Routes of Adoption: Process Standardization

Once a process is well understood, organizations are in a position to identify "low hanging fruit" and can achieve quick process improvements using human workflow and electronic forms to address manual procedures and eliminate one-off exceptions. We call this Process Standardization.

Human workflows end electronic forms help drive process repeatability and consistency across people. Some of the benefits of workflow include:

• Ensuring process consistency and repeatability across teams or organizations
• Reducing process errors caused by manual labor
• Simplifying complex business processes
• Reducing dependency on email to ensure work gets done
• Realizing quicker time to market through self-service

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server provides teams and individuals with out-of-the-box capabilities to implement human workflows. SharePoint provides built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving processes. With SharePoint, users can create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling them to streamline collaborative processes.

Electronic forms provided through InfoPath Forms Services are also an integral part of such workflows. These InfoPath designed electronic forms make it easy to collect and validate information that drives your business processes. And information workers can collect and validate this information right from the Microsoft Office client applications they use every day.

Finally, SharePoint Designer makes it easy to add business logic to sophisticated no-code composite applications with the rules-based Workflow Designer. With the Workflow Designer tool in SharePoint Designer, users can use drop-down lists and check boxes to identify the events that trigger a workflow, and then specify the actions and responses that follow and even identify the conditions under which other workflow events will occur.