Workflow Service

Overview

How is your company handling the routing, assignment, queuing and prioritization of critical messages and documents such as trade confirmations, claim forms, and purchase order exceptions that drive your business? Are these messages coming in as faxes, e-mail or paper? Are your processes and procedures secure and compliant?

At EasyLink, we often hear about the problems companies face when trying to manage the flow of these business messages. Often companies have an existing set of applications and procedures in place that do not map well to the security, agility and speed your organization needs to stay competitive. We hear about problems like the following:

• Organizations still using fax machines need to guarantee that every fax was processed. They end up using manual processes like physical stamps and Excel spreadsheets to log every fax and validate they were processed at the end of the day.
• Companies struggling to integrate different sources of business messages into a single location for centralized processing, tracking and accountability.
• E-mail servers being used as the funnel to move business transactions to users for processing. This often includes specialized “folders” to hold e-mails creating a poor-man’s work-queue and making it nearly impossible to track who did what.
• Users from multiple geographically diverse locations that need to share work; often exacerbated by fax numbers that terminate in a single location.

The EasyLink Workflow Service (EWS) is a Software as a Service (SaaS) workflow application that enables your company to deploy a customized application for the centralization, management, queuing and processing of inbound business transactions of any kind. EWS is a sophisticated hosted service that combines advanced message queues, alerts and alarms, comprehensive audit trails and a Web 2.0 interface for the delivery of tailored applications to your company. EWS solves many business problems for your company including:

• Consolidation of messages coming from many different sources including fax, e-mail and paper into a single workflow application.
• Comprehensive security and audit controls that enable your organization to meet security and governance mandates.
• A workload balancing system giving you complete visibility and control into the work being done by anyone in your company. For example, Workflow Service enables administrators to easily re-assign business documents that employees may be working on, if needed.
• The ability to embed sophisticated business rules directly into your workflow so that routing, prioritization, queuing, and handling of business messages are guaranteed to meet your needs.

Features

GET CONTROL OF YOUR DOCUMENTS

The steps that it takes to move data from e-mail, fax, paper or other formats to your back office can be laborious and costly. Errors can be made that require correction, compromising the integrity of your data and operations. The Easylink Workflow Service (EWS) helps you take control of your documents and related business processes, replacing cumbersome data entry steps. Workflow Service is a 100% hosted Software as a Service application managed within the EasyLink network.

HOW IT WORKS

EasyLink works with your organization to map out and understand your business to create a tailored workflow process that reflects your business rules, your structure, and most importantly your information. That workflow is then hosted on EasyLink’s highly secure and redundant global network for access from anywhere in the world.

With the EasyLink Workflow Service, e-mail, fax, paper and other documents are routed directly into customized online workflows to be managed by the EasyLink network. EWS can assist with one or many parts of your transaction processing workflow, including:

• Processing inbound documents and routing them into your company’s back office system. Features and functions include:
  • Data extraction
  • Field level validation
  • Transformation
  • Customized delivery formats
• Managing the workflow of inbound documents, processing these documents within EWS, then providing data to your back office system. Features and functions include:
  • Queue Management – Custom queues and sub queues that reflect your business
  • Business rules management – Enforce your business rules within the workflow application
  • Routing – Easily route transactions within the workflow to other groups or queues
  • Assignment – Assign transactions from one user to another
  • Field validation – Field level validation at the web-browser with fast and quick feedback
  • Role-based security – Setup security and access to queues and documents using roles defined by you
  • Annotations – Easily annotate or update documents and transactions
  • Search – Find documents using any of the meta data fields designed by your organization

EasyLink Workflow Service also provides many benefits for operational managers, including:

• Auditable transaction processing that complies with strict security regulations
• Web browser-based transaction processing monitoring and reporting
• Dashboard view with queue status, alerting and alarming metrics
• Workload balancing to easily move and assign blocks of transactions between users
• A more cost-effective workflow process