Integrated document and workflow management applied to the offer processing of a machine tool company

Introducing document and workflow management systems causes two main problems:How can the supported business processes be adequately modeled? How can existing information systems and databases be integrated? Within this paper, we present tools, methods and other approaches, which are designed to solve these problems. They are illustrated by the offer processing of a machine tool company. This process starts with a customer inquiry for a particular product and finishes with a customized offer. Several levels of integrated document and workflow management are discussed in section 2. This is followed by an introduction to the current offer processing used by our partner company INA Waelzlager Schaeffler KG, in which we highlight its main weaknesses. The fourth section describes a newly developed document-oriented tool to model business processes, and which serves also as a means of analyzing the current offer processing. The subject matter of the next chapter is the prototypical realization of a document and workflow management system at INA, which also comprises integrated application programs. The objective consists of a “lean integration” in order to avoid methods like total IS-reengineering or the use of highly integrated, but rigid standard software, where these are unreasonable heavy for small to medium enterprises.