Application of workflow technology in process mana

On the application of workflow technology in process management

I. Introduction

the acceleration of global economic integration and technological renewal has brought enterprises more market space, broader customer base and more effective opportunities to allocate resources. At the same time, the diversification and rapidity of customers' needs and the high standard requirements for quality have also brought more intense competitive pressure. These external changes promote the change of enterprise organization. However, there have been many problems in the traditional division of labor according to functions and the "separate" department setup pattern, which has reduced the operation efficiency of enterprises. This makes the process organization form begin to appear, and the idea of process management, a new management method supporting this organization, is also becoming more and more mature. With the emergence of this idea, a series of process management technologies have gradually appeared and developed, and workflow technology is one of the representatives

Second, process management (BPM)

the 21st century is a period of rapid development of information technology. With the popularization of the application of IT technology and the development of management theory, the traditional internal problems of enterprises organized according to functions have gradually emerged. It can be found that the Department pattern of division of labor according to functions leads to that each department only cares about its own affairs, and employees do not care about the whole business process of the enterprise and the needs of customers. At the same time of improving labor productivity, too detailed professional division of labor separates various complete processes across the organization into several parts, which will inevitably lead employees to ignore the mission of the whole organization and weaken the overall function of the organization. And any division of responsibilities can not be perfect. In the process, there are blank areas that are not under the jurisdiction of any department, or overlapping areas of cross management, which makes it difficult to complete the management of unidirectional tensile test according to the steps specified in the technical specification for mechanical connection of steel bars between the human intelligent interface and the input and output channels, and reduces the management efficiency. Facing these problems, various management practices are looking for more effective management theories to support a new organizational model to meet the requirements of the times. Therefore, a new enterprise management mode - "process management" began to appear

process management was put forward only in the 1990s, so there is no recognized definition and connotation of this emerging management theory, and the meaning of process management will inevitably develop with the development of enterprise management practice. The representative view in China is Mei Shaozu's Description: "procesmanagemeno is a systematic method centered on the standardized construction of end-to-end excellent business processes and aimed at continuously improving the business performance of the organization." Process management generally includes three levels: standardizing process, optimizing process and reengineering process. It is actually a methodology of circular development. That is to say, process management cannot be achieved in one step. It needs continuous circulation and repetition to keep the business process of the enterprise excellent and ensure the core competitiveness of the enterprise. Therefore, the author summarizes the general steps of enterprises in the initial stage of application process management, as shown in Figure 1

III. workflow technology

workflow is an information technology that automates and optimizes the execution of a related group of work. According to the definition of ibmalmadenresearchcenter: workflow is a computerized representation model in business process, which defines various parameters required to complete the whole process. These parameters include the definition of each unit step in the process, the execution sequence between steps, conditions and the establishment of data flow, who is responsible for each step and the application required by each activity. It can be seen that workflow technology can support the modeling and analysis of enterprise business processes. Therefore, its most important and direct use is to manage various processes of enterprises and realize the automation of enterprise processes

using workflow technology, most of Antwerp's caprolactam products are directly digested within the company. The life cycle of the workflow management system established in combination with the actual situation of the enterprise generally includes process definition, process optimization, application system development and system execution. The specific relationship is shown in Figure 2. Compared with the general steps of process management, it is not difficult to find that the use of workflow technology can well support business process modeling, process simulation and implementation, process optimization. At the same time, the workflow management system can also monitor and schedule instances in real time, so as to realize the management and control of enterprise processes. Therefore, we can apply workflow technology to process management to manage organizational affairs and adapt to the development of the organization

IV. workflow technology and process management

processes have always existed in enterprises, but in the traditional enterprise organization, various processes have not been paid enough attention. At that time, process activities were often scattered in different functional departments and forcibly separated, and the activities of the process could not reflect the due connection, which would inevitably bring great difficulties to the process description of the overall process, let alone further optimize the process since June 2013. The essence of process management is process. The enterprise breaks the original hierarchical departments, recombines all value-added activities, and establishes an organization based on process, which makes the direction of key processes within the organization very clear and more suitable for computerized processing and execution

the workflow we mentioned is an integrated technology that includes all stages of process management. The application of workflow in process management is divided into three stages: process modeling, process simulation analysis and process optimization. It is embodied in:

1 Process modeling

establish a process model (workflow model) according to the business process in the enterprise, that is, use the formal definition that can be processed by the computer to describe the business process. Process modeling is an important foundation of process analysis and optimization. The business process existing in the enterprise is the reflection of the production and management process of the enterprise. Applying workflow technology to the process management of the enterprise requires workflow products to have strong process modeling ability, and the current workflow technology is very mature and can do this. In this regard, many research institutions of workflow technology have studied and developed the description method of workflow model. Common methods, such as directed graph, Petri net, formal language grammar representation of object model, etc. Generally, the main idea of establishing workflow model is to decompose the business process of an enterprise into a series of activities with logical relationships, and then describe the attributes of each activity and the relationship between activities, so as to define the workflow model. The first thing to establish a workflow model is to understand the process of enterprise business process. Of course, the collection of such information needs the guidance and support of the idea of process management. This is the guarantee to get the information correctly, so as to make the workflow model based on this more correct and reliable. Only when we finally get a relatively perfect workflow model can we more completely describe the operation process of the enterprise

2. Process simulation analysis

the process management of enterprises is not to simply use various advanced automation technologies and information technologies to realize the automation of enterprise operation process, but to improve the key performance indicators of the business process by optimizing or even transforming the imperfect factors existing in the original process. Therefore, analyzing process, finding problems and solving them are important links in implementing process management. Because the workflow model comprehensively reflects the structure and dynamic behavior of the business process, it is a very effective and reliable method to diagnose the existing process of the enterprise by analyzing the performance of the workflow model

the performance index of the model can be simulated and analyzed through the simulation analysis method of workflow. After the workflow model is simulated, the system will collect simulation data to provide users with quantitative analysis of the performance of the workflow model

the simulated data includes the execution time of activities, the use time of resources, the cost of activities, the utilization rate of resources, and so on. Through the quantitative analysis of these data, we can judge which activities in the process have the highest cost, the longest running time, which activities use more resources but bring less benefits, etc., and then we can analyze which activities are the key activities in the process, which processes can not bring value-added effect and need to be improved, and which processes even need to be reengineered

3. Process optimization

after analyzing the simulation results of the process, it is necessary to modify and optimize the workflow model, so as to achieve the purpose of optimizing the enterprise process. On the one hand, using workflow simulation execution can be used to compare the design schemes of diversified business processes, so as to find the best scheme. By modifying the bottleneck links in the workflow model, analyzing and comparing, we can effectively evaluate different schemes quantitatively and select the best scheme. On the other hand, there are many ways to optimize enterprise processes, such as changing the path of transaction processing, changing the execution time of one or some activities in the process, changing the structure of the organization, modifying the number of resources, and so on. After making such changes, the feasibility of the modified scheme can be easily obtained by simulation. The purpose of optimizing the process can be achieved by modifying the workflow model many times. The optimized workflow model is the basis of improving the actual business process of enterprises

therefore, from the above analysis, we can see that using workflow technology for process management has many advantages:

first, workflow technology has a powerful graphical language function to describe and define workflow. Use graphic language or text to describe the process, so that employees can easily understand and be clear when using the system. It can easily analyze the business process of the enterprise, find out the unreasonable place, and can organize the process independently through the workflow definition tool. Secondly, workflow technology can optimize the original process and improve the efficiency of enterprise operation. One aspect of process management is process optimization. The application of workflow technology can make many steps of the process automatically executed by the system in parallel in the background, greatly reducing the labor of personnel, and merging and deleting some redundant processes, so as to optimize the process and improve efficiency. Finally, workflow can support rapid process development and deployment without coding

process management is produced by enterprises facing the changing market environment dominated by consumers. This environment determines that enterprises' processes must also change constantly. Enterprises can adapt to market changes only if they have the ability to change quickly. Workflow design does not need to write code, so it can upgrade and deploy business processes without affecting other processes. This advantage is also in line with the characteristics that process management is a circular and repeated process

v. summary

due to the challenges of the new market environment, the original competition advantage of the enterprise no longer exists for designers and engineers, requiring enterprises to find new advantages. Therefore, processes, especially excellent business processes, have attracted more and more attention. Excellent core business processes have become the key for enterprises to obtain sustainable competitive advantage. This is the inevitability of the idea of process management. Applying this management idea requires some support for end-to-end business flows