Workflow Automation

The Company
A leading manufacturer of smart cards, security cards, and cell phone data cards. The company owns 75% of the worldwide market for their product line.

The Company Need
This company needed a convenient way to grant information access and permissions to new hires and existing employees who were assigned to new positions. Their existing process involved physically tracking down a series of individuals to obtain different levels of approval. Depending on the subject position and its responsibilities in the organization, that could mean a whole different group of people with each separate hire or job change. Control over this process is particularly important because of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations.

At the very least, the existing process was inefficient and was costing the company valuable man hours as certain employees spent time seeking out other employees for the approvals.

How Workflow Automation Helped
Workflow automation allowed them to create a system to put the entire approval process online and eliminated the need to expend human resources on these time consuming tasks. With the new system, the form is filled out and assigned, in order, to the four people within the company who need to approve it. Once it is approved, the help desk gets the green light to begin setting things up for the employee.

Introducing workflow automation also built accountability into the system. At each step of the way, if someone has not performed his given task in a set amount of time, everyone else involved in the process is notified of the holdup, and who is responsible for it.

Perhaps the most important feature that workflow automation provided the company was in the submission/approval form itself. The form is designed to dynamically work with the company’s back end database. So as certain selections are made in the form, options lower in the form change to accommodate them. And when the form is complete, it works with the back end database to determine who will need to be contacted for approval. This essentially eliminates the paper trail that was necessary with the former process.

The Results
The workflow automation system the company introduced accomplished 3 important things for the client:

- It gave them control over a process where none had previously existed.

- It greatly improved the efficiency of the process, because nobody wants to be identified the person holding things up. Replacing anonymity with accountability has made the entire process run seamlessly.

- It played a vital role in the client’s ability to pass a recent SOX audit, by giving them a credible way to test and prove their IT controls.