Dr. Carlos Ferreira

Historical development[edit]

The development of the concept of workflow occurred over a series of loosely defined, overlapping, eras.

Beginnings in manufacturing[edit]

The modern history of workflows can be traced to Frederick Taylor[6] and Henry Gantt, although the term 'workflow' was not in usage as such during their lifetimes.[7] One of the earliest usages of the term 'work flow' was in a railway engineering journal from 1921.[8]

Taylor and Gantt launched the study of the deliberate, rational organization of work, primarily in the context of manufacturing. This gave rise to time and motion studies.[9] Related concepts include job shops and queuing systems (Markov chains).[10][11]

The 1948 book Cheaper by the Dozen introduced the emerging concepts to the context of family life.

Maturation and growth[edit]

The invention of the typewriter and the copier helped spread the study of the rational organization of labor from the manufacturing shop floor to the office. Filing systems and other sophisticated systems for managing physical information flows evolved. Two events provided a huge impetus to the development of formalized information workflows. First, the field of optimization theory matured and developed mathematical optimization techniques. Second, World War II and the Apollo program were unprecedented in their demands for the rational organization of work.

Quality era[edit]

In the post-war era, the work of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran led to a focus on quality, initially in Japanese companies, and from the 1980's on a more global level, giving rise to a variety of movements ranging from total quality management to Six Sigma, then to more qualitative notions of business process re-engineering.[12] Under the influence of the quality movement, workflows, in knowledge economy sectors[13] as well as in manufacturing, became the subject of further scrutiny and optimization efforts. Acknowledgement of the dynamic and changing nature of the demands on workflows came in the form of recognition of the phenomena associated with critical paths and moving bottlenecks.[14]

Workflow management system[edit]

See main article Workflow management system

Related concepts[edit]

The concept of workflow is closely related to several fields in operations research and other areas that study the nature of work, either quantitatively or qualitatively, such as artificial intelligence (in particular, the sub-discipline of AI planning) and ethnography. The term workflow is more commonly used in particular industries, such as printing and professional domains, where it may have particular specialized meanings.

Processes: A process is a more general notion than workflow and can apply to physical or biological processes, for instance; whereas a workflow is typically a process or collection of processes described in the context of work, such as all processes occurring in a machine shop.

Planning and scheduling: A plan is a description of the logically necessary, partially ordered set of activities required to accomplish a specific goal given certain starting conditions. A plan, when augmented with a schedule and resource allocation calculations, completely defines a particular instance of systematic processing in pursuit of a goal. A workflow may be viewed as an (often optimal or near-optimal) realization of the mechanisms required to execute the same plan repeatedly. [15]

Flow control is a control concept applied to workflows, to distinguish from static control of buffers of material or orders, to mean a more dynamic control of flow speed and flow volumes in motion and in process. Such orientation to dynamic aspects is the basic foundation to prepare for more advanced job shop controls, such as just-in-time or just-in-sequence.

In-transit visibility is a monitoring concept that applies to transported material as well as to work in process or work in progress, i.e., workflows.

Examples[edit]

The following examples illustrate the variety of workflows seen in various contexts:

In machine shops, particularly job shops and flow shops, the flow of a part through the various processing stations is a work flow.

Insurance claims processing is an example of an information-intensive, document-driven workflow.

Wikipedia editing can be modeled as a stochastic workflow.

The Getting Things Done system is a model of personal workflow management for information workers.

In software development, support and other industries, the concept of follow-the-sun describes a process of passing unfinished work across time zones.[16]

In traditional offset and digital printing, the concept of workflow represents the process, people and usually software technology (RIPs raster image processors or DFE digital front end) controllers that play a part in pre/post processing of print-related files. e.g. PDF pre-flight checking to make certain that fonts are embedded or that the imaging output to plate or digital press will be able to render the document intent properly for the image-output capabilities of the press that will print the final image.

In Scientific experiments, the overall process (tasks and data flow) can be described as a Directed