Enterprise Storage Solutions For Data & Document Management Streamlining corporate business processes By Roger K. Sullivan, VP of Marketing Keyfile Corporation Successful companies understand the importance of efficiency. They recognize the value of technologies that empower professionals to continually improve their business processes. They also know that staying ahead of the competition demands the capability to respond immediately to customers and react quickly to change. Relying on manual processes and endlessly and aimlessly moving files and stacks of paper from one desk to another not only wastes precious time, it invites obsolescence. To remain competitive, organizations must implement innovative technology in order to automate and facilitate business decision-making. Only leading-edge technology, properly applied, can provide strategic leaps forward and establish a company as an industry trailblazer rather than a follower stuck in a morass of antiquated policies and procedures. Today, in addition to document management and imaging products, companies worldwide are realizing the benefits of using workflow technology to address mission-critical business problems. Organizations who use technology in innovative ways are better equipped to attack new markets more cost-effectively and pro-actively than those who do not. External pressures--competitive threats, government regulations, the need to continuously improve customer service quality--are forcing companies to take action. Workflow empowers corporate professionals from a variety of industries to apply their expertise to design efficient business processes that can be used by anyone within their department or across the entire corporate enterprise. For example: * An engineering change order (ECO) process and design cycle can be significantly reduced to bring products to market sooner. * A customer's loan application can be handled quicker and tracked at all points in its process. * Confidential government information can be electronically distributed only to those individuals with access rights. * Customer contract changes can be easily tracked by customer service representatives. Traditionally, workflow products have required customers to agree on a single process, complete with all possible exceptions, to be coded into one application. With today's workflow solutions, customers are able to link together departmental processes across the enterprise. Department managers can create processes for their own groups while participating in cross-organizational business operations. For example, if a person in marketing is purchasing a new PC, there would be a process for approving the PC within her own department as well as a process within the purchasing department. When approval for the PC is given within marketing, control of the workflow passes to purchasing. What actually happens during this process, while important to the purchasing group, is of little interest to the marketing person--so long as it results in a new PC. With workflow, department managers are also able to control their own destiny. They don't have to stand in line waiting for someone else to develop an application. Instead, managers can quickly design innovative new processes, retain and refine those that work and discard those that don't without investing hundreds of person-hours into analysis and applications development. Managers can also contribute to bottom-line profitability quickly. By implementing an enterprisewide workflow solution, organizations have the ability to: * graphically map out a process and create a workflow that automates that process; * monitor a workflow and dynamically modify the workflow while it is running; and * interconnect departmental workflow processes across an entire enterprise. Workflow products such as Keyfile's Keyflow enable professionals to take control of their businesses and to build real-world solutions for mission-critical problems. It helps companies recognize process bottlenecks, wasted steps and redundancies while facilitating process management across a local area network or an entire enterprise. Roger Sullivan is VP of marketing at Keyfile Corp. (Nashua, NH), 603-883-3800, ext. 375, fax 603-889-9259, E-mail sullivan@ keyfile.com. He is recognized as a leading authority on document and image management.
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