An organization’s success is closely related to the efficiency of its everyday business processes. Yet too many organizations continue to rely on outdated, manual processes that hamper productivity and interfere with effective decision making. In today’s increasingly-complex global environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to streamline operations and to help staff focus more of their time on revenue-generating activities.
Laserfiche Workflow is a flexible, easy-to-use framework for automating and optimizing business processes organization-wide. A key component of the Laserfiche platform, Laserfiche Workflow enables you to automatically route documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages and other types of content among staff members.
Because staff have instant access to the information they need, they work more effectively, complete projects more quickly and make better-informed decisions. These productivity gains rapidly translate into lower overhead costs, more responsive customer service and a stronger competitive edge.
Highlights:
- Promote the seamless movement of information.
- Simplify complex tasks.
- Enable better decision making.
- Realize rapid Return On Investment (ROI).
Integrate Your Content with Your Business Processes
Building a workflow is as easy as selecting and configuring workflow activities: pre-built, configurable processes designed to accomplish a specific task. Laserfiche Workflow contains over 30 activities, including Route Entry to User, Assign Tags, Assign Template, and E-mail. Laserfiche Workflow also enables users to extend its functionality, allowing them to build workflows that interact with third-party software or databases or perform custom actions. Users can insert custom-built VB.NET and C# scripts into one of Laserfiche Workflow’s scripting activities, or they can design their own activities.
- Using an intuitive interface, you model your organization’s current processes and transform them into digital workflows. Each workflow can involve as many steps as you need, and you can trigger a workflow at any stage in a document’s life cycle.
- You can execute any number of actions on an item as part of the workflow, from changing its security access to automatically assigning metadata to it. This automation helps you simplify complex processes and reduces the amount of time employees spend managing information—leaving them with more time to act on it.
- To improve task management, you can configure Laserfiche Workflow to automatically e-mail users when an item requires their attention. Laserfiche Workflow can also notify supervisors of user action or inaction, as well as reroute items in the event of user inactivity.
- To promote greater transparency in your organization’s business processes, Laserfiche Workflow includes detailed reporting functionality so that you can quickly determine which workflows are running and where a particular item is located in a workflow.
- Ultimately, the value of a business automation solution lies in its ability to optimize processes involving multiple systems and departments. Laserfiche Workflow is built on the Windows Workflow Foundation engine provided with the .NET 3.5 Framework, which opens a number of possibilities for integration with your other line-of-business applications.
Denied
Approved
Simple Workflow:
Requesting Vacation Time
- 1. Employee submits a request using the Laserfiche Client.
- 2. Manager is notified for initial review via an automatic e-mail notification.
- 3. Human Resources gets an automatic e-mail notification. The request is given final approval if the employee has vacation time available.
- 4. Employee is automatically notified if the request was approved or denied.
Simplify Complex Processes
Laserfiche Workflow enables you to translate even the most complex processes into a series of precise steps, each involving the users and activities you specify. Because business processes can vary significantly among industries, we’ve also designed Laserfiche Workflow to be as flexible as possible. For example, nearly any event in Laserfiche can trigger a workflow, and you can configure the system to perform a number of activities on a document as part of the workflow process, from moving it to a new location to changing its security access to assigning new metadata to it.
Realize Rapid ROI
Many work processes involve multiple line-of-business applications. Because Laserfiche Workflow is built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, you can create a workflow that involves both Laserfiche and your organization’s other software systems. For example, you might script a step in a workflow that automatically brings e-mail messages into Laserfiche from the Microsoft Exchange Server and then archives these messages in a certain folder, routes them to a particular user or takes another action.
No matter how complex your business processes may be, you can manage them from a single location—the Workflow Administration Console. Because this console is a Microsoft Management Console application, you can snap it into the same enterprise console you use to manage all your organization’s Windows-based applications. In this way, Laserfiche Workflow not only helps you automate business processes, but also makes them more transparent, providing you with a single location from which to monitor and refine your organization’s operations.
Design Workflow Definitions with Ease
The Workflow Designer is an easy-to-use, graphical interface where you build a workflow and define the conditions that must be met in order for a document to move from one step to the next. The Designer’s streamlined layout and intelligent design help you work quickly, while its intuitive “top-down” structure makes it easy to identify each step in the workflow. To minimize time spent troubleshooting build-related issues, the Designer automatically alerts you when a workflow is not configured correctly.
Once you’re satisfied with a workflow, you can activate it with the click of a button. You can also save a workflow as an XML-based file that you can load into other Laserfiche Workflow 8 installations.
- Simple, intuitive and customizable interface lets you drag and drop activities onto a workflow and configure how they should perform.
- Trigger workflows when specified events take place in your Laserfiche repository.
- Define exactly which events should trigger a workflow using flexible conditions.
- Limit starting rules to specific events, users, repositories, folders, etc.
- Route documents based on conditions you define or different actions to be taken before or after a deadline.
- Perform two or more activities in parallel, based on specified conditions.
- Configure a workflow to wait to proceed before a specified condition becomes true.
- Create custom tokens using regular expressions.
- Create and run custom Laserfiche Workflow activities with VB.NET or C# scripts.
Minimize IT Support
Laserfiche Workflow is not only easy to use, it’s also easy to deploy and maintain. This flexible architecture helps you design a system that both fits your existing IT infrastructure and helps you optimize system performance.
Also, a separate Windows service, known as the Workflow Subscriber, monitors the Laserfiche repository and notifies the Workflow Server when specified events occur. To make the best use of your current hardware, you have the option of installing the Workflow Server and Workflow Subscriber on either the same or different machines.
- Import and export workflows from one location to another, including exporting as Windows Workflow Foundation definition to share workflows with other applications.
- View detailed information about the performance of workflows, such as current status, errors or warnings, names of documents they interacted with and when completed.
- Assign users custom properties for Laserfiche Workflow routing and decision-making, such as working folders in the Laserfiche repository, e-mail addresses and supervisors.
- Administrators can specify what actions users can perform in the Workflow Designer, such as permission to view a published workflow, but not to edit or delete it.
“Post-implementation surveys show that, with Laserfiche, Gaston County is saving over 28,500 man-hours—the equivalent of 14 full-time employees—a year.”
Brandon Jackson / CIO / Gaston County, North Carolina
Workflow in Action
Gaston County, NC, is the second largest county, by population, in the Charlotte Metropolitan Area.
Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that is part of the Laserfiche ECM suite, facilitates case management within the social services department.
Functionality
Designing and Implementing Workflows |
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Workflow Operations |
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User and Group Properties and Security |
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Installation and Support
Components |
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Environment
Operating Systems |
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DBMS |
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Required Windows Components |
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Protocols |
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