The Construction Industry, Workflow, and Cherwell

I love workflow.

I was once involved in building a workflow system for a company in the construction industry using only Cherwell, and starting with only a blank canvas. The company was small enough for me to roll my sleeves up and dive in to the workings of every department.

The result was a joined up centralised workflow system for a complicated order fulfilment system that traversed a dozen departments and functions.

Given the fact that the construction industry is rated one the lowest adopters of digital transformation, it's no surprise that digitisation was become a major area of focus for improving productivity.  

One of those areas is digital workflow. As you'd expect, on-song digital workflow brings the following benefits:

• Increased efficiency
• Streamlined processes and value creation
• Quality outputs
• Better employee and customer experience

Look up any resource on the internet and most will list the following requirements for a good workflow system, ALL of which are central to Cherwell capabilities.

• Transparency. Cherwell acts as a centralised system within it's CSMe bundle offering of ITSM, PPM, HRSM and FM. Plus a range of over 50 custom-built mergeable applications from its App Marketplace, many of which are free.
• Automation. At core of Cherwell capability is its Automation Engine. Visual, Threshold-Based or Simple Action/Event Process. Easy drag and drop triggers and actions quickly fires up the automation engines.
• Flexibility. Workflows are process unique, Cherwell allows for custom-built workflows through Service Catalogue Templates. Well understood and proven workflows can easily be custom-moulded for specific requirements.  

Here's one I built for HRSM, I'm calling it Workflow Lite (WFL). It basically triggers steps in the process flow as you complete the previous dependent steps. You could easily add a new custom-workflow within a day. Compare that against the costs of inefficiencies of a manual tracker based system, and there's your ROI right there..

Of course there's much more to Cherwell workflow than this, and this includes almost everything you can possibly think of.

As I proved in my opening paragraph in this article, you can build a business on it. At the very least, it can act as a go-between amongst your other systems and departments.  

So crucially, what is so pertinent with using Cherwell for workflow in the construction industry?

In my experiences I have found that I the high volume of complex project task activities vs the requirement for the workflow to easily fit like a glove, was a huge delta in the capabilities of the construction industry vertical software solutions. 

Finally, I leave you with this. Your company will already have an ITSM toolset at it's disposal that may have the capabilities to leverage the same possibilities. If this is the case, let the conversation turn to TCO...