Large organisations have a host of systems that do different things but statistics show that a good 60% of processes are still manual, says Roger Trummer, sales director at 3fifteen.

“Most organisations shuffle huge amounts of paper around and the only thing that holds processes like customer requests and claims together is scraps of paper, that travel from person to person,” he says.
If one piece of paper gets lost or gets stuck on someone’s desk it causes a break in the chain of communication, management loses control, the process breaks down, and service levels suffer.

Communication coming in from multiple customer interaction points, including the call centre, e-mail and faxes, also need to be controlled and managed, says Trummer.He says that, even with existing systems, many are standalone applications that might have workflow capabilities, but typically only address the specific data within them.

"The answer is to use technology to manage, monitor and automate all business processes from all channels between all systems and lines of business in the company,” says Trummer.A company should analyse its existing processes and paper trails and document information flow. It should then look at implementing an enterprise workflow application that will automate all the processes.This type of system will enable a company to capture information once and allow it to travel through all the processes until the end, monitor and track the progress, identify bottlenecks and take corrective action. The margin for error is then reduced and management has an auditable record of transactions.