Improving Workflow Problems
Many of New Signature’s clients have invested large amounts of money in both hardware and software to solve specific problems. Problems such as “How can we communicate more effectively?”, “How can we measure and analyze how we are utilizing resources?”, or even “How can we consistently prepare highly designed documents for clients or constituents?” aren’t relatively new. They’ve been around as long as capitalism.
As technology has advanced, the problems have become more complex, but the available solutions have grown much more powerful–especially in the last five years. Without a large amount of expertise, most users are accustomed to being able to easily perform activities today that would have been unheard of a decade ago. For example, office workers can now share calendar information, collaborate on shared documents, perform data analysis in spreadsheets, and put together compelling presentations. (Well, maybe not the latter, but there’s always hope!)
Because this change has been relatively recent, many people are not aware of the some of the other areas in which progress has been made, specifically intra-office procedures and business workflow. These problems have also existed since the dawn of business, but are often stickier to resolve: “I need someone to sign off on this or it can’t move foward.”, “Every time we setup a new person we forget something critical…and the procedure changes daily.”, or “Why is the conference room always full when I’ve booked it weeks ago in outlook?” The reason paper procedures have worked so well in the past is that it’s relatively easy to see someone’s signature and know they’ve approved something. Performing the same task in the digital world isn’t as intuitive.
Procedures used to be fairly static, and cumbersome, with additional layers adding hours, days, or weeks to certain processes. Today, though, a procedure can go from the back of a manager’s mind, to a website, into production, in less than an hour. Often, the constituent components (forms, people) are already prepared, so only the linking technology is needed.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is an example of a technology New Signature uses at clients sites to assist firms with this need. WSS is a free technology that can run on a Windows 2003 Server, or Windows 2008 Server. Clients who want to create detailed forms and upload them into a website can also do so with InfoPath and Office Forms Server.
Sometimes the workflow process is more simple: allowing resources to reserve rooms or equipment. New Signature has a great deal of experience utilizing Microsoft Exchange 2007 to enable firms to quickly assign users as “managers” of rooms and resources, enabling scheduling conflicts to be a thing of the past.
With multiple technologies allowing workflow modification, the real questions companies need to ask themselves are dual:
1. How can we improve our current business workflow?
2. What is the return on investment (ROI) if we improve our current business workflow?
New Signature stands ready to assist our clients in answering these questions, and then employing the latest tactics, standards and technologies to make improvements that result in a long-term positive ROI and produce a strategic competitive advantage.