Here are some sample applications for workflow tools:
One of your colleagues has a draft document ready for distribution. It has to go out to a five-person project team for final approval. If and when the draft is approved, it can then be submitted to upper management for review and comment. If certain key decision-makers approve the document, it then goes to the client.
Your project team is defining strategy for an upcoming client engagement. Several different plans have been proposed informally. You decide to document these ideas, and circulate them to the team for input on which strategy is most promising.
In all three cases above, document transmittal could be done via email alone. So why use the Workflow module? What are the benefits to using Workflow, rather than just attaching files to email with receipt requests?
Email works well enough for simple transmittals; even there, emails may take more work to administer than you think. You’ll need to monitor your email inbox to make sure you know when all responses have been received, and to see which recipients still have not responded so you can follow up on your original request.
Benefit: Ease in monitoring response is one great advantage of the Workflow approach. Schedule reviews via the Workflow module, and Worldox does the work for you. You can see at a glance who has responded and who has not – from inside Worldox, without checking your email inbox.
Email alone offers little support for a structured, multi-part communication plan. The Productivity Suite Workflow module does exactly that.
Benefit: The ability to automatically trigger follow-on actions in Workflow is a big plus. With regular emails, you have to decide at some later point whether further action is needed, and if so, what that action will be. With Workflow, follow-ups can be defined in advance, and are triggered automatically based on pre-defined goals for the current route. You can even add additional routes to pending (still active) workflows as needed.
One thing email cannot do is provide an aggregate tally of participation. The Workflow module does exactly that, automatically generating email receipts (tickets) at the conclusion of each scheduled workflow.
Benefit: Workflow initiators can save and track just this one document - the concluding, automatic email - to validate the fact that a certain communication happened, also to show the results of that communication. If you’re concerned with compliance issues, this one feature will prove incredibly valuable. No need to sort through emails sent and received. Just profile and save these email receipts as your proof of workflow activity.