Simply put, a workflow is the series of activities that are necessary to complete a task, where in a sequential workflow each activity depends on the occurrence of the previous one, while in a parallel workflow, two or more activities can occur at the same time.
In business context, a workflow is the organised pattern of business activities enabling a business organisation to transform materials, provide services or process information.
The origins of the modern-day workflow can be traced back to the late 1880s studies of the rational organisation of labour in the manufacturing industry.
In an attempt to improving labour productivity and overall economic efficiency, the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor used scientific methods to discover how long it should take men to perform each given piece of work; and eventually founded the Scientific management theory to analyse workflows.
The term workflow, to represent the rational organisation of work, was first introduced in print in 1921, in a railway engineering journal, to find its definition as a ‘sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion’ by the 1950s.
In the 1980s, the work of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran gave rise to a variety of theories on improving business process workflows, including the Six Sigma set of techniques and tools for process improvement and error elimination and the Total Quality Management.
With TQM becoming popular in times when corporations aimed at global competitiveness, the study and integration of workflows spread, to leave room for customisation, to link planning with execution, and to lead to the creation of workflow management systems and workflow- and business processes- automation.
At the end of 1990s, workflow management systems with business rules processes appeared, and in 2005 Microsoft set the foundation for modern Business Process Management software, allowing business process management to start to separate from systems management and the usage of various methods to measure, optimise and automate business processes.
With workflow- and business processes- automation, organisations improve corporate performance and clients’ satisfaction, and therefore, we, at EVS Translations, have automate all our translation project processes and workflows into one state-of-the-art BPM system, and are looking forward to the near future, set to belong to blockchain-based solutions for workflow automation.
