Remember the old “Things go better with Coke” commercials? The target message meant that drinking Coke with anything makes it better. For the purposes of this post, we could say “Everything goes better with effective workflow”. Adding clearly defined workflow’s to your business process definition and then finally to your software solution creates levels of control and accountability throughout the enterprise that “make it better”.
The Sarbones-Oxley Act of 2002 mandates that controls and checkpoints be put in place to meet the requirement of corporate governance. These criteria drive ownership of specific tasks within the business process and allow for easy identification of process misdirection.
Ultimately, the goal of the Sarbones-Oxley legislation is to clearly define every aspect of your business workflow so is up to the standards required to ensure a successful business process. On other words, with the right tools in place, your workflow will make everything about your business process better.
Technology and tools are available within current software solutions or as plug-ins to your business process allowing you to streamline your workflow by tracking how things get pushed throughout the system. Checks and balances coupled with integrated gates the data has to pass thru help ensure the cleanliness of a transaction and drive the accountability to a specific department or person. It gets scrubbed at every step of a transaction so the information is correct and everyone who needed to see or interact with it along the way has done so.
Workflow definition is a key step in remediation of any business process. As many business owners learn in a crisis, a lack of clearly defined workflow and the resulting problems tend to be the main reason we need to reevaluate our business process in the search if higher returns. It is vital when defining your new business processes that all of the touch points of a transaction are clearly defined in a visual representation of your companies’ workflow.
Once you have a transparent view of every step of the process it diminishes the possibility of problems in the future and allows you the benefit of improving your overall company performance.