In the corporate world it’s the information storage equivalent of a dirty secret, and most organisations have it hidden away somewhere.

It’s that musty room you keep well out of site of office visitors – the cluttered repository of a generation of old forms and files, an embarrassing shambles that’s best ignored.

As e-form and workflow technologies matures, there is less excuse not to automate the processes around data capture and processing within an organisation. Businesses that stick with pen and paper-based form-filling systems are missing out on cost-savings, productivity gains and competitive advantages their rivals are likely to be embracing.

July 2007

By Simon Hendery

The presentation layer - to align with marketing and legal requirements, e-forms should be “pixel perfect” duplications of the paper forms they replace.

Peter Neal, workplace and portal sales leader at IBM, says organisations the world over are grappling with the question of how they take the information they have locked away in countless reams of paper and use it to the business’s advantage.

Neal also rattles through a list of costs associated with paper document storage: having a filing cabinet occupying expensive CBD office space, the costs of printing forms and other documents, disposal charges when you finally ditch the paper. On the other hand, robust electronic form processing can be a huge business differentiator and a powerful marketing tool.

An example, says Neal, would be an insurance company which promotes its ability to do quick claim processing. To be effective the company would need a process management solution that avoided claims sitting too long on any one staff member’s desk.

Delays could be avoided by designing processes to move an e-form on to another staff member if it sits idle for too long with the person initially designated to approve it.

“If you can automate that process with some workflow wrapped around it, then instead of an insurance claim taking a couple of weeks, you can literally approve it in hours,” says Neal.

Data entry – form-fillers are taken through a guided interview or wizard-driven process.

Rod Hall, managing director of Tranzsoft Group, says efficiency and accuracy gains can also be considerable when e-form processes are incorporated into a sales environment.

A salesperson securing a sale during a customer meeting can fill in an e-form listing all the components of the deal, which is automatically fed into their company’s ERP and CRM systems.

“If it [the sales agreement] requires an account approval the automated workflow then goes on to the next step which might be an approval process. So there is the electronic requisition already sitting there populated from the original web form,” says Hall.

“This sort of dynamic approach where you’re using electronic data in a more meaningful way, I think, is going to become a major step forward,” he says.

The business logic layer - form completion is linked to the organisation’s business processes.

“Once people understand it, and how to use it, we’re finding there’s a ready appetite for it.” Steve Lewthwaite, professional services consultant at Canon, says his own company is in the process of rolling out Cardiff LiquidOffice, a BPM/workflow engine Canon resells, across the company’s sales fulfilment process.

The solution means Canon sales staff no longer have to generate complex contractual paperwork. Instead, through the company’s CRM system the required information is populated into a web form that dynamically adjusts depending on the content required on a specific contract. Details are sent on to the finance department and the engineers who will build the ordered equipment. The system will also calculate sales commission.

“All the way through this the salesperson has the ability to see where the customer’s contract is and where their machines are in the process,” says Lewthwaite.

“You can break it down to a number of benefits. It comes down to removing inefficient processes from the business and increasing your productivity because you can automate a lot of forms,” he says.

“There are a lot of forms which people have in their organisations – both internally and externally – which can be moved quite easily to an electronic world and be passed around a business quite quickly. From that you start cutting costs associated with creation and management of the documents because you’re not actually creating them any more.”

XML schemas – industry standards are helping to drive e-form uptake.

Robin van der Breggen, of process management solution provider Mavim, says the growing uptake of e-form and BPM solutions goes hand-in-hand with increased corporate awareness of the power and benefits of sharing information across an organisation.

“What we’re seeing is that while Mavim may be bought for a specific issue like compliance or risk management – to create transparency around those procedures – over time it will be used for recording more information, storing knowledge within an organisation which can be made transparent across the rest of the business,” van der Breggen says.

“This type of software is very common in Europe but in New Zealand it’s a new way of thinking. Here there is beginning to be a lot more development around questions such as: ‘Well, we have all this information, how can we structure it? How can we make it accessible to the rest of the organisation?’”

File attachments – adding related files to e-forms means a complete customer record can be captured electronically.

IBM’s Neal says the migration to e-forms should start with the creation of a “pixel perfect” duplication of the traditional paper form.

“When someone has an insurance claim form or a brokerage application form, typically that has gone through a lot of marketing and design. From a legal aspect you need to have certain things contained within that form and therefore when you’re looking at making that into an electronic form you want to capture a pixel perfect duplication and then put the electronic bits underneath that.”

The electronic bits start with the way data is entered into the e-form, through a guided interview or wizard driven process which allows for immediate efficiencies because irrelevant sections, for example, in part of a 60-page insurance application form, can be skipped over.

“So if you put a tick in the box that you’re a single man you won’t get all the questions about your spouse and kids and that type of thing. There’s an ability to reduce those 60 pages down to just a couple around that wizard driven process so it’s much more efficient in terms of capturing the information that’s key to your process.”

Underneath this sits the e-form’s “logic” – the link into an organisation’s business processes: details, for example, of who is authorised to approve a particular type of the application, and what should happen if that authorisation is not given within a specified timeframe.

Neal says e-form uptake is being assisted by the development of a number of XML industry form schemas.

“The reason some people have been putting in these types of systems is to comply with those industry standards – from an open standards point of view it is becoming increasingly important so that various systems can pull and read that data. Insurance companies have been leading that.”

Another draw-card for organisations is the ability to wrap forms, files and images into an electronic envelope which is then “sealed” with a digital signature. The information the envelope contains then becomes tamper-proof.

Digital signatures – make a sealed e-form tamper proof.

John Axe, CEO of ECN Group says wherever there is a business process where automation can provide efficiency gains and cost effectiveness, most of the group’s customers are looking at solutions to achieve those in some way or another.

“The reality is with the internet and ecommerce now, organisations need to be very agile and flexible and these tool sets provide that, as long as you apply them in the right way,” says Axe. “The hardest thing in all this is not the technology, it’s the organisation’s ability to change.”

John Blackham, CEO of XSOL, says while the notion of workflow has been around since the late 1980s, it has morphed into the more powerful concept of process flow, incorporating integration with databases, and systems such as ERP and CRM.

“Typically documents are just part of a system, and while it’s better that an electronic form pop up on your computer than a piece of paper lands on the desk, it still isn’t nearly as useful as if it [the e-form] is already integrated with the other data in the system,” Blackham says.

“Workflow used to be the preserve of companies that handled a lot of paper – finance companies, insurance companies, banks, et cetera. What’s happened now that we’ve moved to process flow is that it has democratised workflow.

What you find now is that rather than pushing forms around, process flow/workflow is now being used to actually run and control business activity.”

Blackham says business’s increasing uptake of mobile devices such as PDAs, combined with the growing mobility of workers, will be a challenge for organisations that don’t soon embrace process flow methodologies.

“They [mobile devices] are not quite there yet but in a year or two they’re going to start replacing laptops and desktops and at that point your whole business starts to become fluid and workflow/process flow [orientated],” he says.

“So for companies now it’s really important to start getting to grips with their workflow or process flow now, because in the not-to-distant future, just to be competitive they’re going to have to be mobile and fluid.”

For more information, vendors, resources and case studies visit the BPM, Document Management, Portals Solutions Research Pavilion

PlaceMakers on the right BPM path with Promapp

Business processes are top-of-mind for PlaceMakers as the building material supply company rolls out a new ERP solution.

PlaceMakers has implemented Promapp, a web-based application that makes it easy to create, navigate and change business processes.

“Promapp is simple to use, is web-based and most importantly, gives us a single unified version of the truth that is accessible to all project members,” says David Thorpe, training manager for PlaceMakers’ Project Cornerstone.

“I’ve been involved with the implementation of three major system roll-outs over the years and Promapp is helping make this project the easiest one yet,” he says.

“We open every session with a Promapp chart that gives us a real-time end-to-end process view. We start with the big picture and drill down into the immediate tasks at hand.”

Thorpe says having a map that illustrates roles and responsibilities, and that can be easily modified and updated, has been a huge benefit for the company.

“Keeping processes simple and easy to use is the top priority for most of our clients,” says Promapp founder Ivan Seselj.

“We’ve got a diverse range of companies using Promapp – from small retail franchises right up to TrustPower and Telecom. Regardless of industry or the size of the operation, a clear understanding of key processes is important.”

For more information: www.promapp.com