SiteScape White Paper: Collaboration + Workflow = e-Process

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The promise of B2B e-commerce is fast, efficient and repeatable experiences for all users of a business ecosystem. Instant and ad hoc relationships can be formed and propelled forward unimpeded by traditional commerce "friction". However, e-business has high complexity built into transactions. Not only are people collaborating with people, but also machines are collaborating with machines. The result is a dramatic net increase in the volume of communications between organizations that are more ad hoc and instantaneous than the traditional model. How to organize and make sense of the myriad of transactions, communications and new relationships is a major challenge.

This generally chaotic and ad-hoc nature of B2B communication demands a definable, illustratable, and repeatable set of processes with which companies can conduct business. The combination of collaboration (both asynchronous and synchronous) and workflow, which SiteScape calls e-process, makes this possible.

e-Process's key role is to act as the glue that holds the elements of business together. It mirrors critical business processes by defining the rules, interfaces, and procedures that comprise how relationships work. It also provides a management layer that gives oversight to the reliability and consistency of business practices within an e-business ecosystem. As such, e-process can be used to seamlessly integrate suppliers, customers, and business partners.

Three e-Process Segments

There are three distinct segments of any e-business that can benefit from e-process:

Administrative e-Process: general workflows or processes available to everyone in the organization to use, such as purchase approval processes, resume tracking, vacation requests, etc. Production or Transaction e-Process: the automation of complex business-critical applications, repetitive or high-volume transactions.

Collaborative e-Process: the automation of business processes that are not transaction-oriented, and enable multiple users to share documents, data, annotations of work in progress and drive this work to completion faster and more efficiently.

Why Traditional Workflow Isn't Sufficient

In a distributed business environment, information must always be made explicit. You can't rely on the shared sense of understanding that face-to-face contact tends to foster. Without a common frame of reference, collaboration and communication between the dispersed team members may be disordered and inefficient. It's not about just knowing what to do; it's about knowing how to implement processes, and turning innovation into execution.

Workflow technology as it developed in the '80s and '90s can perform some of those tasks, but e-business brings new demands. The value of today's work force is based on workers' ability to make critical, rational decisions using on the information at hand. This stands in contrast to the earlier model that was based on a worker performing tasks, usually in a repetitive manner. It is becoming apparent to enlightened business managers that a whole new set of tools is required for these new knowledge workers. As a result, the concept of collaborative work is taking root. e-Process tools are designed to meet these new collaborative needs by providing the interface between all the tools currently utilized in the e-business marketplace.

Measurable Benefits The benefits of using collaboration technologies can be quite significant. Product quality improves by bringing together people involved in the decision process and providing fast, efficient communication. Also, companies can significantly reduce costs by eliminating travel expenses and the lost productivity associated with frequent meetings. Most importantly, it saves time by allowing people to resolve problems quickly.

Constructiva, a South American application service provider(ASP), is using SiteScape solutions to power its collaborative services for contractors in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The Constructiva Workspace enables construction teams to plan, manage, and coordinate the development of construction projects. By facilitating the free flow of information between contractors working together on a project and managing the work processes, it eliminates the type of errors typically produced by lack of communication, changes in plans, documents, or specifications, or delays in the delivery of raw materials and services, etc. In addition, it allows all the information pertaining to a project to be securely and centrally stored, managed, and disseminated using the Web. As a result, contractors avoid breakdowns in the communication process thereby ensuring projects are completed on time and under budget - a near miracle in the construction business.

Shell International is an example of a company that saved $200 million in one year. Shell has created a process that not only allows engineers from all over the world to troubleshoot problems by connecting people in the same disciplines, but it also enables cross-fertilizing ideas. Pipeline engineers and corrosion engineers, though they may not usually work together, can stay abreast of each other's projects by participating in or observing discussions on-line. In Shell's case, the sharing of information and ideas has led to better solutions, preventing problems, getting to market faster. In short, creating a competitive advantage.

The Portals and e-Process

Whether a company has adapted a portal infrastructure or is just combining multiple software applications into a B2B solution, the communication processes must be unified into a single interface. There is a premium placed on application relevance reducing "application clutter" where a single application or portlet aggregates all like and related functions into a single interface. Even one disconnected communications channel could hold the key to a set of critical transactions that renders the archive ineffective. e-Process is a vital component of the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) architecture, one that allows for the ad hoc creation of communities and contextual collaboration around any information resource in the portal. e-Process:

1. facilitates efficient communication and project management among teams and disparate organizations;

2. encourages "contextual collaboration" or ad hoc team communication around specific data sources;

3. is the means of defining, illustrating and managing the complex interactions between the players.

e-Process adds another significant dimension to enterprise portal functionality. It enables workers to collaborate in real time on solving a problem or creating a deliverable. In these cases, integration with strategic business processes is critical. e-Process accomplishes this through collaborative workflows, categorized knowledge resources, and linkages to transactional systems. This ability to collaboratively discuss and analyze information from disparate sources makes the potential of any enterprise portal solution more easily realized, allowing teams and individuals to use knowledge and information to improve the performance of a business function and, thus, the overall performance of the business itself.

The Making of an eProcess

e-Process is not a shrink-wrapped, one-size-fits-all commercial product; it is something a company must build to exactly mirror its way of doing business. But, it is an indispensable corporate asset and a competitive advantage. To cultivate and grow these assets and competitive advantages, a company must reorient their formal and controlled culture to one that is more flexible, responsive, and cooperative. Work should become more focused on processes and less on tasks. Management must concentrate more on building functional teams and less on departments.

Companies need to grasp and implement efficient process controls; implementations need to pull together all the separate pieces of the process jigsaw that often contains people, information, and technology, and manage the pieces in a measurable and repeatable manner. SiteScape offers the technology that can do that.

Proven e-Process Solutions

SiteScape's Specialized Solutions are broadly applicable e-processes that are built on top of our base collaboration capabilities. These applications are proven to provide quick and easy-to-use solutions to common business problems, such as managing resumes and the hiring process, tracking and reporting active sales opportunities, or managing an online support environment to provide superior customer satisfaction.

These solutions use a combination of workflow, pre-defined attribute fields, and custom commands to create robust collaborative applications. All can be easily further customized to meet specific business requirements.

SiteScape offers the following e-process solutions:

Resume Tracker

Human Resource professionals work with hundreds of applications and resumes on a daily basis. Finding and utilizing the right information within these resumes can be time consuming. With Resume Tracker you can quickly locate the resumes and other information you need and automate the interview process.

Sales Account Manager

SiteScape's Sales Account Manager helps sales professionals achieve two basic goals: to stay in communication with customers and business partners and to track and prioritize sales prospects and activity.

Help Desk

SiteScape's Help Desk provides help desk, call center, IT department, and technical support personnel with a way to effectively report, track and resolve problems.

Contact Manager

With SiteScape's Contact Manager you can file, store, search and retrieve your business and/or personal contacts in a shared, Web-based database. You and your colleagues can access e-mail addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses anytime, anywhere, using an Internet connection.

Filtered Discussion Forums Filtered discussion forums help categorize and classify types of information. They have a variety of uses, including document review processes, project management, and many others. With SiteScape's Filtered Discussion Forum, you can view and filter information according to your needs and preferences. Filtered discussion forums are easy-to-use and allow users to manage data using their own searchable categories.

Using a combination of easy-to-use set-up wizards and the simple workflow interface, it is easy to create new e-processes. And, if you don't have the time, SiteScape's Customization team can do it for you.

Conclusion

SiteScape's e-process technology provides the means to define, visualize, map and manage the complex processes that comprise today's increasing global and mobile businesses. e-Process links remote islands, which are customers, suppliers, and companies into a coherent whole. It pulls together all the separate pieces of the process jigsaw that usually contains people, information and technology, and manages them in a measurable and repeatable manner. e-Process is all about pulling disparate elements of business together into a collaborative and constructive whole, providing strong productivity growth and measurable return on investment.

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