Feedback from user groups emphasizes that although the competitive advantage gained by using workflow eclipses the financial savings, it is the financial savings that are the deciding factor when obtaining support from senior management. Projects getting the blessing at the CEO level are much easier to manage, and far more likely to reach their goal within the project time frame.

So plan well, and don't neglect the business case.

Because the following questions deal with the financial case in more detail, this section will finish by listing the competitive
advantages.

The quality of the process is assured by pushing the relevant information together with links to related transactions
directly to the user. Managers don't have the time to search for information so give them what they need to reach the correct
decision.

Cycle time is reduced by pushing the process directly to the users. The users receive notification of a task immediately
and can even be prioritized by the system.

The tasks are performed consistently and diligently by the users. The workflow system pushes all the necessary
information needed to perform a task, including a clear description of what has to be done, how to do it and the impact this
task has on the business process for your company. At any time, the user can check the list of tasks pending and
determine at a glance which are the important tasks, and which tasks can be completed the next day without any negative
impact.

The process instance is transparent. Any user can check at any time how far the process has progressed and which
stage the process has reached. For example the call center can immediately see the status of a purchase order, an
employee requisitioning a purchase would see at a glance if  a colleague has been sitting on it for too long, the ad hoc notes
made when approving an engineering change request are visible long after the request has gone into production.

The process is flexible, allowing it to be changed on the fly without retraining everyone involved. The description
accompanying the change takes care of on-the-fly process improvements.

Deadline handing ensures that users perform the tasks within the time planned. Escalation measures ensure that the
failure to meet a deadline can be corrected by other means.

Intelligent reporting highlights the weaknesses of a process. Often there is a simple cure to such weaknesses such as
reeducating the users involved in the bottleneck or providing additional information (automatically). The difficulty of a
non-automated process is identifying such bottlenecks.

The process definition is transparent. You can see at a glance how the process works and who will be selected to
perform the different tasks. Think of the workflow as the process book. If you can spot the pattern and define the process
without headaches, you can create a workflow definition effortlessly. However, don't forget that if a company has business
processes that are erratic and lack a consistent pattern, the company is very likely to be losing a lot of money in terms of
lost contracts, labor intensive administration and low customer confidence. It is my personal opinion that automating exactly
this type of processes will yield the best returns, but only if you limit yourself to automating the basic skeleton of the
process first. Don't get bogged down in the detailed exception handling. That can be done in the next phase once you've
checked the process statistics and determined which exceptions are worth tackling.

As with most software the reasons for automating business processes are primarily to increase the competitive edge of your
company and to cut costs. Although the increase in competitively gained by radically reducing process times is by far the most
insignificant gain from workflow, you should not ignore the cost savings. The cost saving calculations are needed by upper
management in order to approve workflow projects. This upper management signature will be very useful in  different phases of
the project and cannot be underestimated.