Process Observation
A major goal of ORSOFT MDW Solution is to make the master data creation process fully transparent. The supervisor role is typically assigned to the person responsible for the process. There are special functionalities and GUIs available for him\her to observe and control the workflows. Important components of this observation function are the status concept and the process tracking of workflows.
All workflow steps are clearly marked by a status, which helps to gain quick information about the current state of the workflow. When a new Workflow is created, the status of each step is automatically set to initial. According to the process flow, the status of the workflow steps changes. The different statuses are shown semantically and graphically. Furthermore, temporal restrictions can be attached to each workflow step. Upcoming or already existing violations of such restrictions will automatically raise alerts indicating these delays. Thus, the workflow manager is informed at all times about the status of all workflows.
Various analysis functions support the workflow manager in their task to monitor and analyze the entire portfolio. In the screenshot above there is a chart which shows the flow of the incoming and outgoing workflows per week. The period of time and the level can be adjusted.
A performance indicator summarizes various key figures in one number. Hereby, bottle necks can be identified very quickly. The level of detail in this STEP-Performance matrix is the user group. The group with the highest indicator performs the worst and probably needs most of the attention in the process of the workflow improvement.
To gain a quick overview over the most urgent topics a workflow manager has a short list functionality available. The list can be built and sorted according to different, individually configurable criteria.
Several diagrams support the workflow manager to get a quick overview over the workflow portfolio. In the first example (Workload) a bubble-chart illustrates the workflow count regarding each user group and in the second example (Priority) a pie-chart shows the priority allocation of the entire workflow stock. Shape and level of detail of the charts can be adjusted and customized according to the requirements of a customer.
Information flow concept
Pre-defined events can trigger messages to persons and groups of persons responsible for a workflow step. There are different message types (e.g. email) available to inform the person responsible about newly-added workflow steps to their work basket. Wildcards in the message headers and texts enable the use of text templates with automatic-completion functionality.