Increase efficiency by digitizing business processes incrementally

Case Activities can be used to quickly and iteratively define the steps in a process. You specify which steps are required, which are optional and which ones can potentially be executed automatically without requiring a caseworker to act manually. Case Activities are designed to give you the tools to get started digitizing business processes quickly. At the same time, we focus on retaining the flexibility required for complex case management where the flow does not usually follow a linear path.

Connecting the dots in the business process

Our focus, over the last few releases of KMD WorkZone, has been to connect different parts in WorkZone in order to support digitization in a holistic and coherent fashion.

So, to give an example, you can now allow a citizen or company to initiate an application process through a self-service web form created using WorkZone Interact. Once the form is submitted, a case is automatically created in KMD WorkZone with the citizen or customer registered as a party on the case. Any supporting documentation the citizen or customer decided to include in the application is added as documents on the case. You can map any fields from the web form to fields on the case, making sure, that the data is correctly structured in KMD WorkZone from the very beginning.

Using an automatic Case Monitor in KMD WorkZone, a Case Activity List is added to the case with the process you have designed for this specific kind of application. The first activity of the Case Activity List could be to automatically send a letter to the citizen informing them that the application process has been started and what to expect during the processing of the application.

Other automatic activities could be to assign the correct caseworker to the case or set the planned processing time.

All the steps above can be configured by you in KMD WorkZone to be executed automatically as soon as the application is sent by the customer or citizen. All steps, manual or automatic, are documented on the case when they are executed.

The actual technical setup of the steps described here can be done in a few hours, saving hundreds of hours on future application processing while at the same time strengthening data quality. This is where you will quickly see the value of Case Activities - you can very quickly take the first steps towards digitizing a process without making big upfront investments.

An iterative approach to digitization

We recommend an agile, iterative design and configuration process without the need to define everything perfectly upfront. Instead start by defining the major activities, get the process into production and then evaluate how it works in a real environment – setup short iterations where you evaluate which steps need to be added, modified or removed in order to have the system ensure compliance and support the caseworker in an efficient manner. Start with small simple steps to get yourself familiarized with the different tools and methodologies and work in small iterations, gradually refining the process.

Define the steps that are always required as well as other steps that may support the process.

And don’t forget to set business goals as part of getting started with the new digitization process. What do you want to achieve? Reduction of application processing time or better compliance? How will you know if you succeed? What numbers will tell you if you are moving in the right direction?

WorkZone Case Activities can help you: 

• ensure all required steps in a process are executed
• update fields in KMD WorkZone automatically if certain conditions are met
• use data in KMD WorkZone to decide if a step in a process should be executed
• create and send documents automatically as part of a process (Using the WorkZone module SmartPost)
• In upcoming posts, we will look into how you get it all setup and what features in KMD WorkZone are needed