Solutions Blog

http://www.uthscsa.edu/facilities/index.html

Mission
The Department of Facilities Management of the University of Texas Health Science Center At San Antonio provides services (maintenance, repair, etc)  to support more than 2.8 million gross square feet of space in buildings with a staff of 315.

Testimonial
"We are very pleased with our decision to purchase WorkflowGen.  We knew there must be a better way to process the thousands of paper work requests that we receive each year.  We initially looked at having someone write a customized program which turned out to be well over our budget.  We then looked at some of the larger workflow software companies and found that their software was expensive and required substantial programming to implement.  Once we “discovered” WorkflowGen, we knew that we were looking at something special.  Being able to design work flow processes using PDF forms, without formal programming, was extremely important to us.   Designing processes using WorkflowGen is relatively simple for an “end user” to do with out formal programming.   We plan to extend WorkflowGen processes to other areas since it is so easy to design and implement them quickly and economically.  We are very satisfied with the product."
Gary L. Tate
UTHSCSA Facilities Management
Assistant Director for Business Services

Business Challenge
The Department of Facilities Management was looking for a solution to better serve 3,000 internal clients who are submitting 6,000 work order requests per year. The goal was to reduce the volume of paper work while optimizing the response time.  
  

WorkflowGen Solution
Functional Solution
The Department of Facilities Management designed a workflow with WorkflowGen to enable any of the 3,000 authorized clients from anywhere on the campus to submit a work request. Depending on the requester and the nature of the work the requests are automatically routed to the appropriate supervisor (signature authorities) for approval and then routed to the Department of Facilities Management. All the participants in this process can track the status of their request in real time (requesters, approvers, facilities management operators) via the workflow portal. Event-based email notifications enable the requestors to be notified of the request's progress along the workflow process. The users can attach external files to the forms. Thanks to single sign-on, no separate username and password is necessary.

Technical Solution
WorkflowGen works on an IIS web server with SQL server as a back-end database. The authentication of the participants is done automatically thanks to an LDAP connector. An integration has been developed with PeopleSoft in order to dynamically retrieve the list of approvers depending on the requester and the nature of the work. The participants use their web browser to access WorkflowGen and populate PDF forms to submit their requests.

Benefits
Immediate productivity gains
The response time has been optimized from 2 days to 15 minutes.
The workload for the operators in the Department of Facilities Management has been reduced dramatically and their ability to monitor and retrieve process data has been maximized.
The clients enjoyed both the productivity gains and the possibility to monitor their requests in real time.

Fast deployment
The Department of Facilities Management has designed the work order process with WorkflowGen in 1 month.
A pilot was first organized for a few selected participants before the solution was rolled out campus wide to 3,000 people by sending a simple email. 

Ease of use
The Department of Facilities Management was able to design the workflow without programming except for the integration with PeopleSoft and LDAP.
No training was required for the end users who where able to access a user guide if needed directly on the Department of Facilities Management web site. 

http://www.brd.ro/brd-finance-ifn-s-a/

Mission
BRD Finance is the consumer credit unit of BRD group, a Romanian bank owned by Societe Generale. BRD Finance wants to be the most important consumer credit provider in Romania and operate with more than 300 employees and representatives in all national territory.

Testimonial
"WorkflowGen offered us a way to a better finance request tracking and reporting providing us necessary tools to understand and see how is our business going on at any moment in the past or today.
Due to huge volume of processing after 4 months from production launch we needed a solution to speed-up the system. Advantys and NESS Romania offered us a solution based on a secondary WorkflowGen site for archiving purposes that was freeing-up our main database, thus the production site was able to concentrate on the current business we have."
Crenguta Profir, Operations Manager .

Business Challenge
Approving credit request was a manual process that involved a lot of paper handling and storage. Reviewing dossiers or making reports was very slow with the impossibility to grasp an accurate present view of business.
A solution to overcome this situation was needed. Also budget limitation was imposed.
 
WorkflowGen Solution
Functional Solution
The implementation of WorkflowGen enabled the Backoffice team to define and launch first process in a couple of weeks. After the first process was in production and the management team was able to run sophisticated reports, another three processes were created then modeled within WorkflowGen.

Technical Solution
The SQL Server version of WorkflowGen Advanced was installed. ASP.NET forms were implemented. Archiving site was installed later on, using the same forms applications as the production site.

Associated documents, in no need to be modified, were uploaded into IIS virtual directory and they are available for later review either from the WorkflowGen production site or the archiving site.

A separate data warehouse database collecting the data from each workflow form was created for fast reporting. Also a bulk notification solution was implemented to model email notifications at predefined intervals, independent of the status of the processes.
 
Benefits
Immediate productivity gains
The implementation of the processes with WorkflowGen enabled the reduction of paper flows, and low added value activities.  Above all, it  dramatically reduced the average processing time per request. Reports that were difficult or impossible to be created before are now available in matter of minutes enabling better decision making process.  Currently the production site processes between 1000 and 3000 new requests daily, each staging through multiple actions that can be completed in one ore more days, based on particulars of the request.

Ease of use
The end users access WorkflowGen via their Web browser and launch their requests without any need for training due to friendly end-user interface. The unlimited user license of WorkflowGen Advanced allows BRD to expand its operations base worry free. In six months the number of users increased more than 100%.

Archival
The archiving site enables the organization to create a comprehensive archive with fast access to all closed requests and associated documents. The use of separate WorkflowGen archiving site also leaves the production database free of historical data enabling fast execution of processes anytime in the future.