A User's Guide to E-mail
& Workflow Applications
Executive Summary
Introduction
The Importance of
E-mail
Why E-mail
Leads to Workflow
Types of Workflow
Active E-Forms
Workflow Action Plan
Bibliography
Executive Summary
The purpose of this article is to help prepare an organization to take
advantage of electronic mail by making it the foundation for new application
development. The business enterprise that intends to stay competitive during
the 1990’s will need to embed E-mail technology and applications into the
framework of its business process.
Global competition has already forced American business to streamline
and "downsize," both organizationally and procedurally. As a result,
corporate management is now focused increasingly on improving time-based
processes by shortening "cycle-times," and thus, lowering costs.
Electronic mail is recognized as a key technology that enables these
objectives to be attained. One company --General Electric-- could not have
carried out its business strategy of the past decade without the use of new
communication technologies such as E-mail.
E-mail is evolving from being a discrete application to an "application
enabler," i.e. an information highway on top of which specific applications
can be built. It lends itself well to event-driven business processes by
allowing different parties to communicate without having to be "all in the
same room at the same time." E-mail can be an essential component of
"workflow," which is defined as the automation of office processes that
involve forms-routing, database queries, signature approvals, and filing.
Although workflow technology is still evolving and not well-understood,
it is clearly more than simply routing a formatted screen from one person to
another. Workflow requires a high-level language with logic enabling the
designer to insure data integrity and structure a series of events or
"triggers."
Among current workflow systems on the market there is a wide spectrum of
computing platforms, design methodologies, complexity of learning, and cost.
In selecting a work-flow product, it is important to first define a
company’s strategic business objectives, then apply the right technology to
the requirements by matching it with the proper product. The overall scope
of the project, and the choice of workflow product, will be determined by
three primary factors: the complexity of the business process to be
automated, how structured versus unstructured that business process needs to
be, and the overall cost of the system.
A flexible forms automation system, of which CASI’s Active E-Forms is one
example, does not mandate the acquisition of a completely new turn-key
system or require the imposition of a top-down model for development. It
allows you to automate in increments within your company’s existing business
environment. Active E-Forms preserves and extends an organization’s current
hardware investment and makes an enterprise-wide forms system attainable.
Some workflow processes that can be automated by Active E-Forms, such as
time card accounting, purchase order requisitions, research requests, and
several others are described in this article. It also provides a technical
overview of the Active E-Form product itself, and it concludes with a
suggested action plan for piloting workflow in your organization and a
bibliography of pertinent resources.
Introduction & Background
"If you thought the 1980’s were tough, the 1990’s will make the
1980’s look like a cakewalk. It will be brutally competitive." --
Jack Welch, CEO, General Electric Corp.
Over the past decade, electronic mail and intelligent forms have emerged
as new and growing technologies. Each has the potential to significantly
enhance corporate performance. Since the productivity level of every
corporation is a microcosm of the nation’s economic position, the best way
to assure America’s financial future is to bring productive change to every
business organization.
It was President Clinton who stressed the necessity for America to
develop infrastructure and control costs. E-mail technology clearly is a
powerful way to achieve the twin objectives of better infrastructure and
lowered costs.
When properly planned and implemented, applications based upon E-mail can
make a significant contribution to the bottom line of companies that are
prepared for it. However, becoming "E-mail literate" does not happen to an
organization overnight. And becoming "prepared" requires commitment to start
with the basics of electronic messaging, and then an ongoing plan to
systematically build applications upon it.
The good news is that more and more businesses are turning to E-mail to
keep up with the pace of business change. Industry statistics show that the
number of electronic mailboxes in operation has been rising at a compounded
annual growth rate close to 45% since 1992 and may exceed 50 million users
in 1996. Industry estimates indicate expected growth in the number of users
of electronic mail to reach 100 million users by 2000.
A substantial number of office workers today use E-mail simply to
communicate with other co-workers; many are not aware that there is a much
bigger payoff from "mail-enabled applications." That is because many E-mail
systems currently in use today do not go far enough in providing the
workflow capabilities described in this paper.
Any business enterprise that intends to stay competitive during the '90s
will need to embed E-mail technology into its business processes. To
understand "why" requires a review of recent shifts in the world economy and
what this has meant for business.
The Economic Watershed of 1990-91
Since 1989, the U.S. economy has recorded the slowest growth and the
smallest gains in productivity and net investment since the Great
Depression.
For the first time in a half century, several foreign economies
outperform our own. Japan and Germany produce more wealth per capita than
the United States--and several other industrialized nations including Italy
and France have closed the gap significantly. It is a fact that in
productivity measured as Gross Domestic Product per worker, Japan, Germany,
France, and Italy all lead the United States.
The new realities of global competition are shattering previous economic
assumptions of millions of Americans. Working for a large company is no
longer a guarantee of security; during the past decade alone, Fortune 500
companies laid off well over 4.2 million men and women.
Corporations, driven by global competition to increase productivity in
flat or declining markets, have down-sized dramatically both in number of
employees as well as size of organizational structure. Entire layers of
management have been swept away in major restructuring of American
enterprise.
A Corporate Standout
One of the past decade’s notable examples of such corporate restructuring
has been General Electric under the tenure of its CEO, Jack Welch. During
the 1980’s, the company grew from $34 billion to $56 billion in revenues and
produced a phenomenal 18% return on equity, making it a darling of Wall
Street and institutional investors. The reasons behind GE’s success in the
face of a negative business climate are enlightening.
First, under Welch, GE downsized its organizational structure. While GE
nominally saved $40 million by removing several layers of management, the
real benefit to the corporation came in the form of improved quality of
leadership and the ability to get products to market faster. As Welch puts
it: "People think of ‘de-layering’ as a cost reduction, but it’s really a
way of enhancing management...Delayering speeds communications. It returns
control and accountability to the business, which is where it belongs." He
adds: "When you try to move information through layer after layer in an
organization, it is like playing the children’s game of telephone...the data
gets corrupted."
Second, Welch implemented the concept of running a "boundary-less"
company--one that can do business and exchange information with any company,
in any country, just as if that company was actually part of the GE
corporate information network. To accomplish that vision, GE was forced to
become a sophisticated user of new communication technologies.
Six key operating principles
But something more than technological innovation was needed to turn a
company as large as GE into a profitable and formidable competitor. Welch
laid the ground work for a corporate performance philosophy that became
distilled into six key principles. Today GE uses these principles to
maintain a competitive advantage in its key markets.
- Manage processes rather than people
- Use process mapping and benchmarking to spot opportunities for
improvement
- Emphasize continuous improvement and applaud incremental gains
- Use customer satisfaction as the main gauge of performance
- Treat your suppliers as partners
- Introduce a constant stream of high-quality new products
These imperatives are important because they are a perfect match for the
benefits that electronic mail (a "process technology" itself) brings to the
table. For example, the application of intelligent form-routing to business
processes does not require a costly or radical restructuring of business
systems; it allows improvement to be made in increments. E-mail enables
better communication and thus a tighter partnership between a company and
its customers/suppliers. E-mail can also reduce time-to-market by enhancing
communications and information flow between internal workgroups.
It is no surprise that GE has become a major user of electronic mail, and
GE’s information services division (GEISCO) is a prominent provider of
electronic mail services to many Fortune 1000 corporations. In fact,
downsized corporations need E-mail even more than before to manage broader
spans-of-control and enable faster decision-making. By using and applying
E-mail creatively, corporations can better refine their mission, improve
their operations, and empower their employees.
The Importance of E-mail
"The high-value enterprise need not be organized like the old
pyramids that characterized standardized production, with strong chief
executives presiding over ever-widening layers of managers, atop an even
larger group of hourly workers, all following standard operating
procedures. In fact, the high-value enterprise cannot be organized this
way. The three groups that give the new enterprise most of its
value--problem-solvers, problem-identifiers, and strategic brokers--need
to be in direct contact with one another to continuously discover new
opportunities. Messages must flow quickly and clearly if the right
solutions are to be applied to the right problems in a timely way."
--Robert Reich, Professor, Harvard University, U.S. Secretary of
Commerce
The Importance of E-mail to the Corporation
It is a familiar casebook study in today’s business schools: how Japan,
using American technology and ideas, perfected a new system of producing
goods. Sometimes referred to as "lean" or "agile" production, the new system
provided higher quality and more customization than mass production systems
of the past, yet did so at comparable costs. The emergence of these new
"processes" has had a profound impact on the industrialized world. They
illustrate the importance of leveraging time.
Just as one day of "float" in the financial markets can mean hundreds of
thousands of dollars, "information float" resulting from a company’s
operational procedures is just as costly and needs to be managed or
eliminated.
Competition today is just as often time-based as it is technology or
product based. In such cases, the critical factors become time-to-market,
sales cycle time, logistics cycle time, and customer response time.
For a large enterprise facing time-based competition, problems of command
and control (i.e. process coordination) become paramount. Since most
middle-level managers spend an average of 50 to 60 percent of their office
time "communicating" directly, i.e. talking in person or on the phone, any
technology that reduces the barriers to communication (whether walls or time
zones) is desirable.
E-mail and applications based upon it have an important role to play in
the down-sized corporation of the 1990s. E-mail provides a way to save time,
broaden communication across an ever-increasing span of control, and enhance
existing computer investments while controlling costs.
A recent study by Ovum Research found that computer applications with
"high-impact" had certain characteristics. Our comments pertain to the way
electronic mail and its associated applications match those high-impact
characteristics.
High impact applications:
- Fit the natural operating style of people and organizations.
E-mail, because of its asynchronous process orientation, is a perfect
match for most people’s operating style.
- Deal with semi-structured information and procedures.
Because it deals with text, numbers, application data, and binary files,
E-mail is very flexible in this regard, and is becoming more so.
- Are enterprise-wide in scope.
Through gateways, E-mail systems can become enterprise-wide in reach.
Companies such as Soft Switch provide such enterprise-wide E-mail
delivery capabilities.
- Are cross-enterprise in reach.
Through external gateways to public carriers, E-mail provides access to
other companies such as customers, suppliers, regulatory agencies, etc.
- Protect the existing systems investment.
By using the resources of the existing computer complex, E-mail can
preserve a company’s existing investment while extending its reach.
- Address additional complete business processes from the
beginning to the end of the cycle.
Addressing the total business process is what workflow is all about.
Why E-mail Leads to Workflow
"Messaging Systems are a natural choice for workflow systems because
the store-and-forward nature of electronic messaging is perfectly suited
to the way people work." --The Clarke Burton Report, April, 1991
While the growth rate of E-mail has been quite rapid over the past
decade, it is about to explode even more dramatically due to a convergence
of technologies. Cellular modems, mobile messaging software, and the
expanding bandwidth of E-mail are all factors behind the increasing
penetration of E-mail into everyday life.
E-mail has had a beneficial effect upon productivity because it takes the
burden off the user to "inquire" interactively. For some business processes
such as airline reservations, interactive inquiry is mandatory; for many
others, it is not necessary and in fact is costly and support-intensive. A
better alternative is for the application to send a message to the
individual giving notification of a condition or action as soon as it has
occurred. This leverages time and enhances productivity.
For example, a busy investor could be notified by E-mail whenever General
Electric stock rises above $43 per share or drops below $34 per share. He
might actually prefer this rather than having to search the listings in the
Wall Street Journal or dial Dow Jones on a daily basis. This kind of
event-driven "triggering" is made possible by coupling an E-mail system with
database applications.
The ability of E-mail to accelerate the natural flow of daily
business life is also what makes it most useful. In order to compete in the
years ahead, a corporation will have to build E-mail capability in two
areas: internally within the organization, and externally, reaching outside
the organization to other entities such as customers, vendors, regulatory
agencies, etc.
The Advantages of "Mail-enabling" Applications
Many companies have processes that are begging for automation but have
not been automated either because the MIS programming staff is backlogged,
or because the cost to program the application appears higher than the
projected return on investment. Such potential applications, while
important, may fall short of being considered "mission critical." They fall
right into the category known as administrative forms applications.
An intelligent forms-routing and approval system is a good way to reduce
that programming backlog by allowing non-programmers to design and implement
their own automated procedures. Using a 4GL to define variables, screens,
and logic, users can program the path of an electronic form from one
approver to the next. The logic behind the form checks limits established in
each user's directory profile and uses its own logic to determine the next
step in the approval process.
Types of Workflow
"Most business applications aren't really based on interactivity.
They're a series of event-driven activities conducted across time,
space, and people." --Patricia Seybold, Seybold Report on Office
Administration
In every company, information moves in a continuous flow between
operating groups. Yet in spite of computerization and a wide range of
communication mediums (TV, radio, satellite, computers, etc.), the paper
form is still the dominant method of information movement for businesses --
and a dominant form of bottleneck. (Who among us, for example, has
not had to call the boss' secretary on more than one occasion to ask, "Has
the form been signed yet?")
The fact is, it is not the form itself, but our methods of processing it
that represent the greatest obstacle to increased productivity. Studies show
that for every dollar spent on the creation of a paper form, over $30 will
be spent in processing it. It has also been estimated that as much as 80% of
the processing time required for forms is spent in transit time between
processing points.
What is "workflow"?
Like many industry buzz-words, "workflow" has as many definitions as the
number of vendors trying to break into the market. At its most basic level,
"workflow" is technology that automates the process, its related tasks, and
the path that information connected with the process must take through an
organization.
In selecting a workflow product, several factors must be considered:
- How complex are the business processes needing automation?
- How accessible would you like the workflow capability within the
organization to be?
- How much of your budget are you willing to invest in the project for
additional software, and in some cases, additional hardware?
Two types of business environments are natural candidates for workflow.
At the high end are mission-critical applications that are highly structured
and often complex processes requiring automation. These "production
workflow" systems are usually quite comprehensive in scope and often include
image integration and large-scale document archives. Production workflow
systems almost always require the re-engineering of the business processes
to fit a top-down conceptual model of the process. They usually do not
operate on top of an electronic mail system, but instead use a database
document management system as the foundation. These are characteristically
expensive projects requiring large-scale development efforts to provide
total "process automation."
Other business environments are less structured, less complex, and better
served by an automated solution patterned after the business processes
already in place. These processes are amenable to a workflow product built
on top of E-mail. By virtue of that fact, such a product can be more
flexible and less costly. This kind of system, sometimes called
"administrative workflow," does not replace an existing process with a
complete new model, but does allow the automation of the separate sub-tasks
that make up the process.
One ancillary benefit of workflow is that in the process of automating
forms-based processes, companies end up streamlining and reducing the number
of procedures they have, thereby achieving greater operational efficiency.
Some Examples of Candidates for Workflow
Many processes that involve forms are amenable to forms automation,
either in whole or in part. The objective is a simple one: to get
information to flow faster, to make data easier to exchange into and out of
required formats, and to track the status of the process.
In each candidate process, there are several common characteristics. Each
process is represented by an already existing form. The forms process spans
two or more people or departments. The form may involve approvals or
authorizations. Some examples of successful workflow development are
outlined below.
Sales Lead Management - The sales
department of an industrial products company enters all information about
incoming sales leads into an intelligent form which is routed via electronic
mail to the appropriate sales representative based on ZIP code. Information
in the lead form can be transferred automatically to a secondary call report
which each sales rep must return within a fourteen day time period. Any call
report that is over ten days old is flagged and highlighted in the E-mail
system. Returned call reports are returned to the central sales
administrator who runs a monthly batch report summarizing lead results by
several criteria.
Personnel and Recruitment - A
pharmaceutical company uses intelligent forms routing and bulletin boards to
manage its job posting, recruitment, and placement activities. A job
requisition is submitted for approval by the hiring manager and is returned
to personnel where the relevant position information is posted on the
Personnel Bulletin Board on the company E-mail system. A copy of the
approved requisition is also routed to the E-mail in-box of the appropriate
corporate recruiter.
Company employees who wish to apply for the open position can submit
their application using a standard intelligent E-form accessible from the
company-wide Forms Cabinet. After interviews have been scheduled and
completed and a hiring decision made, the company's internal applicants are
notified of the results by E-mail. External applicants receive a letter on
company letterhead generated by the E-mail system. The offer letter to the
winning applicant is triggered by the final approval of an intelligent
E-Form initiated by the personnel department on behalf of the hiring
manager. A monthly report is run and distributed by E-mail that summarizes
all interview and offer-letter activity for the month.
Loan Processing - A bank uses forms
routing and approval to manage the document flows involved in its loan
processing operation. Previously, both the loan approval and amortization
schedule were paper-based manual processes which took several days to
obtain. Now, the loan approval documentation is routed to management for
approval while an amortization schedule is requested from the bank's
computer which calculates and returns the schedule via E-mail where it can
be printed locally. What used to take a week now takes less than a day in
most cases.
Research Request - As part of its
research request system, a bank uses intelligent forms. When a customer
requests additional information about a disputed transaction, such a request
ultimately gets handled by the research department at headquarters. This
group works on a LAN with sophisticated workstations providing visual access
to microfilm and microfiche. The local branch initiates a "research request"
form which is automatically routed to a mailbox belonging to the research
group. The mailbox is polled several times each day and any forms and
messages are downloaded to the LAN. The research group then retrieves the
requested information and generates hardcopy images where necessary. The
form is returned to the local branch informing them of the status of their
request and when to expect a hardcopy to arrive at the branch.
Time Card Processing - Aerospace
companies are required to keep very detailed and accurate records of labor,
allocated by contract and subcontract. In the past this has been handled
through a largely manual paperwork system.
At one large aerospace firm, an existing paper-based salaried employee
labor charging system has been augmented with a paperless version using
intelligent electronic forms. The new system was implemented primarily to
support a remote manufacturing/test facility, but has now been deployed to
other sites.
The aerospace company desired an on-line, CICS-based "front-end" to the
existing batch-oriented labor system. They wanted the new system to do as
many up-front edits and validations as possible, in order to eliminate the
usual error report-correction-error report loop that was so characteristic
of batch oriented systems. The project faced an important constraint in that
it had to be implemented quickly (in 60 days or less) and not require a lot
of programmer man-hours.
Each employee selects his/her timecard from a cabinet and updates it at
the end of the day. The form prompts the employee for the required
information, performs validation checks, and computes elapsed time intervals
automatically. When the employee invokes The APPROVE function, this launches
the form up to the department manager's level for approval. After managerial
approvals are applied, the form is converted to data and entered into the
CICS batch job stream for payroll processing. The company has discovered
that data and calculations handled this way are much more accurate and
consistent than the previous manual time card system.
This mail-enabled application saved the client time and money by:
- Reducing paper
- Shortening the processing/approval cycle
- Reducing human error through computerized validation and checking
This application was programmed and deployed in less than sixty days
using Active E-Forms.
Active E-Forms
As an administrative workflow product, CASI's Active E-Forms (AEF) is a
way to develop automated business processes that span groups, departments,
divisions, and entire organizations. By riding on top of EMS, which runs on
most IBM and compatible host computers, AEF is an efficient, low cost way to
attain operational experience in developing forms-routing and workflow
applications.
AEF includes a 4GL-like language that allows the definition of variables,
screens, and logic within the routing and approval process. Some of the key
features of Active E-Forms are listed below:
To provide an "agile" information delivery system, every IS organization
should establish an action plan. Here are some suggestions about how to
approach a pilot project: