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April 7, 2008

Putting Your Workflow On Paper. It's Tedious But So Important

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Writing down the work flow and processes of your business is important if you hope to grow and want to systematize good processes and eliminate ones that hinder the growth of your company. Maybe you've grown from a small home office of 2 persons to a corporate business of 50 persons - you need your work flow written down on paper.

Your new hires, front line managers and others do not have the same institutional experience as you or those who helped you build the company to what it is now. A document work flow helps everyone perform to the same level - whether they were hired today or 2 years ago.

You can be a small business while you act like a "big business" as far as work flows and processes are concerned. Opening up word and writing down the flow is a start, but it's easier and better to use a program specifically designed for this process. Software as a service provider Longjump recently launched a new Workflow Designer, a visual environment to design and deploy business workflows which can help.

LongJump's press release reads Workflow automation is important to business because organizing and sequencing how work gets done can accelerate communication and collaboration between team members, across company departments and between suppliers and partners.

Every business has recurring processes, such as information requests, management approvals, fulfillment and deliveries. Until now creating, implementing and updating customized workflows has been too complex, expensive and time consuming. Consequently, businesses have been unable to immediately see the results and return on investment. However, implementing workflows creates significant value when they model and reflect how a business really operates. For example, businesses have workflow processes that are: started based on calendar day, such as submitting reconciling inventory; started based on completion of tasks and events, such as creating a customer quote and getting it approved; and started based on data entered, such as routing new job candidates captured through a web-form to a hiring manager.

There's many software tools that can do workflow and LongJump's is only one of many. I took a look at LongJump's demo video and their tool has to be one of the better ones. it's simplistic in nature but feature rich.

tags: longjump , workflow | 1 comments