We will try to show you a demo case with a fictional HomeRepair Company - company offering repair services that almost everyone has been in touch with or at least have a common impression of (it does not limits the implenetation of Team@work in any other kind of company).

After starting the server, we advise you to open the Team@Work designer (username: "Administrator", password: "123456", applicable for other tools)

Usually it has office, where calls or orders from customers are received; it has technical groups that carry out the services; financial group dealing with the invoices and accounting services and eventually storehouse or service set .

Its main activity is to offer home repair services. First the company memebers collect orders from clients. Then they send the most suitable technicians to run the tasks. If everything is O.K. they issue the corresponding documents and receive payments from customers. This is the best case they struggle for.

Ussually these companies have a good database of regular customers. According some standard maintenance contracts they take care about special customer equipments. So this is another workflow these companies carry out everyday.

1. Design the company structure

The act of company establishment defines a kind of organizational structure and hierarchy.The top company manager is the architect of the company framework. Logically the first thing you should do is to “Design your company structure”.The first start will open the application in mode “Editing organization structure”.

You will see what we have prepared for you - a simple structure of “Home repair company”. It has four basic departments (Central, Operational, Technical and Financial) and the Operational one has four sub-departments (North, South, East and West) that carry out services in the four parts of a small town.

Simple rules:

• left mouse buton click or drag is used for selections, grouping, etc.
• Some buttons of the menu bar will become active when you select object in the graphical panel
• the right mouse buton click holds the functionalities

Switch to workflow design mode pressing the button.

Please, load the workflow named "Main" (this is the implementation of our first example - the everyday repair services on customer calls).

1. The workflow starts when a call is received from a client. We have appointed that the Operational department (you can rename it Call center) will receive orders from customers and this will be done by Alys Smith. She is given the right to start projects under this workflow and her task is to distribute orders according their location to the four sub-departments (so the outgoing links are of type "Selector"). She is also the most suitable person to fulfill the obligatory project parameters (like address and customer name). Look in the manuals to find out how to define project parameters, staff roles and permissions, links definitions, task terms, priorities, etc. Our advice is to read carefully the Designer manual and play the game with the manual in hand.
2. The order reaches one of the four subdepartments. The next workflow’s state is the report order execution. We have defined three possible different paths from this state - invoice issue, certificate issue or problem report. As far as any one of these three situations may happen we have defined the outgoing links from this stage of type "Options". This is a very dangerous choice for a non-trained staff and our reason to choose it is to pay your attention to it and to train you.
   
   If you select one, two or all three outgoing links of a project under this workflow, it will go in all selected directions and everything will be OK (like using automatic or selector links). But if you just mark a project task complete without pointing any of the optional outgoing links, the project will stop at this stage and will be sent to archive. The logic is simple - links are optional including the option not to choose any one of them. So, pay attention when using optional links! You have many other ways to design such workflow using another combination of states and links.
3. The next stages are ordinary ones. We want to pay your attention also to the fact that we have marked all incoming links as activating. You can feel the reason looking at stage "Send documents to customer". If we have chosen notification type of incoming links you can easily found that this stage becomes unreachable in some cases. You have been given "ultimate" freedom in designing and modeling the real life company workflows, but don't forget you are responsible for the logic of your models. The program will work according your logic.

Now our next workflow example. The company carries maintenance services to its regular customers under annual contract. We have made a very simple workflow about it - just load the workflow named "Annual maintenance contract".

1. The company carries this activity offering to the customer its standard annual maintenance contract. If the client accept the contract clauses, the company should make its technical inspection onsite in order to check and define the exact contract parameters.
2. Depending on the results: if the situation is standard and accepted by both sides the workflow goes to state of contract signing, but if partners have not reached agreement they should negotiate additional contract points. If the changes in the contract are not so great the company can go on with its signing, but in some cases the company will need lawyers revision. So it is up to the concrete situation where the workflow will go through. This is an example how the external partners are included in the company workflows. Nothing restricts you to design workflows composed of states and tasks assigned only to your external partners.

Now our advice is to switch on all other Team@Work applications – “Task Manager”, “Reports”, “Controll Center”, etc. In “Task Manager” you can play the different user roles. In the “Reports” you see the results of your actions (do not forget to refresh them).

The demo version comes with defined organizational structure, two workflows, defined users, roles, passwords, several archived projects, several project at different state of compeltion and different tasks for fullfilment. Hereinafter are the tables with the required data for easy playing and navigation in the demo version. All starting passwords are: “123456”.

Good luck and fair time!