Google Map for the 'Pathway' in Business Trip Application

"Business Trip Application" is complicated and cumbersome.

You may be required 'Prior Approval', or may need 'Advance Expense (cash prepayment)', or the company may arrange certain type of tickets ... The proceeding is troublesome than anything. If you try to extend the schedule as personal trip, you will totally not understand what you should submit.

On the other hand, your Boss or Accounting personnel who receive the "Business Trip Application" won't be so happy. It will be hard enough only to check expenses and detailed travel plan. The words of "travel plan" are already nonsense because anyone can change their reservation at anytime, anyplace. Also in Expense Settlement processing, there no longer is a necessity for advance cash because most of the purchase can be paid with 'Company credit card'. If you need a settlement, you'll claim it in Travel Expense Report of afterward.

In the Workflow below, it is focused on 'abolishing Advance cash', and on giving Prior Approval on [Overview of Travel].

What is excellent on this workflow is, destinations of the travel plan (place name) that entered can be referred in Google Maps. Because "travel route" and "travel cost" can be understood with one click, "person who gives approval (the Boss)" or "person who does audit" can understand the business trip summary instantly.

[Business Trip Approval flow]

Dynamic Choices and Static Choices, Example in Host City Selection Flow

There are two types of Decision Making; 'pros and cons on one proposal' and 'choose from several proposals'.

"RINGI", a traditional unique Japanese business practices, is a Workflow that is to make a decision over 'one proposal', to approve or not. (Collecting signatures (stamps) from a terrible number of people. So the paper almost looks red.)

In the other hand, the following Workflow is a example of a Selecting Workflow to choose from 'multiple choices'.
In this example, "Host City candidates" will be enumerated in the upstream operation together with study on benefits and problems of each them. And in the "Host City" is determined in the downstream operation. You can put it to practical use such as a serious business of "selection of the seminar venues" or 'choosing destination of company outing', an easy one.

As a matter of course, the options for the final decision will differ each time. That means, even if you want to show the options in the selection interface at the downstream operation, they will not be the same depending on each matter in question. In such a case, I use a technique that to display data which was entered in each line of "String type multiple line" in the upstream process, as "options of the downstream process". For example, if texts in three lines;

Tokyo
Madrid
Istanbul

are entered in the [Host City Candidates] at upstream operation, 'Tokyo/Madrid/Istanbul' will be listed in the Selectbox (or Radio button) of [Host City] in the process of downstream.

[Olympic Games Host City Selection flow]

Auto-Splitting Using Random Number

Among Business Processes, occasions to use random numbers are only few.
If I'm forced to say, they could be cases of changing Reviewers randomly for internal control reason or, cases of 'Choosing winners' in a giveaway campaign or so on.

The following Workflow sample is a Business Process definition to play 'Word chain game' in the company. I have written about it in a blog post on the Questetra Blog, and it is totally practically useless, but a few readers want to see the 'archive', so I decided to present it as a content on this particular website again. (Of course, you can download the archive for free.)

In this example, the contestant of the Word Chain game is chosen by a random number for answering. It generates a random number just before the Splitting Gateway, and the path of the Gateway is chosen according to the random number. (Auto-Splitting)

[Word Chain Game flow]

Auto Generation of the Answer Draft on Receiving a Contact

Contact from customers should be replied 'quickly' and 'accurately'.

There are many 'Contact Management System', but most of them do not support your original answering flow. The motivation of business flow improvement varies such as Improving quality, speed up, recurrence prevention. But if the system did not reflect your original creative Contact Reply flow, the 'Human Cost' will keep on increasing.
Suppose if there is a business rule that 'reviewing by technical staff is a must for the answer to inquiries about bug', it should be managed by 'Business Process Management system' rather than by 'Contact Management System'. The progress (bottleneck) can be overviewed on the Flow Chart, the instructions by the chief manager will speed up. (Moreover, flow expansion might happen that the receptionist would distribute queries manually according to who is good at.)

In the following Business Process definition, a Workflow from 'email inquiry' or 'inquiry via Web form' to 'reply email sending' is defined. Using this Workflow, you can record 'the Time of checked by senior staff' and 'Advice from other departments', as well as 'Sentences of the primary answer' or 'Sentences of final answer', as Business data in a bunch. It will be referred as knowledge, and it could be the basic data for the further improvement.

[Inquiry flow-Auto-set Reply]