A few weeks ago, myself and one of my colleagues travelled to Johannesburg to catch up with the Emerging Technologies team at SYSPRO. Our primary goal was to get up-to-speed with the latest developments in SYSPRO Workflow in SYSPRO 7 and gain an appreciation of how SYSPRO’s implementations of Workflow in South Africa are significantly impacting their manufacturing and distribution businesses for the better.
I was amazed by the way I saw businesses leveraging it to significantly reduce costs whilst at the same time putting tighter controls around their unwieldy business processes.
Of the Workflow solutions we saw, every single business had benefited from:
- Significant reduction in Labour Costs
- Improvements in Business Process Management
- Flexible monitoring of business process timings
- Tight control around Compliance
- Ability to impact SYSPRO processes outside of SYSPRO
Dispelling the myths: When Workflow was initially released various concerns were raised – that you might need to be a developer, you might need to understand code, or need a team around to support it, and that you possibly had no method of interacting with it using forms or outside of SYSPRO.
How wrong those myths have proved to be. At the end of our time with the team – we (non-developers) had set up Workflow Services, created a multi-point Workflow that could be called from inside or outside SYSPRO with a full understanding of the best practices that should be employed when creating a solution – and it was significantly easier than we ever thought it would be! All testament to the efforts that have gone into the design of the Workflow engine and the teams’ commitment to demystifying functionality to make it transparent to the user, and as user friendly as possible.
For those who aren’t aware of SYSPRO Workflow:
SYSPRO Workflow enables you to streamline end-to-end business process activities within SYSPRO, as well as to create efficient interactions between SYSPRO and external touchpoints.
Workflow can mean different things to different people, so to avoid confusion, here’s a simple definition: Workflow is the collaboration between people, documents, software and systems. Each workflow has a beginning and an end, and contains a process flow (set of tasks) which produces a result. Workflow systems can allow control over authority levels, security, policies, and procedures.
I am sure that every business could benefit in one way or another by implementing a Workflow system. So make sure your ERP system includes an efficient Workflow, if you haven’t already!
