My fellow-programmers started a new project. They rented a small office, stuffed it with computers and started development with a team of 10 people. This was 6 years ago, now it’s a medium-size company with their own clients and thousands of supporters in social media.
They started, at the very beginning, with a work automation system, one of the simplest, yet it’s unbelievable to normally manage software development without a tool like that. Being natural born programmers, my friends knew that so they picked one of the cheapest systems, if not freeware.
Six years later, they have a financial department, sales department, marketing department and a number of additional administrative units. Gradually, each department was choosing their own system for keeping and processing work data.
That is comfortable for work because this type of system saves time and money. At the same time, departmental solutions are dedicated to one type of activity, the one the department is busy with. And the processes inside this system are hard-coded, meaning that you can’t simply take one system and use it for all the company once you want to unify automated workflows.
That’s not only the problem of my friends: normally, most departments, when it comes to automation, work with their own informational system. This usually happens gradually, system by system, department by department, while the company grows. There’s no harm in this situation for each department as, this way, they can normally solve their innternal problems.
It’s only when the company grows, and cross-departmental processes grow bigger and heavier along with it, so that’s where the company faces the need of using a single solution to ensure collaboration between different parts of the company.
Universal BPM solution doesn’t have hard-coded processes: all of them can be changed, replaced or modified. At the same time, universal BPM solution provides pre-configured process templates for main company activities. That is where we strike a balance, as it is the case with Comindware Tracker: you can use it for cross-departmental processes, managing them all in one without the need of switching between applications or converting data from one format or another. You can try it right now and use it for free during the next 30 days.
