWB) in Zurich,
  Switzerland implemented a fully integrated
  electronic securities trading system in the Swiss
  financial service market.
• Workflow totally automated many of the routine
  processes so that they no longer had to be
  touched by humans.
• This allowed knowledge workers instead to focus
  on the complex cases, where most of the business
  risks are.
• The workflow system resulted in annual savings of
  3-5 Million dollars in the area of securities
  custody and settlement processing.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied Cont.

• Government
• New York City was experiencing record numbers of
  claims and contracts, and at the same time the
  resources allocated to processing them decreased.
  
• NYC processes over 30,000 claims and incurs a
  quarter of a billion dollars in claim costs
  annually.
• The New York City Comptroller's Office, with the
  assistance of its consultants Xerox and Universal
  Systems Inc. (USI), utilized imaging, workflow,
  and other client-server technology to enhance
  revenues and decrease operating costs.
• The implementation of the workflow System has
  significantly improved the work processes and
  productivity within the City's Office of the
  Comptroller to process contracts and claims.
• NYC reported saving over 20 million dollars in
  the Year 2000.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied Cont.

• Healthcare
• In a dynamic industry such as healthcare,
  workflow and process automation is a key
  component of business improvement.
• Early work focused on administrative functions
  such as billing and collections. The emphasis is
  now shifting to clinical care functions.
• Elmhurst Memorial Hospital located in Chicago
  implement RecordLinks workflow automation
  software.
• About 1,700 people (including 500 doctors) at
  Elmhurst Memorial and in three other locations
  were connected to the system.
• Post clinical episode, the paper record portions
  of the chart are scanned into RecordLink and
  merged with electronically captured data. They
  are routed on the basis of admission type, enter
  a queue in the Medical Records Department, and
  analyzed. When complete, each chart is marked
  "done" and taken out of the queue.
• If analysis shows any remaining deficiencies, the
  chart goes back to the doctors for completion.
  With RecordLink, each doctor can see his or her
  deficiencies and work on them in different
  locations.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied Cont.

• Judy Ferraro, Elmhurst's Director of Medical
  Records. "It's significantly decreased our number
  of incomplete medical records--by at least 75
  percent" .
• Other benefits for Elmhurst Memorial included
  significantly increased record accessibility, and
  less hospital space for record storage.
• Workflow systems are using for productivity
  enhancement in pharmaceutical and
  biopharmaceutical production for approval of new
  drugs.
• A pharmaceutical company may submit as many as
  500,000 pages of information to FDA agency for
  review to maintain public safety.
• Producing copies of this large amount of papers
  are costly and required a lot of effort.
• The company analyze that the key for their
  productivity is by applying fully electronic
  workflow system that allow document to be passed
  and routed among participant for review and allow
  electronic signature for approving.
• This solution reduces cost by at least 20 as
  comparing to paper based system.

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Areas Where WF Can be Applied Cont.

• Industry
• The purpose of deploying system in the
  manufacturing enterprise was to handle customer
  offers in a Machine Tool Company.
• The process starts with customer filling a
  request and ends with an offer from marketing and
  selling department.
• Almost 39 activities are repeated in each cycle
  for each customer, and thus they should be
  handled in the workflow system.
• After evaluating the performance, the company
  reports benefits in processing customer offer by
  at least 45 and huge advantages in reducing
  paper cost, plus other non-tangible benefits like
  the flexibility in handling customer wishes.

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Review of Literature

• Workflow management systems vary greatly in their
  functions and what certain businesses may need
  them for.  Some businesses need them to help
  organize transactions, others need them for
  managing data put on the web, still others need
  workflow management that organizes and classifies
  all the documents and content of a company. 
• Workflow management systems can range from being
  very basic all the way up to having thousands of
  state-of-the-art features and covering every
  aspect of a business' needs and processes for
  both large and small enterprises. 

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Review of Literature Cont.

• There are many BPM and workflow software products
  to choose from and most of them also offer
  solutions to just about any process an
  organization will face.
• Selecting the suitable workflow management system
  is risky and time consuming task.

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Review of Literature Cont.

• 50 of companies took more than 6 months to find
  their right workflow product.
• This result shows that the market is still
  immature and need standardization.

Figure 1 How long it tokes to find the most
suitable workflow product for your enterprise?
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Review of Literature Cont.

• Current WF applications suffer from some
  problems
• Insufficiently flexible in workflow applications
  current systems should allow dynamic changing in
  process as organization's rules change.
• Platform-dependent applications unfortunately,
  the workflow applications are often dependent on
  the platforms such as O.S., programming
  languages. The problem accrues when environment
  changes. Also, it doesn't support
  interoperability.
• Expensive to build a new workflow application
  some current workflow tools provide support to
  design a new workflow application. However,
  customizing application can be time consuming and
  require programming skill that most of developers
  don't have.

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Comparative Analysis for the Workflow Process
Management Software Features
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Comparative Analysis for the Workflow Process
Management Software Features
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Project Goal Feasibility

• The main purpose of this project is implementing
  a complete solution for electronic form
  processing.
• Any group, organization or process where data
  collection is involved can benefit from this
  solution. The proposed solution can take existing
  forms, those that users are already familiar
  with, and allow them to be viewed and filled out
  electronically.

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Project Goal Feasibility Cont.

• This online submission occurs directly from
  within a users browser. After that, the forms
  are routed for a review and approval process, and
  upon approval a user notified using e-mail and
  sms.
• Designing models can be done by business people
  because it doesnt require any knowledge in
  programming.

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Conception of the Project

• Workflow is the management of who exactly is
  working on a content element, what exactly they
  are doing, and when. So the main issue for a
  workflow management system is answering the
  question
• "who must do what, when and how
• In Modern Business Manager system this question
  finds an answer.

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Conception of the Project Cont.
Figure 2 Conception of the Project
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Methodology

• I followed the incremental approach.
• Incremental approach combines the waterfall
  sequence with some of the advantages of
  prototyping.
• This approach is favored by many object-oriented
  practitioners.
• It basically divides the overall project into a
  number of increments. Then it applies the
  waterfall model to each increment.
• The system is put into production when the first
  increment is delivered. As time passes additional
  increments are completed and added to the working
  system.

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Project Plan
Figure 3 Project Plan
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MBM Architecture

• MBM designed using a 3-Tier architecture.
• Tier 1 Presentation TierThe Presentation Tier
  is responsible for displaying information to the
  user and capturing user input. Any business logic
  or database access is prohibited, which
  guarantees the integrity of the system for
  scalability and stability. The presentation tier
  consists of a collection of User Controls and
  ASPX pages.

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MBM Architecture Cont.

• Tier 2 Business Tier or Business Logic Layer
  (BLL)The Business Logic Layer is responsible
  for delivering information to the presentation
  tier. Business rules are executed using .NET
  objects and the results returned to the caller.
• Tier 3 The Data Tier or Data Access Layer
  (DAL)The Database layer which is the storage
  for a relational database contains all the data
  the engine might need to execute correctly.

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MBM Architecture Cont.
Figure 4 MBM System Architecture
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Class Diagram
Figure 5 MBM Class Diagram
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Sequence Diagrams
Figure 6 Add a New Model Sequence Diagram
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Sequence Diagrams Cont.
Figure 7 Design a New Model Sequence Diagram
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DataBase ERD
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Tools

• The system built on the Microsoft .NET Framework.
  This gives system the flexibility to run in
  either a client/server or Internet environment.
• For storing data, the SQL Server database engine
  is used. It provides more secure, reliable
  storage for a relational database format or XML.
• Adobe Photoshop for designing all graphics.
• Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio for
  developing project plan and designing figures.

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Real Case Scenario
TEXT
TEXT
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Business Trip Sample

• The purpose of this sample is to enable an
  employee to request a business trip which is
  reviewed and approved by the employee's
  supervisor, HR and finance department.
• Using workflow with an integral business trip
  form eliminates the need to e-mail forms as
  attachments, which need to be managed as separate
  documents.
• MBM Workflow manages the business trip request
  information in a database which can be connected
  to other applications such as accounting systems.
  
• Employees, managers, and the finance group can
  easily check on the status of the request using
  their inbox and/or outbox.

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Business Trip Sample Cont.

• Business Benefits
• Eliminates need to manage advance requests as
  separate documents.
• Automatically routes the request to the
  applicable supervisor using the reporting
  relationships defined in the workflow model
  designer.
• Workflow streamlines the process since it can be
  integrated with other systems such as accounting
  system.
• Friendly and easy to understand interface saves
  time in checking on the status of a request.
• Efficiently manages this activity than a
  paper-based system, e-mails or phone calls which
  have no automated means to follow up.

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Business Trip Sample Cont.
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Difficulties and Lessons Learned

• Developing a true 3-tier application.
• Multi-Database Support.
• Storing e-Forms dynamic contents.
• Sending e-mail using SMTP service.
• Sending SMS.
• Understanding importance of Workflow system.

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Conclusion

• BPM is the natural choice to be the next "must
  have" software category. The Modern Business
  Manager (MBM) enables organizations to easily
  route electronic forms online in accordance with
  their defined business processes - addressing any
  business function that involves filling out or
  routing a form. Reduce paper handling and manual
  routing to eliminate errors and shorten the
  lifecycle of forms processing. Seamless
  integration with the embedded workflow engine
  ensures the right users can track and have access
  to the right information when they need it.

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Conclusion Cont.

• Bad management, bad policies and bad procedures
  merely result in bad workflow automation.
• Successfully implementing workflow automation
  requires not only knowing what the technology can
  do, but also knowing each step or stage of the
  processes being automated, that the processes are
  structured correctly and that integration to
  other supporting systems can be accomplished.
• Successfully implementing workflow automation
  also requires an understanding of what the
  technology cannot do It cannot eliminate all
  tasks and it does not make up for bad management
  or poor workforce skills.

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Future Work

• Integration with Active Directory.
• Integration with ERP (Enterprise Resource
  Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship
  Management) famous application.
• Integration with other development and designing
  tools.

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Future Work Cont.

• Support Simulation Module This feature makes it
  easy for a business analyst to simulate several
  weeks of what-if scenarios without impacting
  everyday business activities.
• Provide a strong history management for
  administration purposes along with graphical
  view.
• Provide vertical delegation capability This
  feature allow user to forward a task to a
  colleague in a level upper and/or lower level.
• Allow decision makers to view and place their
  decisions for the critical tasks using their
  mobile devices.

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• Thank You