"Effective and efficient workflow contributes to better bottom-line business," this is according to Denis Fourie, head of workflow at 3fifteen Pty. Ltd.

"The days of workflow acting as a linear technology are over. The benefits of workflow are clear as day. Companies looking to increase their bottom line in today"s competitive market have realized that, by automating various business processes throughout their organization, they increase employee efficiency and effectiveness. This results in huge savings in both time and money, which can be spent elsewhere in the organization," he says.

According to Fourie, there are numerous workflow applications available, but, he adds, these are application-dependent, or will not communicate with any other type of application.

"Tracking a business process from initiation through to completion has traditionally been a major problem," says Fourie.

"Companies often rely on no more than paperwork, which is manually forwarded from one person to the next for approval. This can result in unauthorized, misplaced or lost documentation, and, in most cases, costs the company money," he says.

"Take for example employee recruitment," he adds. Typically, employees would need to fill in numerous forms. These would then be handed over to departments such as HR, security and IT.

"It is quite a rigmarole, and involves a lot of unnecessary paperwork. What is more, is that most of the information is duplicated," says Fourie. "However, another problem comes into play when all this information gets re-entered into the relevant computer systems. Numerous people punch these details into their records, and the chances of someone"s name being entered incorrectly somewhere along the line are quite high. Also, the entire admission process can take up to two weeks," says Fourie.

3fifteen"s K2.net Workflow solution is said to make this process, as well as many others, far more efficient and accurate. "An employee now just has to fill their details into a terminal, and check off a couple of boxes indicating what type of equipment and services they would need once part of the company, hit the send button and know that everything is being taken care of," he says.

The application will immediately be sent to the workflow server, and from there be redirected to the relative department or departments. This application is then monitored from start to finish by K2.net, prioritizing it and escalating it to the relevant people within a department should nothing be done in a predefined time period.

"If the correct plug-ins are in play in the organization, K2.net can even automate processes such as creating an e-mail account, or creating a shared directory, as it is tightly integrated with Microsoft Corp. solutions such as Active Directory, Share Point Portal Services, BizTalk and Microsoft Office. Thus, admission time is cut down to mere hours," says Fourie.

"K2.net is an enterprise workflow application, basically meaning that it can correspond between numerous applications across all departments in an organization," he adds.

"K2.net Workflow is suited for businesses of any type that wish to be efficient, increase their productivity and have more than 50 employees," concludes Fourie.