Is a workflow product appropriate for this

[J. Kevin Robbins]

I've never worked with a BPM or workflow product. I looked at this page, and at this one. Too many choices and the very term "workflow" is so vague that I'm not sure where to start, so let me describe our business need and see if anyone has recommendations that seem like a good solution.

When someone needs to get approval for a capital expenditure, they have to fill out a Word document and then sneaker-net it all over the premises to collect up to 7 signatures, and then it's filed away. Obviously this is very inefficient and wastes a lot of time. I've been asked to consider possible web based solutions. Like I said, this is new territory for me. We don't need a massive document management system, or something that's going to automate the entire finance department. Just something to address this specific problem. It would need to support emailing alerts to approvers when a request has been submitted that needs approval, multiple levels of approval, and electronic signatures.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Tim Holloway]

Sorry not to have seen this sooner.

"Workflow" is, more or less, what you have when there is a business process with multiple steps. They may be all manual, all automatic, a mix of the two, and they may take anywhere from minutes to years to complete.

So, yes, if you have someone originating a document that has to be bounced between various people in order to get something done, then that's a workflow.

There are a number of ways of handling such things, not excepting good old-fashioned Bob-Cratchett style ledger tracking, but computers do offer a more organized and more automated way of handling things. I used to work with a system based on a now-defunct Apache Foundation product. These days, I'd probably have gone with something oSGi-based. The various workflow steps were all automated. It was IoC-component-based (like Spring), so we could create or tailor workflows with minimal reprogramming.

For processes that involve people, there's the BPM standard

For something like what you're describing, I'd probably want to webify the Word document and use a true workflow product like Enhydra Shark. You can set up a workflow that integrates into MS-Outlook and makes sure that the document reaches the proper people and collects the proper signatures or explores alternatives if kinks appear in the process.