Organisations feel the need for an automated workflow solution way into their life cycles. Added to this is the fact that the workflow needs of processes in an organization keeps  evolving over time and in most of the cases increases in complexity. The core area addressed by workflow solutions are how to structure the internal and external processes,  and how to maximize automation of activities which could result in better productivity, administration and management.

The WFMC (http://www.wfmc.org) definition of a workflow is “The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules”.

Identifying key business processes in the organization is the first step in a process oriented approach to re-structuring to implement automated workflow solutions. The next step would be to think of the core activities that constitute the processes and to identify whether they represent an automated one or a human intervened one. Establishing a workflow process for these activities results in better centralized control, and productivity of the core business areas.

At Essel, we have joined hands with many customers to workflow enable their core business processes, resulting in both tangible and intangible benefits

Improved Quality of Work
Improved automation of core activities
Monitoring and Centralized control
Reducing Operating and management costs

The health insurance claims processing is a typical workflow scenario which includes stages or activities such as scanning, displaying, recognizing, validating and converting of HCFA 1500 / 0805 and UB 92 / UB 04 claims into standard and custom EDI formats. Typical claims processing workflows also produce HIPAA compliant EDI documents as an interface to adjudication systems.

Essel SWolutions has an extensive set of modules which are ideally suited for such scenarios. In addition to these, a highly dedicated technical team helps you to customize the solution for the needs of your organization.

Workflows for Businesses
A workflow in its simplest form is the movement of tasks and or documents through a process. Usually a process definition represents the abstract operational aspect of the process. We usually use a flow chart diagram to denote this process.

Business workflows represent more generic processes being able to structure any set of generic tasks. The key benefit of structuring task lists as a workflow is to increase the throughput of the work stream by allowing control and monitoring mechanisms to be established. In addition productivity levels can be measured and controlled.
Another great aspect of workflow establishment is the central control of roles or participants.

So the key benefits include :

Improved Efficiency by Automation of core activities
Establishment of Control mechanisms results in single central point of administration
Process Improvement through measurement of key control points.

Essel has built its own workflow engine on top of Windows Workflow Foundation to enable businesses leverage on a workflow services platform.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)
Windows Workflow Foundation is a Microsoft technology built on top of .NET 3.0 runtime. It is available natively in Windows Vista. The process definition in WWF is XAML (an XML based format). Workflows in WWF can be thought of as comprising of Activities. Activities are either built in or custom. Custom activities can be developed in any of the .NET compliant languages for domain specific scenarios.

External Links
Official Site of WWF : http://wf.netfx3.com/
Online Workflow Guide : http://wfguide.blogspot.com/
MSDN center for WinFX : http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx
Core Concepts Video :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20051208WorkflowJC/manifest.xml

WFMC
WFMC is a non profit organization of adopters , developers , consultants analysts engaged in Business Process Management. WFMC is mainly concerned with establishment of workflow standards. WFMC has created a new Process definition Format based on XML called XPDL (XML Process Definition Language).

Read more about the standard here www.wfmc.org