This is no wonder, because people are familiar with Xinyada, more because it is an excellent system integrator and has always performed well in the financial field, but when it comes to workflow products, people will be surprised. They often ask: Xinyada is also making products? What exactly is a workflow product?
Customer: What is workflow?
At first, workflow sounds like a new thing in the software circle, but in fact, many familiar ERP and SCM products have workflow systems, which are business processes composed of a group of tasks. According to a series of business rules, documents, information or tasks are transmitted and executed between different participants, which can be a specific person or an application system.
The current software architecture can be divided into application software layer, advanced middleware layer, basic middleware layer and system software layer from top to bottom, and workflow system is in the advanced middleware layer. "If the system software layer and the basic middleware layer are the foundation, then the role of the advanced middleware layer is to build a smooth and efficient channel, and workflow is the core component of this channel." Cao Haiqiang, vice president of software department of Xinyada Company, said.
Status quo: neglected process management
The core of workflow is process management. In business and personal life, we will find processes everywhere.
For example, for an enterprise, its production and operation activities are interwoven by various business processes. When you need to purchase materials, you need the corresponding purchasing process; When arranging production, the corresponding production process is needed; There is also a corresponding sales process for selling products. For example, we have to carry out daily financial reimbursement and the corresponding financial approval process. Enterprise process is closely related to the production and operation activities of enterprises.
Unfortunately, although the process is so important, there are still many processes that are gradually accustomed to in the daily operation process, so they are ignored and cannot be effectively managed. All these make the business process of the enterprise unable to execute efficiently, unable to track the status and results of the business process execution well, resulting in a lot of time and waste of various resources.
In addition, the needs of customers are changing rapidly, the life cycle of products is also shortening, and technology is also innovating. In order to survive in such a competitive and ever-changing external environment, enterprises must have the ability to change on demand, constantly adjust and optimize their own business processes, and reconstruct and recreate them. The competition of 2 1 century is the competition of speed. Whoever can quickly change the process and cope with the ever-changing environmental changes can maintain the continuous competitiveness. Using information technology can accelerate business process reengineering and realize efficient and orderly process management.
As shown in the figure, process management includes process design, process analysis, process optimization and process reengineering. To achieve efficient process management, enterprises not only need good processes, but also need us to give up the organization and labor methods that we are used to. The traditional division of labor theory divides enterprises into functional departments and divides enterprise processes into various simple tasks, which exist in organizations. Here, the organization can be a department of our enterprise or the enterprise itself. And according to these tasks, department managers mainly focus on improving the efficiency of the department, ignoring the overall goal of the enterprise, and can not form effective support for the development strategy of the enterprise and the rapidly changing competitive environment.
Enterprise: We need workflow technology to manage!
In order to enable our business process to be implemented efficiently, cross departmental barriers and cross the gap between enterprises, the organizational structure of enterprises should be flat and networked, and change from the traditional function-oriented organizational structure to the process-oriented organizational structure.
Therefore, the competitiveness of enterprises is reflected in the process and management ideas. The establishment of the organization should also adapt to the changes in the process. People are no longer unfamiliar with the relationship between information technology and enterprise management. Today, with the wave of enterprise informatization in China, most enterprises, especially those with a certain scale, have carried out the first round of informatization construction. For example, they have established sales system, SCM, financial system, OA system and so on. These systems are generally limited to solving specific affairs within the enterprise and are oriented to internal functions of the enterprise, rather than market-oriented and customer-oriented systems.
It is precisely because every business process change may cause great changes in the program structure, and the rigid architecture increases the complexity of the system and hinders the flexibility of the system. For end users, the lag of business process changes has seriously affected the market response speed and lost some opportunities. For business operators and developers, they are caught in a quagmire of inefficiency. This has caused many tragedies in the past development of ERP. Therefore, it is also required to strengthen the flexibility of the process in the new generation ERP system. Workflow technology is a good way to solve these problems.
Xinyada: Seize the opportunity of workflow products!
Guo Huaqiang told reporters excitedly: "In the next few years, the field of management software will set off a peak of migration from software infrastructure platform to application process management platform. Xinyada should seize this opportunity! "
It is predicted that by 2005, mainstream management software will be based on business process management platform. However, compared with the operating system and software platform, the business process management platform has just started in China market. Jishi Information also believes that in 2004, China's process management platform market will further develop and enter a rapid development track, with a total market size of RMB 2.5 billion!
Attracted by this huge market, more and more domestic manufacturers are eager to try, but like most software infrastructure, most of this field is in the hands of foreign manufacturers, such as IBM, BEA, HP, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Sun, Microsoft and other companies provide BPM software. It is not easy for domestic software manufacturers to occupy a place in this field. Although Xinyada, Xi 'an Synergy, Shanghai Donglan, Thinking Acceleration, ChinaSoft Jinma and other manufacturers provided workflow software, it was not really accepted by users.
Among the manufacturers, Xinyada stands out.
Xinyada Company is a domestic system integrator, and workflow business is only a small part of its overall business. But it is precisely because of its system integrator background that Xinyada's workflow products have inherent advantages and have the opportunity to enter the financial, government and other industries through its information projects. For example, at the end of last year, SunFlow workflow products of Xinyada were applied to the new generation call center system of ICBC in Zhejiang Province, which not only improved the operation efficiency of the call center, standardized the workflow, but also brought direct economic benefits to ICBC. In the bank credit management and document management system, Xinyada workflow products are outstanding.
Moreover, SunFlow workflow management system of Xinyada, with its years of accumulation in banking, securities, industry and commerce, taxation, insurance and other industries, fully considers various business process integration requirements that may arise in various industries, provides a large number of common process templates in various industries, and also allows users to generate process templates that meet their own characteristics through simple operations.
Usually, users don't pay enough attention to the processes hidden in their daily operations and can't effectively manage these processes. In this respect, SunFlow provides an open workflow platform based on J2EE architecture, which follows the WFMC standard, supports distributed massive data processing, has a graphical interactive interface, and can easily integrate existing enterprise systems, middleware and e-commerce applications through its iConnect application agent.
The application of workflow management system will show different complexity because of different application requirements, and there are usually two typical applications: one is document circulation and approval in automated office system; The other is the process in the critical business system. Relatively speaking, the requirements of document flow on the performance, scheduling complexity and flexibility of workflow system are not as high as the latter. However, for the scalable SunFlow, it can support applications with different complexity.
The realization of SunFlow distributed task scheduling adopts a four-layer task manager architecture consisting of management layer, behavior layer, reasoning and decision layer and communication layer, and gives the generation method of task manager knowledge base. What happened? Did you take it? (5), (5), (7), (5), (7), (5), (5), (5), (5), (5), (5), (5), (6), (5)
SunFlow also extended the traditional active network workflow model, added new modeling elements such as concurrent tasks, ports, exceptions and compensation transaction nodes, and independently developed a new workflow description language SFSL (Sunflow Specification Language).
In addition, SunFlow supports various mainstream client applications, including traditional "fat client" and "thin client", as well as mainstream PDA and mobile phone. The support of multi-client not only means that the system can be easily integrated with other platforms, but more importantly, users can completely choose familiar development environments and languages for customized client development.
I remember a language master said that the highest realm of text translation is "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance". Today, faithfulness and elegance are also pursuing the highest realm of workflow products, promoting the application of workflow technology and realizing the "faithfulness, elegance and expressiveness" of management.