Workflow Management System: FlexFlow

Design, automate, monitor and improve business processes with Lotus Domino/Notes software:

• save time and money on human resources by having only minimal staff without special knowledge and long term training to manage the system
• perform a more thorough analysis and make optimal decisions with the common workflow, statistical, works and human resource system
• identify the bottlenecks and labor consuming points in the workflow
• analyze the workload and discover lack or excess of labor resources

Why Use the Workflow System?

With the workflow management system, you'll be able to:

• reduce document lifecycle duration
• increase work efficiency by managing human resources
• improve customer service quality
• manage your business processes more efficiently
• collaborate and share knowledge more effectively

Reduce document lifecycle duration

The main benefit of the workflow system is that you can significantly reduce the amount of time, which is required to complete a process. By reducing the time the work travels across the organization, by using business rules to "capture" problems, when they appear, and automation of tasks, not requiring human intervention, the lifecycle duration can be substantially reduced.

Increase productivity by managing work effectively

Information about activity, which needs to be performed by the business process member, contains all the documents, data and visas, which removes the main source of ineffectivenes in the office. The workers can organize their work, based on interactive assumptions about activity priorities, such as statuses and, and control the work with the help of Views, sorted by priority or control date, which allows them to determine the most important or current tasks and concentrate on their fulfillment as soon as possible.

Thanks to user role creation and support for work delegation, employee workload can be balanced and optimized, whichgives you an opportunity to increase productivity of the work group as a whole. By following the work steps and providing the statistical data, the Workflow system also helps you to increase the transparency of business processes, so you can distribute the resources in the most optimal way.

Improve your customer service

Shortening the work cycle and improving processes management become more important, when the work is initiated by the client. The faster the invoice will be opened or renewed, or the technical support request will be processed, the more satisfied the client will be.

Also, by providing transparency of actual work status both to service agents, serving the clienr, or to the clients themselves, you can significantly reduce the client anxiety about the work to be processed.

Manage your processes more efficiently

Quality and integrity management is critical for effective company activity, but this problem can't be sold easily, if the business rules live only in the heads of the employees. Thanks for entering the business rules to the computer - such as, which wowrk parts require special processing or approval, or which additional documents need to be attached to the case - the Workflow system can automate quality and provide correspondence of processes to the rules in the entire organization.

Collaborate and distribute knowledge more effectively

Even such unstructured processes win from such workflow functons, such as work tracking and automation of notifications and easy tasks. Moreover, the same way adding business rules to the computer allows you to improve process management, workflow allows you to document the best methods, related to business processes, and share them with all company employees.

Advantages of FlexFlow

You get the following advantages, when using FlexFlow:

• high performance: achieve real business advantages by using 30-450% faster software, than its similar rivals
• low-cost of business processes reorganization: use all the functonality of this workflow system at a much cheaper cost, than other software
• support of complex business models: model, route and process any business process imaginable. Design your business processes easily.
• ease of use: provide only minimal staff training to use the program
• work with electronic objects of any type: text, images, audio, video, etc.
• maximum flexibility: work according to predefined schemas or allow users to make their own decisions


Look inside the workspace

• individual customization of user's workspace: customize everyone's workspace according to his duties
• open architecture: easily integrate the system with other data processing systems, such as accounting, financial analysis and email systems
• easy distribution: use unified document processing to work with users, regardless of their location and used communications. Also:
  • scale horizontally via clusters
  • duplicate information on several physical
  • enhance system reliability
• scalability: scale both vertically by enhancing hardware configurations and horizontally by using clusters
• reliability: employ the power of Lotus software to protect against unauthorized access and to use its fault-tolerance.
• protection and safety: grant access control only to those, who are authorized to do so. Manage permissions easily by using user groups, roles in business processes and move users between the groups effortlessly
• multiplatform: use the system on any hardware or software

How it works

All the benefits of the software are provided by what it can do.

Process, structure and user access management

During the process, the document is passed from one operation to another. Document is created by process initiator and moves by defined route, created for this document process. For each operation on this document some user actions are performed.

The structure of process members has the following organizations:

1. All members are divided by their roles in business-processes. Each member may have several roles. This helps to model relations of members with different duties
2. All members may be divided by groups. Nested groups are supported. So, it is possible to divide members according to corresponding departments in organization

Access rights to documents are defined for groups and roles on each process operation.

Mechanism of automatic transitions

Along with manually initiated transitions, the mechanism of automatic conditional transitions is implemented in the system. In this case, the system monitors meeting of the condition with defined periodicity, and in case the condition is met, moves the document to the next status, without any user action. This may be useful in transitions, which depend on timing conditions. Conditions may be specified as Notes @Formulas and as Lotus Script.

PostAction Mechanism

To invoke a code without any user action, PostAction mechanism is used in the system. The code, entered in PostAction is executed right after the document gets to the next status. Also, check of conditions and PostAction execution is possible not only when the status of the document is changed, but it is possible when document remains in the same status and is just saved.

This may be useful for implementing of functionality, which doesn’t require status change (for example to check document fields while editing in the same status).

Automatic notification

The system supports automatic notifications to process members about various events of the process. For example, this may be either status change, or start of works, related with some user. Also, notification may be used in case of missed deadline or approaching time of transition of document from one status to another.

The whole process of document movement is monitored and logged by the system. The system of exception alarms is embedded.

Statistics collection

In process of operation the system automatically collects the statistics related with documents movements, and users may rationalize workflow.

What a happy customer says

At the end of 2003 we have bought the eQuality FlexFlow software, meant to automate business processes in Lotus Notes, from eQuality Solutions. It didn't take much time to integrate it with our company, and the achieved results have met our expectations. eQuality Solutions professionals have also optimized a vital piece of software for us: a project management system. Thanks to their help we have substantially increased productivity.

ITC Electronics is satisfied with the results of cooperation with eQuality Solutions and appreciates the high level of competence, professionalism, software and service quality of the company.

Alexey Pogudin
IT Department Lead
"ITC Electronics"