The definition offered by Wikipedia for the term workflow is: 

“A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations.” 

We take this to mean that every business incorporates workflow in one way or another. In fact, a business can be thought of as the sum of its business processes. The workflow sector is currently expanding at a very rapid rate. This means that many businesses want to benefit by introducing new workflow technologies into their organization, but struggle (or even fail) to do this because there are currently very few independent businesses, like devHQ Solutions Limited, that are able to offer the necessary, industry proven, workflow architects and lead developers. 

How We Work With Our Customers

We adopt a very flexible approach when working with our customers to help introduce workflow technologies into their organisation and we always strive to show our customers that we are the right business to work with before any financial agreements have been made.

To help you reach a decision to select devHQ as your workflow solution supplier we are happy to visit you and undertake the work necessary for us to fully understand your needs and the vision of your solution – all completely free of charge (within reason).  We can also help de-risk your solution by providing you with a fixed price quote, or we can work with you on a time and materials basis.

Some of the largest corporate businesses in the world have set up supplier framework agreements with devHQ in order to use our workflow architects and developers, because they know we have proven industry experience, and they know we deliver on time and that we always try to exceed their expectations.  All our developers are located in the UK; hence they can work on site or out of our own offices.

Please register with us here to download our Workflow Solution Check List – “What a company must consider before they select a software development services company to implement their workflow processes.”

Solution Size

Can your business benefit by introducing workflow related technologies – in almost all cases, medium and large businesses can benefit substantially.

With the rapid growth of technology, like most things, workflow technologies are not just for large corporate businesses.  Many medium sized businesses can really benefit by introducing workflow technologies to streamline their organization and they do not have to break the bank to do it.  In fact, we will work with you during the discovery and information capture phase (which is often completely free of charge) to show you just how fast you can make a return on your investment (ROI).  In other words, you will save money by engaging our services after a defined period of time.  

Of course you will also gain many other benefits such as the ability to operate more transparent business operations, increase your flexibility to introduce further change into your organization when the need arises, enhanced management reports, higher quality, better throughput, managing staff workload (and reducing stress and staff churn etc.), connecting your organization together if it is geographically distributed, and have a much better overall understanding of how your business is operating as well as many other advantages.

devHQ work with businesses of all sizes, providing workflow, business process management and reengineering, image and document management solutions.  So contact as today to find out more about how we can help you introduce or improve workflow in your business.

Workflow Solution Factors 

During our discovery and information gathering phase we often talk to our potential customer about the following workflow solution factors

Business Requirements/Process Modeling

It is important for all parties to understand the business requirements, and have a good understanding of the required solution. Within reason, we provide free consultancy to help you capture your requirements and document a suitable solution that meets or exceeds your expectations. This work helps us to understand your needs and your ideal solution, and it also helps our customers fully understand the advantage of using an experienced workflow solutions company such as devHQ Limited.

Business Organization Structure

It is important to consider the business organization structure behind any workflow based solution. Typically, business organization units are created to handle the different types of work and business procedures that they are going to execute. Teams are often based on factors such as staff skills, geographic areas and business streams. Management of the business organization is also important. Typically, organizational units are either managed from within Active Directory, or natively by the workflow product being used.

Roles

Subscribing a user to one or more roles defines what actions that user can perform. Similar to business units, roles can be managed using Active Directory, or natively within the workflow solution itself. How roles are managed and whether a users session allows for roles to be aggregated together (if they have more than one role) are dependent on the type of solution being provided. Managing users by business roles introduces many benefits, such as: business activity permissions, security permissions, user audit, and enhanced business management information and reports and many others.

Business Processes and Simulators

Business processes are typically created using graphical tools. During this phase, it is very important to use a workflow designer specialist who can communicate with project stakeholders, business experts and business analysts in order to produce a solution that meets the needs of the requirements. Simulators can be used to demonstrate many different types work volume scenarios – allowing teams to be resized etc. , to show flow of information, processing transaction rates, people and processing bottlenecks and many more factors.

Hardware/Software Distribution

Our technical architects are able to provide you with the technical (hardware/networks and software) infrastructure necessary to host your solution. Hardware/Software and network architectures are always based on a projects unique requirements. Many factors need to be considered before the correct solution is agreed. Factors such as data sensitivity/distribution, security, disaster recovery, performance, scalability, transaction rates, information volume, bandwidth and many other factors need to be considered. We have delivered solutions using Citrix, thin-client, thick-client, on-shore servers, off-shore servers, private networks using secure messaging technologies and many other variations.

Management Information

Many businesses operate without gathering any audit or business management information. This makes it very difficult for a business to measure the performance of its business processes. It has been said that a business equals the sum of its business processes. If this is the case, then it should be very important for any business to understand how efficient their business processes are, who did what and when, check that security permissions are being adhered to and so on. Introducing full management information into strategic business processes can provide a wealth of information, allowing businesses to streamline and keep their business processes as agile as possible.

Management Information can be gathered for many different reasons to help staff to increase performance and bottlenecks, quality levels, ensure that service level agreements (SLA) are met, help ensure that business units (teams) are well balanced and perform at an optimized level. Management Information can be aggregated, providing information to any management level, from CEO to business process operators.

Legacy Systems

One of the most common requirements is to be able to introduce workflow technologies into a business and integrate heavily with existing legacy systems. devHQ specialise in integrating with many different commercial applications as well as finding appropriate techniques to work with bespoke legacy systems (even if they seem to have no immediate interface to work with!). Under normal circumstances, there are very few issues that need to be overcome in order to work seamlessly with existing systems. Where appropriate, mainly to introduce major benefits to the business, legacy systems might be replaced as part of the overall workflow solution. In all cases, cost/benefit analysis should be undertaken to look at the advantages and disadvantages to using or replacing existing legacy systems.

Information Types

Typically our solutions are geographically distributed, for example a document management centre is responsible for scanning paper documents and creating electronic copies (which may or may not include recognition steps). The digital documents (images) are then securely communicated to offshore back office business centres where they can be processed. There are many different solutions available to choose from: · UK only solutions – all processing is managed from within the UK · UK and offshore – scanning and process expert work managed from the UK and the remaining back office work is managed from offshore. · Follow the sun solutions, providing true 24/7 staff working capability – scanning and process expert work is managed from the UK, and the remaining back office work is managed by other offshore centres across the world. The structure of a business organization is important – many businesses have users who have one or more roles.

Work can be delivered to both Users and Roles depending on type of business process. For example, a User might have an inbox that has work that they need to process themselves, or they might belong to a role shared by a team, or set of skilled experts where work ca In the scenarios above there is an assumption that Image and Document Management facilities are required, such as scanning, form recognition, character recognition etc. We are able to provide workflow solutions that use almost any type of data feed, for example: · Physical documents that need to be scanned, i.e. paper, microfilm, microfiche · Integration with legacy systems, i.e. Mainframe, SAP, bespoke in-house systems · Databases, i.e. Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2 etc. · Data supplied via secure messaging systems such as IBM WebSphere MQ series We are also experienced in architecting hardware solutions, for example: · Servers distributed and installed in many offices world wide · Servers installed at a UK site and then offshore workers accessing the system using thin client software methods, i.e. web or citrix.

Building Your Workflow Solution

The devHQ workflow team consists of specialists in the following roles:

• Workflow Architects
• Technical Architects
• Developers
• Testers
• Business Analysts

Workflow Architects

• This person has proven experience developing large scale, globally distributed, workflow solutions
• Expert in at least two leading workflow products
• Technically, this person has climbed through the ranks, spending many years as a commercial developer using mainstream languages and methodologies
• Able to communicate at all levels and with all roles, i.e. Customers, Business Analysts, Developers, Testers, Network Engineers, Technical Consultants
• Experience with scanning and printing technologies
• Very strong software and hardware architecture skills, and being able to understand when and how to get the most out of the various hardware and software technologies used in typical workflow based solutions
• Expert in both Agile and Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodologies and also fully capable of working within a Prince 2 project framework
• Able to elicit information and demonstrate an excellent understanding of the customers vision of their solution
• Team leading skills – showing the ability to organize and manage the activities of other team members
• Expert in understanding Management Information requirements and ensuring appropriate data is captured in order to deliver the necessary management reports

Technical Architects

• This person has proven experience designing technical infrastructure for large scale geographically distributed systems.
• Capable of understanding business requirements and translating them into hardware sizing for scalability and performance
• Full understanding of security and how to minimize network and hardware vulnerabilities
• Experience of including hardware disaster recovery and full resilience as part of the solution

Business Analysts

• Excellent communication and interviewing skills
• Full understanding of business process management and business process reengineering practices
• Workflow Product specialist and how and when to utilize specific features
• Ability to fully document existing business processes
• Able to formally capture the requirements
• Seamlessly work with the Workflow Architect to build the workflow solution from the requirements

Workflow Developers

• Full design and programming experience with at least two leading workflow solutions
• Proven experience developing large scale workflow solutions
• Experience developing imaging solutions
• Experience developing distributed solutions
• Expert in working in any of the main software application tiers, i.e. Database, Middle-tiers, User Interface
• Expert in using design tools, build tools, unit testing tools

Workflow Testers

• Proven experience testing large scale workflow solutions
• Commercial experience in all types of testing, including the ability to write tests based on complex workflow maps
• Translating workflow maps into normal, alternate and exception flows and creating appropriate test cases to exercise all business paths
• Performance and sizing testing experience
• Expert in developing test scripts to rapidly

To find out more, please contact devHQ Solutions Ltd on 01623 600655