A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. All businesses are based on workflows and almost everything can be perceived as a process or a workflow.
Workflows manage the execution of business activities and coordinate the flow of information throughout an enterprise. It is essential to correctly and effectively define the workflows of businesses.
Building business applications around your existing workflows make your life easier and boosts your digitalization efforts.
An important feature of workflows in a low-code environment is that once created, they can be cloned, updated and improved for each department in your organization. Also, because of this flexibility, developers can easily implement non-standard processes, personalized for each business need. One of the most important features of a workflow is keeping the whole team connected. It is well known that business representatives and IT developers don’t always speak the “same language”, but with the help of workflows all teams can be synchronized. When the whole team is working in the same virtual space, Citizen Developers can make updates or share feedback according to need, and notifications will automatically be sent to other team members involved in a certain workflow. So, even in different offices or even locations, your team is connected and processes are more efficient.
Introducing workflows into your business processes means that your teams collaborate at each step, best practices are implemented, feedback is automated, and smaller departments own their part of the process that they can test and improve. And perhaps the best feature is the speed of the whole process. Innovative ideas can be implemented faster than ever before.
The current pandemic also demonstrates how important it is for teams to stay connected, regardless of their geo-location or department. By working with a low-code platform, nobody is alone. The team is connected, able to check each other’s inputs or even edit details in real time. Because of this, companies choosing to work with a low-code platform during the Covid-19 period, have had a more organized and useful way of working, with less negative business impact. Productivity is faster and easily achieved when working with workflows.
Each workflow starts with a blank canvas with a START and an END. Each step you decide to create in your workflow will always have a beginning and an end. In the workflow creator, besides BPMN elements, you will find process specifications, interface, logic, roles, data, and other elements. A team can contain as many roles as a specific department has, according to the size of your company.
For example, in a sales department the roles can be manager, sales manager, senior sales representative, sales representative and financial approver. In a low-code environment, you have the freedom to add specific roles that will have different decision capabilities, and see data in different dashboards.
The BPMN elements you can use to create your workflow are varied: from human activity, approval/rejection, sending email, push notifications, automated activity such as analyzing data, assigning or reading data, execute processes, and waiting for certain criteria to be met, such as client data, decisions, and specific business logic.
Typical workflow types can include: - Multiple Condition Analysis – a simple yes/no or different outcome workflow. - Automated Conditions – without human interactions. - Parallel Processes - Common Requestor Approval Flow. A simple example will be START – Human Activity – Automated Activity – Human Activity – Decision (can go back to the initial requestor) – END.
Maybe the most important feature of workflows in low-code environments is the speed of updating the process. For example, let’s take a simple Cost Approval Process:
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If a company has an ERP system, all business related documents have to be filed there as well. So we have to extend this workflow with an ERP step as easily as possible.
Deploying a simple change like feeding the ERP system , will take the Business Analyst no more than few minutes, but will make the whole process more complete.
This is what workflows are all about. Finding the fastest solution to implement an idea into daily business processes. And you'll have noticed, no IT representative was involved in the changing of the workflow.
Effector is a flexible development tool for supporting the modernization of core and workflow-based applications within back-office environments and other business areas.
Built upon years of experience, Effector has evolved into a highly capable and sophisticated development platform which simplifies application development significantly. Featuring no-code and low-code capabilities, Effector excels in the business application environment, where process workflow optimization can determine the competitive advantage of your organization.
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