Actual Examples of Workflow

Overview

Workflow or Business Process Management is highly effective in managing and prompting consistent work with predictable Business Processes. The benefits are virtually always achieved:

• Faster, more accurate and consistent outcomes – great reductions in end-to-end cycle time
• Potential alternate Processes for large customers, etc.
• Reduction in “Non Value” work and paper shuffling
• Effective Work Allocation and Division of Labor – including partial offshoring
• Management of the portfolio of work, Capacity and Throughput Measures, Activity Based Costing

Wholesaler Deduction Management

This is a “Time is of the Essence” situation. Large Retailers routinely take 5-figure “Deductions” from invoices, and that is money lost. The need is to work each large Retailer according to their specific rules, cataloging backup information and submitting and adjudicating claims within a short “statute of limitations” period. The stakes are in the millions, and it is a “snooze – you lose” environment.

Inpatient Discharge from Hospital

Short 2-day hospital stays bring a great risk of dangerous and expensive re-admission. The need is to perform myriad small and large tasks to ensure the patient gets home with all the correct medication, equipment, and home nursing care. Then the local physician has to be given timely and accurate information to take over the care.

Many things can go wrong if not checked, for example the patient may not be able to afford the follow-on medications. Consistency is key. It does no good to pamper one patient and forget another. This is an excellent example of Division of Labor opportunities. A physician needs to prescribe oxygen, but a Call Center individual can check it arrived OK.

Website Contact Customer Relationship Management

An Online Language school receives lots of website inquiries, which have to be converted to paying students. Many inquiries are missing basic information, and this is gathered by low cost workers in Ukraine.

Then language-specific sales reps make the closing calls. The new student is then assigned to a tutor, who uses the workflow to schedule lessons. The system then executes billing, compensation, accounting and exception processes, such as rejected credit cards.

The workflow allows a world-wide presence, with minimal central administrative staff. The school is a low-cost leader, yet maintains high profit margins.

Surgery Procedure – Proactive Clinical Trial

A particular weight-loss surgical procedure was popular, but it was also expensive and potentially risky. Did it do any good? Nobody knew, largely because the operations were scattered among many individual surgeons, with no overall consistent measurement.

The proactive trial prompted surgeons to use a website to input many clinical data elements over the course of pre-operative and 6 months post-operative care. The patients input before and after standardized Quality of Life questionnaires. The results were significant and selected for publication.

Addiction Cessation Outreach Program

Chewing tobacco is a widespread addiction with devastating results. There are 5 million addicts, often young men in hard-to-reach rural areas. However, that demographic is web savvy.

A major university had developed outreach and follow up protocols, but lacked the manpower to follow recovering addicts. The protocols were implemented as diverse workflows, prompting with emails and web entries. Then just the exceptions were reported to the clinicians and counselors, thus serving a much greater population than was previously possible.

Website Advertising Content Management

Small restaurants and local businesses submitted Ads through a website, for a local area community website. The submissions were then evaluated in Belarus. These low cost workers corrected spelling and resized photographs, etc. Then the Ads were automatically posted to the community website covering an area just inland of Los Angeles.

Congestive Heart Failure – Patient Monitoring

Patients with Congestive Heart Failure were being monitored and managed with medications. Fluid retention is an early indication of an adverse situation. So patients weighed themselves everyday, and reported their weight through a website. The clinician set an acceptable range and follow-up interval for each patient. Staff members were then informed only about exceptions, such as an out of range reading, or failure to report in.

The workflow managed the normal and acceptable results (happily the majority) thus allowing more widespread use of the program without adding to the staff count.