Excellence in Practice : Innovation and Excellence in Workflow and Imaging Vol II

Excellence in Practice; Innovation and Excellence in Imaging and Workflow Volume II, by Layna Fischer, Chair of the Workflow And Reengineering International Association (WARIA), features the winners and finalists of the 1997 Giga Excellence Awards.

The Introduction is by Mordechai Beizer, Chair, AIIM Accreditation Workflow Subcommittee, and also Vice President, Workflow Components for Eastman Software. His experience in working with winning organizations is reflected by the large number of Award winners that have successfully used Eastman Software products.

Connie Moore, leading industry analyst and Vice President with Giga Information Group, and Excellence Awards judge, takes a thoughtful look at knowledge management, and workflow's role in building process knowledge within organizations. As the knowledge era unfolds, companies will increasingly focus on empowering knowledge workers rather than automating clerical processes that are based on outdated division of labor concepts. Instead, workflow will become a repository for Process Knowledge, allowing companies to quickly adapt and redesign processes as the business environment changes.

In Beyond Groupware and Workflow, Dr. Marvin Manheim presents his premise of Cognitive Informatics: the role of IT is to enhance people's ways of working. Building on this premise, an information architecture of an enterprise can be developed. His chapter outlines key elements of this architecture and shows how these directions of software development can be integrated into a unified architecture that meets the needs of the organization and the needs of individuals and workgroups.

Business Event Methodology is a hands-on tutorial examining the central concept of Organizational Events and how to partition Business Events. Brian Dickinson, author of Risk Free Business Reengineering contributes an excerpt from his new book Creating Customer Focused Organizations.

The Case Studies:

AMP (Sydney, Australia) is Australia's leading provider of retirement savings products and services with more than 2.5 million fund members.
Bank of America's Credit Operations (Phoenix, AZ) implemented a high-speed credit application imaging system incorporating sophisticated handwriting recognition and innovative neural robots into imaging and workflow processing to handle over 14,000 applications daily.
Baylor Health Care Systems (Dallas, TX) uses an Intranet workflow solution to coordinate contract negotiations, by which hospital directors discuss, review and approve pharmaceutical contracts.
Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) with a 30,000 student body, now processes more than four million documents annually using a workflow system.
Bristol & West plc, (Bristol, England), reengineered its Mortgage Application Processing system, achieving not only a reduction of 25% in the time required to key applicants' data onto the mortgage system.
Defense Contract Management District West (DCMDW) (El Segundo, CA) is advancing toward a paperless environment with the implementation of the Totally Imaged Federal File (TIFF) project.
Federal Central Register (Berlin, Germany) The Federal Central Register (FCR) in Berlin, a division of the German Civil Supreme Court, with a staff of 470 people, is responsible for the administration of an enormous database with records of all convictions of German citizens from German and foreign courts.
Hypo-Bank (Unterfoehring, Germany) Hypo-Bank's EDP environment reflects the high complexity which results from a combination of central mainframes communicating with more than 600 decentralized LANs with more than 10,000 PCs. Hypo-Bank's management has acknowledged the use of document and workflow management as an important success factor in relation to competitiveness.
Janssen Research Foundation (Titusville, NJ) uses imaging and workflow to manage case report forms (CRFs) to reduce drug development time.
Sanlam (Bellville, South Africa). Sanlam Electronic Business is focused on transforming the company and its business units. As part of a custom workflow system, implementation of a Telemarketing System formed part of this transformation.
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) (San Diego, CA), a worldwide integrator with 22,000 employee-owners, reengineered its legacy systems and streamlined their business processes.
Swiss Bank Corporation (Zurich, Switzerland). SWB's implemented a fully integrated electronic securities trading system in the Swiss financial service market. The workflow system resulted in annual savings of 3-5 Million dollars in the area of securities custody and settlement processing.
Tennessee Valley Authority (Decatur, AL) reengineered its Procedures Control and Maintenance Work Processes handling paper-intensive 14,000 work orders and 5,000 procedure changes annually.
The University of Alberta's (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) largest academic interlibrary loan lending system uses workflow software to redesign its interlibrary loan (ILL) process and develop an innovative Internet document delivery services.
The University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL.) is using innovative workflow applications in student applications (via Internet) student records, finance, accounting and personnel, making the campus one of the most technologically advanced in the country.
VELO Motor Accident Management Ltd. (Marlow, England) is the largest fleet accident management company in Europe, handling more than 120,000 fleet vehicles for over 400 top UK companies.
Westinghouse Electric Company's Energy Systems Business Unit (Monroeville, PA) has implemented an Information Delivery System to search for scanned nuclear power plant design documents and to archive completed work in accordance with Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements.

The case studies of each winning corporation featured in Excellence in Practice Vol. II go into considerable detail regarding the issues of implementation. Readers can find out more about:

Their system application, what the system is used for, who are the users and what the job entails
What were their key motivations
Their system configuration (number, and type of software, servers, scanners, printers, storage devices, etc., including the identities of the vendors and integrators involved)
The number of users currently on the system and number of users planned.
How the company has been impacted by their new system; cost savings, ROI and increased productivity improvements, competitive advantage gained, and how they managed to move the goal posts for their industry.
Their implementation process and methodology, the project team, and the change management and business process reengineering issues they addressed.
How these companies managed both their overall technological and business innovations.