Management of document workflows
Within every company, documents follow specific paths that include various steps and the involvement of different people before reaching the end of their life cycle.
By using a document workflow system, you can coordinate and automate all the operations necessary for the processing, transmission and archiving of documents: you can specify what activities are required and what users are involved, thereby guaranteeing a full and constant control over the process.
This is the reason why the Document Intelligence software Globe includes a powerful, completely customizable Workflow tool: Globe allows you to efficiently manage all business document processes by guiding each user in the timely and correct execution of the activities, even from mobile.
Main features of Globe’s workflow engine:
- Management of processes through both subsequential and parallel activities
- Interaction between users thanks to the workflow tool, which allows them to be involved in the workflows from every common channel: email, tablet, smartphone, web, notifications, etc.
- Configuration of proxies and automatic reminders on pending activities.
- Managers can assign or delegate activities to their collaborators.
- Generation of processes that require the external interaction of the company’s business partners.
- Graphical representation of workflows for an easier configuration and monitoring of the progress status of processes.
Graphical representation of workflows
Globe’s workflow engine includes a graphical representation of workflows, which allows to display in an easy and immediate way the configuration and the progress status of the workflows.
The graphical representation of workflows facilitates their management through the configuration console which provides configurable charts even for the most complex workflows.
Furthermore, this function produces three distinct graphical representations that provide different point of views on the workflow process:
- Evidence of activities that have been carried out or skipped, that have expired or that are currently being carried out;
- Overview of sequences of planned activities and representation of the time spent carrying out each workflow step. This diagram is useful to identify choke points or the activities that require the highest amount of time;
- Overview of the workflow, including tasks that have already been carried out and tasks that are to be carried out in following steps.
Practical examples
The workflow tool is crucial to the management of document processes and it allows to significantly simplify the activities and the interaction with documents.
Approval of documents
The workflow tool makes it possible to involve people in charge of managing certain documents in specific phases, by asking for approval or rejection of the document itself.
This tool can be applied during the invoicing process: once the administration generates the sale invoices, an automatic workflow gets triggered and submits the invoices to the designated person. The person in charge, in turns, checks that the invoices are correct, and ultimately decides whether to approve or reject them. In case of approval, the invoice is submitted to the client, while on the contrary, the invoices are sent back to the administrative department with indications as to how to change them. At this point, the workflow starts all over again.
The same workflow can be applied also to the approval of payments of purchase invoices received by suppliers.
Workflows for contracts
The configuration of specific workflows is very useful for optimizing the management of contracts: the generation of a new contract may require the interaction of different departments and people, both internal and external, each of whom defines specific parts of the contract and is in charge of the approval or proposal of amendment of its content.
This workflow tool lets managers define who is to intervene, when and what actions are to be carried out on each document. Moreover, the workflow steps proceed automatically each time a user completes his/her tasks.
Once the content of the contract has been defined and approved, the following step of the workflow allows to send the contract to the client, who can propose amendments or send back the signed contract for the final approval.
Finally, the contract can be archived, and upon expiration, a new workflow will be activated.
Expiration/Validity of documents
Globe allows to set an expiration date for documents (for example, for certificates that have a specific time validity, temporary contracts, certificates for employees’ medical examinations, privacy documents, etc.) and to automatically manage the events to be triggered upon reaching of said date. For example, it is possible to trigger a workflow that sends an email containing a reminder to the person in charge of a specific document, thereby reminding them that the expiration date is approaching, and therefore it is necessary to carry out specific actions (e.g. booking a new medical examination for certain employees, requesting a new certificate, renewing or deleting a certain document, etc.)
This function is of fundamental importance for compliance to the GDPR, which requires companies to set specific policies for the duration of processing and retention of personal data: according to the GDPR, after the set period of time, the collected data must be deleted.
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