Speaker 1: Well, I want to thank everybody for taking the time out of their day to join us for our webinar. We've got quite a few people on the line right now, so I think we'll get going and we'll start off right away here. My name is Kevin Darcy and I'm the Vice President of Sales and Marketing with MES Hyperdocument Systems and today we want to take you through the next webinar in our Embracing the Paperless Office series and this one is about mapping a successful workflow. Basically what we're looking to achieve today is to provide you with a brief introduction for the best practices of workflow charting and to review ways that you can identify deficiencies in your existing processes. So for starters, what is workflow charting or process mapping? Well, essentially it's just a visual representation of a task or a business process or a series of tasks within your organization that allow you to take a job activity from start to finish. Mapping it allows you to streamline and analyze these processes for maximum efficiency. Best place to start is understanding the key symbols. Now there's a lot more than the ones we have on the screen here right now. It's important that you familiarize yourself with them, but we want to start off with the basic ones that people are going to need to use. This little orange pill-shaped one, and the colors don't really matter, is your start and end process. So every workflow needs to begin and end with one of these. The yellow square, of course, is a process or an action that somebody actually has to take along it. The blue wavy shape is a document that's created, referenced, or act upon. The gray diamond is a decision that's made. So typically you will see two connectors coming out of a decision, a yes-no decision, at least two. Out of all the other shapes, you're going to see only one connector come out of them. This little blue bullet-shaped one is a delay period. So if a task hits a certain point in the process and we want to delay it for 15 days before we make payment, or before we review, or before we escalate it, that's the shape we're going to use to indicate a delay. The green arrow is our connector. It's what links all the shapes together and all the symbols together. So let's talk about a couple tips and tricks for being a workflow superhero. The first and foremost is that we need to focus on one process at a time. While processes or tasks may feed into other processes, concentrate on completing one at a time and then link them afterwards. Map out the ideal path first. This is one I like to do where I say if everything in the world was perfect and there was no hiccups or exceptions in this process, how does it go from start to end? Once you have that ideal path mapped out, you can go back in and easily start to add in where the exceptions come into place. We talked about symbols on the last slide, and it's really important to use the correct symbols. Reason for that is that if you sit down to review this with somebody who is familiar with workflow mapping and you're using incorrect symbols, it's going to add confusion to the review process. Clarity is always key. Your workflow should be clear, neat, and easy to follow. There should not be any room for confusion or guesswork in your workflow. It should be understandable by everyone who looks at it. It's called a workflow chart for a reason, and it needs to make sure that the direction stays consistent. So if I'm going left to right, or if I'm going top to bottom, we need to make sure that we continue that all the way through. What we don't want to see is something going left to right, and then down, and then back to the left, and then down, and then back to the left again, and back up. We want to take that confusion out of it. It needs to flow. It doesn't mean that you can't have an offshoot. If I'm working left to right, it doesn't mean I can't have an offshoot come back up and down for a decision condition, but those branches then have to continue to move in the proper left to right direction. Be concise. Keep the descriptions to a minimum on the chart itself. Clutter up each step's depth with supporting documentation if you need to. It should be a nice, clean visual representation. It shouldn't be cluttered up with procedures. And be logical. I mean, that's the key for everything we do, but you want to be logical with your flow chart so that it's clear where a process begins and ends, and how exceptions are handled. So let's look at a sample workflow, and this is a vacation request process. It's something that probably everybody has been familiar with. This one's probably oversimplified, based on some people's applications, or spot on for others. But really, what happens is that we start the process by an employee completing a vacation form. They send it to their manager for review, and the manager approves or denies it. If he approves it, it goes on to the HR to verify that they do have the allocated time. They approve it, and they apply it against their accrued vacation time. Or they deny it if they don't have the required time. So pretty standard process, but what we want to do is look at ways that we can improve these business processes. And the reason, the way that we do that is by first defining the problem. You know, if you have a process that's working perfectly, great. Don't worry about starting there. Although I imagine if you look at most office processes or tasks around your organization, there's usually room for improvement. So the first step is to define what are we trying to solve. What's the problem? Once we do that, we want to walk through the process. And I really mean physically walk through the process. Pretend you're that piece of paper, or that information, and walk through to all the different areas. And how it's processed by each people who interact with that process along the way. Talk with the users. Understand what are they doing versus what you know is supposed to be done. Where do they have concerns or problems? Where do they commonly find exceptions? This gives you a fresh perspective on it. It allows you to develop possible solutions. So once you understand the process, you've walked through it, you've talked to the people who've defined the problem, you can start thinking, okay, how can we solve these issues? And what you want to do is you want to verify. You want to go back to the users and say, if we did this, would it help you address your concern? Then you want to test, test, test, test. Make sure everything's perfect. Then execute the new workflow process. So let's go back to our vacation request process here for a moment. And let's look at areas where this process can break down. So we're using a paper form to submit our vacation request. What happens if that gets misplaced? I go to give it to my manager for review. Here she's not at her desk, so I leave it on the desk. Somebody else comes in, piles more paper on top of it, and it gets lost. In no way in this process are we updating the employee that their vacation has been approved, denied. We're not documenting how that's done. We're not laying out what expected timelines for approval are. We're not discussing what happens if the manager is away. What if the manager's on their own vacation for two weeks, and you're trying to book a last minute deal for a vacation, or you need an answer right away. We're not addressing how to handle that exception. So let me give you an example of a customer that we worked with in the past, and one of the stories that came out of actually looking at their vacation request process. I had an employee who booked their two weeks vacation months in advance, well within the approved time frames. They took a piece of paper copy they had signed by their manager, they took a photocopy for themselves, and the manager sent the other one on to HR. To this day, I don't know whatever happened to the original request, but as far as the employee was concerned, her vacation was approved. It was signed off by her manager. So two weeks comes, she's at home. One-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, first day of her vacation rolls around, she gets a phone call. It's her boss and an HR rep wondering why she's decided to abandon her job, not call in sick, not explain why she isn't in to work. She explains that she was on vacation, filled out this form a long time ago, and if they go and look in the top drawer of her desk, they'll find a photocopy with the manager's signature on it. Sure enough, it was there. Somehow it never made it to HR for approval. So what we do when we look at this process is that when we booked the vacation so far in advance, the manager really had no hope of remembering that this person was going to go on vacation. Two, that piece of paper was lost, was misplaced somewhere along the process. Three, we had a departmental manager and an HR rep spending at least the time from nine in the morning to noon before they called this person, or one before they called this person, trying to investigate, trying to talk to other employees, trying to figure out what's going on. And then they finally broke down, they called them, and now they've got an upset employee who, you know, they're basically accusing her of skipping work. And so now you've got an upset employee on the first day of their vacation. So it was a real breakdown all the way along. Once they implemented a paperless workflow solution though, we were able to address it. So our workflow map is now quite a bit more extensive. It's not as simplistic as the last one, but we've addressed a lot of those key areas and concerns. So we now use an electronic form to eliminate the paper. The electronic form feeds automatically into a workflow. It can't be misplaced. It can't be lost. We basically use the equivalent of an email out of office. So if somebody submits a request to their manager and their manager is not there, it can be automatically forwarded to the manager's delegate for approval. The employee is now updated throughout the process via an email. So if their request is approved or denied, they get an email stating the fact that your manager has approved your vacation. It's now moving on to HR for review. So we're not hounding the individuals looking for them. Again going along that, we've now defined how long these actions should take. So if no action has been taken on the approval process for five days, another email goes out to the employee letting them know that they may gently want to remind their manager. Now we're not bugging them every two hours, every other day, hounding them to look at our vacation approval requests. We're letting people act on things in the appropriate amount of time and we're setting expectations for both management and employees on how quickly things need to be accessed. Finally, an email can be sent to the manager prior to the vacation time as a reminder. So maybe I failed to set it at the beginning of the year for vacation in August. I don't expect my manager to remember that. However, two weeks before my vacation, we can send an automated email to the manager on Monday morning saying, as a reminder, Kevin will be out of the office these weeks as a pre-booked vacation time. So we talked about vacation requests, but where else can we use electronic workflow or paperless workflow? Well, some of these common applications are employee recruitment. So the ingestion of applications, resumes, interviewing sheets, generation of background check documents, verify that we have all the correct hiring documents, financial documents in place for them. Policy distribution, so if we update a policy or procedure, we can push those out through electronic workflow and we can solicit verification from each user that they have read it and have reviewed it. Now we have that in writing from them or electronic writing from them that they have reviewed it. We're not posting it up in the lunchroom and hoping people read it. We're not emailing out to 500 employees saying, please read this, not knowing if any of them actually do. So there's an easy way and an auditable way to distribute policies and verify that each employee has read it. New client or vendor setup processes. One of the biggest ones, accounts payable invoice processing. So we get an invoice in from our vendor. We need to match it to packing slips, purchase orders. We need management approval to say that yes, this did meet what it was. We need to cut a check and we need to process all of that. We can pull all that together and automate that process. Order submissions from our sales department and application processing. So things like mortgages, loans, pensions, benefits, insurance claims, you name it. Equity donations, everything like that. Anything where we need to go from step A, B, C, D and we want to expedite it, chances are we can do that with a paperless or electronic workflow. So how do you know if this is right for you? Well, ask yourself these four questions. Are employees spending too much time doing low value tasks like looking for information or trying to match documents up to verify the contents? Are some of your employees swamped while others are sitting around idle? Are staff picking favorable projects? Are they cherry picking applications or tasks or processes that need to be done because they're easier to do, leaving the more cumbersome ones or the bigger ones for their co-workers? Are bottlenecks caused by busy decision makers who are often unavailable? If you answered yes to any of these, chances are you may want to look at electronic workflows or software. So some of the other key benefits include the ability to audit, so you can always go back, view the audit logs of who acted on processes, when they did, which decisions were taken, what workstation they did it from, what was the time frame around that. We can do productivity analysis, so we can look at each process, each employee, how quickly they're processing this, so then we can again load balance it. We can say, well, if employee A is getting 15 applications done a day and employee B is only doing five, what's the reasoning? Do we have an uneven distribution of work? Does somebody need to be retrained? Does a process need to be fine-tuned? We can address those automatically. We can set up automatic alerts, so again, we talk about automatic emails that go out to people, pop-ups, things like that that allow people to automatically know if something's been delayed for too long or is still missing. That way we can be proactive and act on it as opposed to waiting for customers, whether that's an internal or external customer, to call us upset that something's not complete. Promotes uniformity. This way we don't have different employees acting on their own, doing processes different ways and potentially missing steps. It provides easier onboarding because we have these workflows mapped out. We have the explanations, and again, going back to the uniformity, everything's done the same way, so we're not talking to one person and say, well, I kind of do it this way, but Sally does it that way, and just kind of do it every way you want. Related document matching, so again, let's look at the vendor invoice example. To verify vendor invoice, I need to see our original purchase order, I need to see the receiving documents from the vendor, and I need to see the invoice. So when we scan an invoice and it's presented to our AP department, they can click on a button that says Show Me Related Documents, pulls out that purchase order, pulls up that receiving documents, and we can match everything together to make sure that the vendor did send us an accurate invoice. It supports our mobile workforce, so as more people start working on the road, using mobile devices, working from home, things like that, if we're using electronic workflows to move documents digitally as opposed to physically, a busy manager or a busy decision maker who's on the road can pull out their smartphone and go, yeah, that looks okay, click OK and approve it. So that about wraps up our presentation for today. So a little bit about us. For over 40 years, we've helped companies large and small who are frustrated because of service delays caused by slow records retrieval, are unhappy with the space required to store their documents, or who struggle with sharing information across team members. We provide workflow and office automation systems, document management software, document scanning services, and we even do legacy conversion like microfilm or legacy digital systems to modern systems. I encourage everyone to keep in touch with us. So we're on all the major social media outlets, you can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, we have some great videos, educational stuff on our YouTube channel, we're on Google+, and at the end of this presentation, everyone will be getting an email later on today that will give you a link to download our free e-book, The Only Document Management Guide You'll Ever Need, that covers a lot of what we talked about today as well as some other great information about document management, and it's a free download, I encourage everyone to go and grab that if it's of interest to you, and again, I just want to thank everybody for their time this afternoon. I understand that your time is important, it's valuable, and I appreciate you taking it, spending it with us. So thank you very much, and have a great day.