Excellence in Practice Volume III: Innovation & Excellence in Workflow Process and Knowledge Management
Excellence in Practice Volume III, Innovation and Excellence in Workflow/Process Management and Document/Knowledge Management, by Layna Fischer, Chair of the Workflow And Reengineering International Association (WARIA), features the winners and finalists of the 1998 Giga Excellence Awards.
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.
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.
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 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 AIIMs 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 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:
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.
Autogere Seguros e Pensoes (Lisbon, Portugal) 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.
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.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) 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.
CFI Mail Order Pharmaceuticals (Harrisburg, PA) 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.
Detroit Edison (Detroit, MI) 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.
ForeningsSparbanken (Stockholm, Sweden) was 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.
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA) 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.
Government of New Brunswick (New Brunswick, Canada) 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.
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.
IBM ICMS New Zealand Ltd. (Hutt City, New Zealand) Their customer care and billing system was an online repository of intellectual capital enabling information capture, re-use, design, update and distribution. They transformed the internal culture from one that saw information only as “documentation” to one that recognized the asset value of knowledge.
Immigration & Naturalization Services (Washington D.C.) 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.
Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, CA) 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.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Taejon, South Korea) 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.
Kraft Foods (Northfield, IL), put in place a Shared Services Center (SSC) which operates as one of the most efficient Accounts Payable Service Providers. The system connects three different systems through a common interface.
Lewisham Borough Council (London, England) 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.
Office of the Secretary of Defense (Washington D.C.) The OSD Legislative Affairs is the primary liaison between Secretary of Defense and Congress. 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.
Phillips Fox (Sydney, NSW, Australia) They were the first law firm to implement knowledge management, and the first with a high volume claims litigation product. When disability meets workers compensation, implementation 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.
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.
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.
University of South Florida, (Tampa, FL) 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.
The Workers’ Compensation Board of British Columbia (Richmond, BC, Canada) implemented an Electronic Claims File system (or E-File), the technology backbone of its organizational change efforts.
Zurcher Kantonalbank, (Zurich, Switzerland) The ZKB initiated a FIT policy for industrializing business management and production, and automating banking processes.
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.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
