If you work in a medium to large sized business, and you're implementing a workflow system for the first time, including imaging or not, I can give you a piece of advice that could save you upwards of £1m worth of work if you follow it.

I'm going to be generous and give this one away for free.

My advice is based on the actual implementation and support of two successful workflow and imaging systems, and the practical knowledge of the implementation of another three  in the same industry. All of this is over the last 6 years.

All of the companies involved are multinational, finance sector based, employ a minimum of a couple of thousand employees each and operate out of at least two different countries.

Big business huh?

For those that don't know, a workflow system is basically a production line. At their most basic they pass work between members of staff. They typically keep an eye on how long work is taking and report on how much work is around.

When you write to your Bank for example, your letter is often scanned into an electronic format and someone classifies your letter depending on what type of work you've asked to be done on your account.

The workflow system then makes sure the image of the letter is passed to the right department that performs the type of work your letter has been classed under. Some workflow systems accept instructions from web pages, others telephone calls. Odds are you've encountered a workflow system of some description in your life.

Businesses introducing a workflow system for the first time often look at which type of work would benefit most from an automated production line. Where finance is concerned, an insurance/assurance/banking company wants to keep the amount of work done on a policy or account beyond set up and closing down to an absolute minimum if at all possible. Work on a life assurance policy in the middle of it's life is often costly the company involved.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, the banks are trying to be lazy or just want to make money out of you. They want to earn some cash too, but their clients investments isn't just a cash cow to them. The investments represent someone's real life savings. The money could be a college fund for a their kids, a pension or money put aside for a wedding. This is real money and almost everyone I've worked with in the finance sector doesn't even question how important it is to keep that money as safe as possible.

These companies need to keep their costs down so that they earn a profit which keeps them in business which makes sure their clients are looked after. Win-win?

As we're on the topic of investments, we'll take an example of work from the Life Assurance industry.

A very common piece of work that a client will ask for during the middle of their policies term will be a "switch", that is moving money from one investment into a another such as taking your pension money out of a risky investment you plumped for when you were younger and and placing it into a safer fund as your retirement approaches.

A switch can be expensive to perform, several members of staff may be involved and their time costs money. The company may need to be partnered with fund managers who often charge fees. Maybe they pay for a service from the likes of Reuters or Bloomberg to keep an eye on funds so that the company can step in to avert problems. There's a lot of paperwork, faxing and other legally required actions that the company has to perform.

Quite often the client will be charged a fee to perform a Switch or the company will build the fee into the plan allowing a few "free" switches. But this fee doesn't always cover the costs that the company incurs to actually do the work. Here's where companies may think about introducing a workflow system to reduce the costs.

So back to real world experience.

In the last 6 years, all of the systems I've been involved with or learned about have happened to start with Switches as the first "type" of work they would use the new system for. Well all but one company, who decided to start with "Application Forms", but the end result was the same.

To be honest, for their circumstances, switches (or application forms) are a good choice of a type of work to start with. The point being they could have started with any type of work and still made the same error.

Ahh, the error. So what has cost each of these companies in the long run?

For various reasons, be it project demands, deadlines, resource, a dodgy design decision or something in the water, each of the companies managed to develop a Switch-flow system instead of a Work-flow system.

Huh? Switch-flow?

The reasons may have been legitimate however in the push to make sure that the process of handling a switch was as efficient as possible the development teams focussed on the process of handling switches and not what the switch represented.

To a workflow system, "Work" follows a "Path". It just keeps track of where in the path a certain piece of "Work" is and moves it on when each stage is completed. 

So a switch should just be another piece of work following another path. Which path the workflow system should send the switch down compared to another type of work is a configuration issue.

Unfortunately in each case, when the companies involved came to add different types of work to what their workflow systems handled they discovered they would have to perform more development to handle work items more generically.

Don't over customise your workflow system to handle the first type of "work" you are intending the system to handle. If you do, it will cost you more money than what you were expecting when you want to expand what work the system can look after for you.

So that's how to save a lot of money when implementing a workflow and/or imaging system in the finance sector, especially when dealing with switches.

But I want you to take this advice and apply it to whatever you are working on.

Don't lose sight of what you're creating.