Workflow Sample

Fax, in the first place, is " transmitted data" through telephone line. It is such a waste to print out received data. It will never be worthwhile to reconvert digitized data into analog. Why do I have to walk around the office with paper in my hand? It could be easier to pass out, even through Workflow if the data had left in digital as it was.

The following is a Business Process which receiving faxes on a Cloud-based service, circulating it through Cloud-based Workflow, and back up to Cloud-based storage in PDF format.
It will be backed up to "Google Drive", the Online storage, eventually. Automatically backed up for example, purchase orders from the customer to "Fax Order folder", quotations from suppliers to "Estimates of Purchase Fax" folder. All that Who, When, viewed which fax will be recorded.

[Circurating Online Fax flow]

I'm afraid to say that there are only few companies that have visualized the issuance of their 'Quotes' and 'Invoices'. There are not so many of the personnel in charge who can answer immediately to the question about

How many Quotes have been issued now?
How many Invoices have been issued now?

In most of the companies, personnels of Sales or Accounting create each quote and invoice manually in Excel, print them out, get approved by manager, copy them for backup, enclose them and finally post them... With all their effort they created them with the computer, but eventually they are handled in an analog way. And they are hard to be aggregated.

The 'Invoice Issuance flow' below is so to speak a "Billing system".
The 'Billing Data' that has been entered into Workflow will be approved through Workflow. Using the data, the Invoice PDF is generated. In other words, Invoice PDF will not be created except from this system. You can centralize management of issuance of invoice PDF. When you could develop a Business Process this far, for example you can download business data of 'Issued date', 'Billing company name', 'Billing amount' in CSV format. That means you can create a 'Real-time Billing Ledger' anytime.

By the way, the excellence of this Workflow is to throw backup of 'Invoice file' automatically to a specific folder in "Google Drive", the Online Storage.

[Invoice Issuance - Auto Backup flow]

Before improving the "Business Process", you should learn the tool to do it.

'Of course, that's right...', so this time, I would like to show you a quite simple usage of it.
The Workflow definition below is a job of 'writing an email'. It already is not to be called a 'flow of job'. It has just one processing step (Task). Only one person to handle it. Neither remanding, nor Looping.

[Email Sending flow]

To ask someone a tiny 'job'. It quite happens daily.

Most of the cases, these are handled with the 'Magic Tool' called "Email". That is, Mr.Jack the requester sends an email to Mr.Smith the requestee to ask;

Please issue my Incumbency Certificate.
Please survey the competing product...

But talking about Email as a tool, it could be a 'Magic tool' as well as a 'graveyard of Tasks'...

Here we are going to reconsider;

Operations too "infrequent" to call a 'Business process'
Operations too "short" to call a 'Business process'

to begin with. Then you will become to be able to improve frequent Business processes or long ones.

[General Purpose Request flow]

"Case Studies" or "Customer Story" articles on the Website is important. Especially for IT companies, "Sales" might depend on the quality of these contents.

In fact, companies like Microsoft, IBM, SAP,,,
,,, Oracle, Google, Salesforce,,, so on
almost all the IT vendors with their own products, are listing 'Customer Case Study' on their Website. As a matter of course, Questetra as well. => Customers

The following Workflow is for writing a "Case Study Article". In some cases, the duty would take more than a month to be completed. Visualizing the "progress" clearly, aggregating the "performance" occasionally, and keep on improving for the business process 'To-Be'.

[Case-study Publishing flow]

On 26 May 2013 this week, the Revision of the Public Officers Elections Act will be enforced.
Finally, 'Election campaign' on the internet will be available in Japan. (Too late...)

That means, candidates (political parties) will be updating Facebook everyday during the campaign. Emailing as well. They can fairly appeal 'Please vote for me!' (It seems stupid now that telephoning over and over before.)

What you should be cautious is that even ordinary people are also 'campaigning'.
For example, anyone can originate messages such as 'Hooray for Candidate TANAKA!' or 'Support for candidate SUZUKI!' Or just carelessly be outgoing 'Candidate YAMADA, such guy shouldn't Win.'
However the regulations enforced this time, requires indication of 'information about contact' to whom campaigning and negative campaigning on their blog or Social network Services. It will not be a problem if posting to Facebook or Twitter, but need to be careful when letting the messages outgoing from blog or home page.

(Little bit digressing though,) "Election campaign" with email is still expressly prohibited in Japan. General public is not allowed 'election campaign' with email including Forwarding.

Well...
There seems to be happening new duties in service providing companies for blog and BBS.

A. Requesting deletion of libel and defamation against the author.
B. Notifying violation of duty of indication of contact information.

It seems like to become human tasks of considerable scale to me...
The person who would claim the "Delete of libel", would be the candidate him/herself. First of all, 'personal Identification' must be carry out. And if it is popular sites, there might be that notification of the breach of display duty will be a huge number. For Internet-related companies, maintenance of related business process (workflow development) is urgently needed.

[Public Article Modification Request flow]

Accepting the participation application on "Web Forms", sending an "Invoice" automatically.

Anyone would think such "labor saving using IT", nowadays.
A Web site which is totally automated by connecting a 'Web form' and a 'Payment system' can be created easily, If limited to a particular method of payment to "PayPal" or "Google Wallet".

However in fact, for an event of about 50 or 100 people, you would like to correspond on the phone and by e-mail. Why?
In short, it is because there will be various demands (exceptions) such as "invoicing for corporation name" or "Cash payment of day of the event". If humans response, they could handle anything flexibly. (Though mistakes would occur, of course ...)

The Business process below is a Workflow that humans make the payment confirmation operations.
Taking over the participation application data received in the Google Spreadsheet, humans do the subsequent processing. Specifically speaking, humans confirm the settlement completion by "Invoicing + Bank Transfer" or "PayPal Credit Card" or "Handing Cash on the Day".

Excellent point of it is that an "Invoice PDF" will be sent automatically when the participation applicant designate "invoicing + bank transfer".

[Invoicing flow]