Learn more about the
Global Excellence Awards including rules, submissions and deadlines.
The criteria for the
case studies in this book.
Each received an Excellence in Workflow Award based on the following:
Innovation
encompasses the innovative use of technology for strategic business objectives;
the complexity of the underlying business process and IT architecture; the
creative and successful deployment of advanced workflow and imaging concepts;
and process innovations through business process reengineering and/or continuous
improvements.
Hallmarks of a
successful implementation include extensive user and line management
involvement in the project while successfully managing change during the
implementation process. Factors impacting the level of difficulty in achieving a
successful implementation include the system complexity; integration with other
advanced technologies; and the scope and scale of the implementation (e.g. size,
geography, inter-company processes).
Impact is the
bottom line, answering the question "what benefits do imaging and workflow
deliver to the business?" Examples of potential benefits include: productivity
improvements; cost savings; increased revenues; product enhancements; improved
customer service; improved quality; strategic impact to the organization's
mission; enabling culture change; and-most importantly-changing the company's
competitive position in the market. The visionary focus is now toward strategic
benefits, in contrast to marginal cost savings and productivity enhancements.
Table of Contents
Guest Chapters
To add depth and
meaning to the case studies, leading industry analysts and experts were invited
to contribute chapters from their respective perspectives.
Streamline Your Business Processes with Workflow and Extranet Solutions
The introduction is by
Connie Moore, leading industry analyst and Vice President with Giga Information
Group, and Excellence Awards judge, jointly with Gig Graham, Chief Research
Officer, Giga Information Group. Here, they watch a new trend in the way an
enterprise delegates and manages business processes in its extranet, and a new
role for workflow technology within organizations. One of the revolutionary
concepts made possible by the Internet is "electronic value chains" of carefully
sequenced insourced and outsourced business processes for delivering and
servicing products. In economic terms, the Internet enables the disaggregation
of internal processes and reaggregation of specialists into a modern workflow,
often at new price points or with higher-quality products.
Technologies for the Virtual Enterprise
Martin Ader, Principal
of Workflow & Groupware Strategies, France, and author of the highly acclaimed
Comparative Analysis of Workflow Products, looks at how the development of the
Internet, coupled with the development of technologies for Knowledge Management
and Work Management, will have deep influence on the way economic actors play
their role in the worldwide market place. This will lead to the development of a
new form of economic undertaking, the "Virtual Enterprises" where sets of
economic actors are associating their strengths to provide a specific service
traditionally provided by a single enterprise. Such a possibility will have, in
the long term, deep influence on the economy and enterprise development
strategies. This chapter shows how this can modify the way work can be organized
and conducted, and demonstrates how those effects enable competition between
virtual enterprises and traditional ones, and gives an overview of the
conditions to make it happen.
Process Support
Derek Miers,
Principal, Enix Consulting Ltd., England, offers excellent advice to business
leaders who must make critical decisions regarding the development of the next
generation of Web-based enterprise application systems, e-commerce products and
Web-based services targeted at the business sector. The key point he makes is
that building and maintaining an effective support infrastructure for business
processes have become a technologically demanding task with relatively high
costs attached. More importantly, the capability of the firm to rapidly bring
products to market is significantly inhibited. On the other hand, embedding
robust process oriented components within Web-based applications will speed the
time-to-market and lower the cost of ownership. Unless developing process
support engines for the Web is a core capability of your company, embedding a
product architected for that environment will deliver a much higher return on
investment than in-house development, while also ensuring that products and
services are brought to market more quickly and effectively.
The Workflow Market in 1999 and Beyond
Priscilla Emery,
Senior Vice President, Association for Information and Image Management
International (AIIM), presents some of the results of AIIM's annual worldwide
study and provides a status of the document technologies marketplace, from both
a user and a supplier perspective. In 1999, AIIM requested that GartnerGroup
conduct this study. The resulting information provides insight into the growth
of the different document technology areas, the reasons for that growth and some
of the issues that both suppliers and users consider the most pressing in this
area. Workflow is one of the document technology areas that were examined.
This chapter summarizes the findings of the market research as they pertain to
workflow technology and trends.
The Case Studies
We, at Giga
Information Group and WARIA, are most fortunate to have read all the submissions
for the Excellence Awards-not just the Gold and Silver winners. Having combed
through hundreds of submissions over the years across many countries and
continents, we can clearly discern patterns in how companies achieve excellence.
While not all companies share each and every characteristic, there is enough
commonality to detect distinct paths for achieving excellence. When several of
these characteristics are combined in a single installation, they often result
in visionary companies moving the competitive goalposts for their industries, as
you will read in the following case studies:
Arthur Andersen LLP
(Amsterdam, Netherlands). As a professional services corporation with 1998
revenues about $6 billion and over 60,000 employees in 363 locations in 78
countries, for Arthur Andersen LLP (Amsterdam, Netherlands) knowledge represents
99.95 percent of what AA sells to its clients and is the core process of their
value chain. This has enabled them to drive revenue growth in their consulting
areas, the chief users of the Knowledge Management Systems, at a rate greater
than 40 percent per year. This has allowed them to increase their ability to
value bill, improve their competitive position while adding significant numbers
of new associates. Nominator: Arthur Andersen. Gold, Document/Knowledge
Management
Autogere-Seguros e
Pensoes (Lisbon, Portugal) This large financial group handles 700,000
insurance policies from five different insurance companies. Their business
problem revolved around five different claims processing systems. Their solution
was to implement common front end to back office systems. They integrated
imaging, telephony, fax, and transaction processing using workflow across the
supply chain. Their call management system included computer integrated
simultaneous voice/data, and inbound/outbound call scripting. The work
management system used a single point of entry, including remote access, process
maps, business applications, and process agents. In addition, Autogere automated
inbound/outbound faxes, digital photography, remote access, and automatic letter
generation integrated with their preferred supplier contractors. By
enterprise-wide support of their value chain they now handle over 70 percent of
claims on the first call, resulting in a significant cycle time reduction from
opening to closing claims. Nominator: Methodus. Gold, Workflow/Process
Management
Bank of America
Capital Markets Operations (San Francisco, CA) This application describes
the reengineering and workflow automation of the process used to acquire, setup
and maintain new brokerage accounts within the Capital Markets Operations
division of Bank of America. The end result of this project is a large-scale
workflow and imaging system that has at least quadrupled processing capacity of
the new accounts group. Documents are introduced to the system via traditional
scanners, via a large network of facsimile machines, via FTP data transfers, and
via intranet forms. Once in the system, significant amounts of data are
collected from the various documents using a leading ICR/OCR/OMR forms
recognition engine. Finalist, Workflow/Process Management
Blue Cross & Blue
Shield of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) Their military health claim
operation was a very paper intensive process and a very cost competitive
business. BCBSSC's high claims volumes of over 500,000 claims in process with
more than 100,000 new claims added daily impacted their ability to meet service
level and cycle time minimums for processing claims according to government
contract requirements. A unique add-on product allocation allows them to
facilitate high volume distribution of claims records and images using a "push"
methodology, yet gives supervisors the ability to redistribute work on an
exception basis as needed and on demand. Nominator and integrator is Syscom,
Inc, and with software solutions provided by IBM Corporation. Finalist,
Workflow/ Process Management.
CFI Mail Order
Pharmaceuticals (Harrisburg, PA) One of the nation's largest privately owned
mail order drug company filling millions of prescriptions annually and serving
four million individual customers throughout the United States, invented a
completely electronic workstation for professional pharmacist knowledge
management. CFI tied together imaging, OCR/ICR, bar code, document management,
core line-of-business applications, on-line databases and other technology
components into a total enterprise solution. The new system resulted in dramatic
expansion of the business capacity by more than 50 percent; increased overall
professional staff efficiency by one third; and improved customer services.
Nominator is Interling (Logical Software Solutions). Silver, Document/Knowledge
Management
Detroit Edison
Finalist, Document/Knowledge Management DE generates over 46 million
kilowatt-hours annually with eight fossil plants and one nuclear facility and is
Michigan's largest electric utility serving two million electric customers in
7,600 square miles. Because of the need to access over 300,000 easement
documents and 4,000 owned property records, they implemented the Corporate Real
Estate Services (CRES) Database/Imaging System to automate the process of file
retrieval and to protect these easement agreements (some of these fragile
documents were acquired before the year 1900) from catastrophic loss. Nominator
is Eastman Software Inc.
ForeningsSparbanken
(Stockholm, Sweden) This preeminent retail bank holds $85 billion in
balances, has over 11,800 employees, 4 million private customers, and 200K
business customers. They changed from duplicate systems due to mergers,
bureaucratic, paper-driven environment, outdated email, branch and document
management systems to one bank, one information channel, and one way of
searching for information. They were first European bank to integrate web-based
workflow, implementing an Intranet for electronic mail, discussion groups,
workflow and DM, BPR for pilot systems, purchasing and customer feedback and
Workflow integrated with EDI. They have realized savings of over $600K and they
forecast $20M/year savings in 1999. Workflow linked to EDI saves $25 per
invoice, purchasing cycle time has gone from 37 hours to less than 2 hours,
administration reduced to 20 percent of its previous cost. Silver,
Workflow/Process Management
George Mason
University (Fairfax, VA) George Mason University (GMU) serves more than
25,000 students enrolled in more than 100 degree programs at the undergraduate,
graduate, masters, doctoral and professional levels. George Mason saw Web-based
work management solutions deployed on an Intranet as one of the best ways to
regulate and reengineer its business processes because of the relative ease of
deployment and training. The first Intranet workflow application targeted by the
George Mason University was Temporary Employee Request (TER) because of the high
number of employment requests processed and a large population affected.
Finalist, Workflow/Process Management
Government of New
Brunswick (New Brunswick, Canada) Faced with challenge of maintaining their
documents in multiple languages-principally French and English-operates a
Translation Bureau in its Department of Supply and Services. This Bureau, which
consists of approximately 35 people, provides translation and interpretation
services for all departments of the provincial government. In addition to the
internal staff of translators, interpreters, secretaries, typists, proofreaders,
and receptionists, the Bureau contracts with 50 independent freelance
translators. The Bureau transformed what was previously a slow, paper-based,
resource-intensive process into a streamlined, automated flow that has
dramatically reduced costs and processing time, and increased productivity and
accuracy. Nominator is JetForm Corporation, with integration by Ordiplan.
Finalist, Workflow/Process Management
IBM Global Services
(Sleepy Hollow, NY) created CM AssetWeb to provide the infrastructure for
IBM's Knowledge Management Solutions. ICM AssetWeb is a strategic knowledge and
asset management collaboration system used by IBM Global Services and Global
Industries to team, execute and win customer engagements by creating, sharing
and reusing intellectual capital. Intellectual Capital consists of information,
know-how, experiences, wisdom, ideas, objects, code, models and technical
architectures that are structured to enable sharing for reuse to deliver value
to customers and shareholders. Nominator is IBM Consulting Group, Integration by
IBM Global Services. Gold, Document/Knowledge Management
IBM ICMS New
Zealand Ltd. (Hutt City, New Zealand) For this large multinational
corporation, their key motivation was to build a knowledge solution that would
become an integral part of the product development lifecycle, and be shared
across all business groups. Their customer care and billing system was an online
repository of intellectual capital enabling information capture, re-use, design,
update and distribution. This innovative system resulted in content development
reduced by 50 percent, 75 percent information re-use together with $40K saved
per release on new manual distribution and $150K saved per implementation
project. They transformed the internal culture from one that saw information
only as 'documentation' to one that recognized the asset value of knowledge.
Gold, Document/Knowledge Management
Immigration &
Naturalization Services (Washington D.C.) The INS, an agency of the
Department of Justice is responsible for enforcing the laws regulating the
admission of people born outside of the United States and for administering
various immigration benefits, including the naturalization of resident aliens.
The ultimate mission of the INS' FOIA/PA unit is to respond to a constituent's
"right to know" by providing timely information to the public and other
Government agencies when they request it, within the provisions of pertinent
laws and regulations. Finalist, Document/Knowledge Management
Kaiser Permanente
(Oakland, CA) is the largest Health Maintenance Organization in America with
over 8.6 million members. Through their Outreach Program-generating more than 8
million customized correspondence pieces annually-Kaiser Permanente can now
contact patients who didn't normally schedule appointments for physicals, cancer
screenings, mammograms or PAP tests. By combining data mining techniques with
the document technologies, Kaiser Permanente generates personalized
communications from doctors to patients who may be at risk, requesting an
appointment. By applying all formatted data and graphics at the time of print,
they decreases costly programming time cutting $300,000 annually in outsourced
printing costs. Nominator is Cincom Systems, Inc. Merit, Document/Knowledge
Management
Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (Taejon, South Korea) A leading
engineering university, KAIST has 5500 students, 360 professors, 500 employees,
100 researchers and a virtual university. Their business problem was that
inaccurate forms created re-work in their bureaucratic, paper-driven
environment. Their solution was to initiate an ambitious project called
Intelligent Campus to build a virtual university. Started in 1993, K-WFMS has
been developed to automate business processes in administration, which is one of
the core components of CAIS (Campus-wide Advanced Information System an
integrated information system that supports the various functionalities of
virtual university, including workflow and smart forms. They reengineered 20
main processes, affecting 4,000 clients, and reduced cycle time by 50 percent
and saved 6,400 hours/year. Silver, Workflow/Process Management
Kraft Foods
(Northfield, IL), the nation's largest packaged food retailer, identified
potential savings through the consolidation of over 230 employees and 2,500,000
annual invoices across 60 operating plants involved in processing through a wide
variety of accounts payable systems. In 1994, Kraft Foods put in place a Shared
Services Center (SSC) in San Antonio for this purpose. Today SSC operates as one
of the most efficient Accounts Payable Service Providers. The system connects
three different systems through a common interface to process $7.3 billion in
invoices annually from thousands of vendors. The system stays 100 percent
compliant with Kraft's control policies while achieving a 37 percent reduction
(from $7.50 to $4.74) in transaction costs. Nominator and integrator is ICG
Consulting using FileNET's workflow platform. Gold, Workflow/Process Management
Lewisham Borough
Council (London, England) This low-income borough in large metro city dealt
with a very high unemployment constituency, of which 25 percent of their tenants
have no telephone and more than 60 percent receive benefits. In their Revenues &
Benefits Department, management was extremely paper- and detail-intensive,
handling 32,000 council tax benefits, 216,000 in-office payments, and 500,000
payments. Through the deployment of workflow technology, efficiencies in this
area will allow for collections to reach a 95 percent success rate in financial
year 98/99. The department manages an average 120,000 actions on Council Tax
accounts and in recent times has issued 82,000 reminders. By installing video
booths called "TellyTalk" in the borough, they plan to integrate workflow
throughout their inter-governmental collaboration. To date they have achieved £5
million additional revenues, £1.7 million saved on fraud investigations, £0.5
million savings through efficient document management and more. Silver,
Document/Knowledge Management
Office of the
Secretary of Defense (Washington D.C.) The Office of the Secretary of
Defense (OSD] Legislative Affairs is the primary liaison between Secretary of
Defense and Congress. With 200 to 300 separate inquiries initiated each month,
the scrutiny on the duties of this organization is formidable. Over the past
several years, public pressure has increased and various mandates have been
enacted requiring improved business performance from government agencies. Using
procedural and ad hoc process management, which provides the necessary
flexibility the OSD Legislative Affairs requires, they are now responding to
inquiries 15 times faster and processing more responses with 10 percent fewer
personnel. Finalist, Workflow/Process Management
Phillips Fox
(Sydney, NSW, Australia) As a leading commercial law firm with 12 offices
across Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam, Phillips Fox has uses technology in
an innovative way to help capture and disseminate legal knowledge. Their
business problem evolved from multiple disparate databases, using different
database syntaxes, resulting in information hoarding by their lawyers and
duplicated research efforts with no audit trail of information access. They were
the first law firm to implement knowledge management, and the first with a high
volume claims litigation product. This implementation, which changed the way
lawyers share and access information, redesigned existing Intranet processes,
aligned IT and knowledge management, integrated document management, databases,
workflow, documents, email, with the result that one query searches all
repositories. Silver, Document/Knowledge Management
Screen Actors Guild
Producer's Pension and Health Plans (Burbank, CA) is a trust that was
established to provide a portable set of health and pension benefits to its
37,000 health and 5,500 pension members. The SAG-PPHP Claims Processing Imaging
and Workflow System captures incoming health insurance claims using OCR
software, checks them for accuracy against legacy system records, verifies that
all required supporting documents have been received, and delivers them into an
insurance adjuster's work queue for resolution, thus greatly increased
efficiency in processing over 530,000 claims annually. Nominator is Eastman
Software, Inc., with Integration by Omnikron Systems, Inc.. Finalist,
Workflow/Process Management
Texas Women's
University, (Denton, TX) Resources to track all the information that is
required to approve a loan, grant or scholarship have been shifted from
personnel to the workflow system. As each document is received and scanned, the
databases on both the host and workflow systems are updated. Cost benefits
include increased productivity and reduced operating costs. The amount of time
to process items through the flow has been reduced. More items can now be
processed with a smaller staff. Finalist, Workflow/Process Management
University of South
Florida, (Tampa, FL) USF is a public state institution with more than 36,000
students and over 8,600 faculty and staff. With campuses in Tampa, Lakeland,
Sarasota and St. Petersburg, it is the 13th largest university in the United
States and the second largest among Florida's 10 state universities.
Integrating the legacy and manual processes with new and innovative technologies
via the intranet system provided a set of flexible processes that use a single
source of information in a meaningful and useful way. Implementation was a
challenge, but the rewards have been great. Finalist, Workflow/Process
Management
The Workers'
Compensation Board of British Columbia (Richmond, BC, Canada) is the sole
provider since 1917 of workers' compensation insurance to the 1,000,000 workers
and 140,000 employers of British Columbia. The WCB's Compensation Services
Division implemented an Electronic Claims File system (or E-File), the
technology backbone of its organizational change efforts. E-File is a claims
management system that applies imaging, workflow, and data integration to help
CSD process 8,000,000 documents each year, manage 200,000 injury claims each
year and make US$500 million in benefit payments. As a result, 70 percent of new
claims are electronically processed, with a 36 percent improvement in customers
receiving income continuity. WCB expects to save US$29.6 million in
administration and benefits in 1998. Nominator is Workers' Compensation Board of
British Columbia. Silver, Workflow/Process Management
Zurcher
Kantonalbank, (Zurich, Switzerland) ZKB is the third largest bank in
Switzerland. In a world of growing global banking competition, the ZKB acted
upon its vision of rationalizing work and efficiency. The ZKB initiated a FIT
policy for industrializing business management and production, and automating
banking processes. A workflow system was installed to manage processing tasks in
a centralized Securities Administration Department. The sub-department of Bonds
Redemption was the first workflow project, and it is currently in production.
Finalist, Workflow/Process Management.
Readers of these detailed case studies can find out more about:
·Their system application, what the system is used for, who are
the users and what the job entails
·What were their key motivations
Their system configuration (number, and type of software,
servers, scanners, printers, storage devices, etc., including the identities
of the vendors and integrators involved)
·The number of users currently on the system and number of
users planned.
·How the company has been impacted by their new system; cost
savings, ROI and increased productivity improvements, competitive advantage
gained, and how they managed to move the goal posts for their industry.
·Their implementation process and methodology, the project
team, and the change management and business process reengineering issues
they addressed.
·How these companies managed both their overall technological
and business innovations.
