Sky Flow Platform

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Sciomagis Sky.Flow platform enables easy digitalization of business documents and process automation. It is designed based on decades of experience with clients ranging from small and medium businesses to enterprise organizations using world-wide usage and millions of processes each year.

Why use digitalization of your business? For the most common use – to find information you need quickly and spend more time on doing core businesses. Most analytics groups find the average user spends from 15 up to 35 percent of time to finding information. Reducing this time just for a few percentages can resolve in reducing expenses comparable to margin business makes. Expending usages from simple information search to automating processes can improve business performance needed in the ever-growing information age.

This article covers some of the digitalization challenges based on Sciomagis history of implementing document management and business process management systems and how our new Sky.Flow platform enables our clients to resolves them.

Introduction digitalization to your business introduces many challenges. Upon decision to implement digitalization in every day work environment projects are focused on implementing one set of documents and business procedures around it as a start or a pilot. Executing project takes specification writing, vendor selection, design, implementation, user trainings and/or similar phases. Once it is finished moving to another set of documents requires the same time and cost consuming efforts. Differences in projects can be small or minimal but the cost is usually similar as a time-consuming effort are repeated. Executing digitalization in this way can lead to high accumulated cost that can be discouraging and could often shadow the greater benefits of digitalization. Using a platform that could simplify design, minimize implementation costs and offer familiar user experience to reduce training could exponentially simplify digitalization process.

Business process management system (BPM) implementation offers significant improvements to performing business procedures and offers management overview to understand how is business performed and how to improve it. Execution of business procedures in BPM is often targeted at mission critical processes that can easily show return-of-investments on implementation. Other procedures are skipped as a transform to BPM execution can lead to the similar high cost of implementation. These could be administration tasks, HR requirements, maintenance and other. Although these are not core or critical procedures there are a lot of them and they take of lot of personal focus on every day work. Implementing them in the same manner as a critical one would introduce the same benefits in usually cutting back office costs and allowing employees to focus on their core business.

Implementing projects in IT environment can be focused on repeating best use-cases found in similar fields. It provides reassurance that these types of projects can be reasonably implemented and benefited from. This could involve accounts payables, ordering, contract management, HR procedures and other. Executing implementation often creates custom made solutions although similar to ones implemented in other organizations. Custom implementation creates high costs. Starting with a platform the would provide out-of-the box solution that is ready for use and then easily customized later could offer great reduction in implementation costs.

Business process solution should follow organization changes thought the years. Once solution is in place it is often costly to make changes or to maintain it. Change is usually linked to man-day cost of BPM specialist so even a small change can result in high cost of process transformation. Ideally, BPM and digitalization implementation should move in direction of inexpensive change cost implemented in system architecture and administration and change by internal IT departments, all to enable alignment of solution to the current requirements of business with minimal cost.

Document and business management solutions are often linked with big companies and organizations and the transformation of processes in their environment. But advantages that are offered with these solutions are applicable to even the smallest operations: full-text content search, access control, documents approvals and other functionalities. Cost of implementation is something that usually drives smaller businesses away from using these kinds of systems. Platform that would offer inexpensive start through online or cloud installation, self-serving administration, ready-made modules and procedures and then would scale appropriately to business needs would address large range of companies. Small businesses would benefit from all functionalities big enterprises have for the cost appropriate to them, while larger companies could use for processes not implemented in their internal systems, pilots, testing or once they move enough procedures in platform to full on-premise installation.

Sky.Flow platform addresses all of these challenges.

Sky.Flow platform is designed with specific set of goals: enable easy business digitalization, quick management of business processes, ready-made solutions for common use-cases, user empowerment and deployment options.

User empowerment is focused upon on architecting Sky.Flow platform. Enabling users to create digital archives and business processes enable organizations to have desired features of DMS/BPM system fast while reducing the cost of implementation. In the same time platform is designed to be easily customized to organizations when they needed. Goal is set for users to be enable to configure most of the desired features while external services should be focused on custom integration and similar tasks that are specific for every organization. Digitalization of different sets of business documents should be performed inside application. There is no need for multiple digitalization projects as they can be configured by end-users using the system. All common DMS properties should be included. Business process modelling should also be implemented on-the-fly removing the need to start yet another project for every business procedure in organization. Process should be modelled and executed though user interface.

Sky.platform targets usage with most features configurable by end users leaving development as option for custom integration and other organization specific features

Platform should include several out-of-the box applications and configuration: accounts payables, ordering, contract management, HR procedures.

Organizations should decide on the type Installation: start with low cost though cloud base service or use it as on-premise installation.

Sky.Flow platform provides easy business digitalization through its application Sky DocPortal. DocPortal uses dynamically defined classes of documents. Each document class can have its own set of properties that can be indexed and search upon. Further, classes have archiving rules which enable to store documents of that class in repository according to any property of the document. This can include class name, year, month and day of creation, or other properties. Classes can be nested enabling further specialization of documents while reusing parent classes configuration. System enables authorization, notifications and other commonly used DMS functionalities on the per classes base. All configuration is performed live so all changes can be used immediately without system restart.

Accounts payables is common implementation process in DMS/BPM. Sciomagis Sky.Flow platform includes award winning Sky ap.GO Accounts payables application used by some of the world’s largest organizations but also cost efficient enough for small and medium business. Application implements complete process from validity, indexing, approval to bookkeeping and archiving. Process is templatable based upon invoice properties and system settings. This enabling organizations to add specific approval processes based upon invoice content. Application has no limits to number or templates and users can add more templates on-the-fly without system restart. In this way application follows growth of the organizations adding or removing approval processes in line with organization needs. Implementation use-cases includes stories from client companies where implementation, training and production start was performed in a single day.

Sky orders.GO application supports ordering process enabling organizations to have complete process from ordering request, vendor selection, purchase order approval and communication to selected vendor. Ordering process can be linked to ap.GO invoice approving process providing complete overview from order start to invoice payment. As in ap.GO process is templatable enabling users to execute specific process or ordering based upon the properties of the order. Application features document generation from MS Word templates or similar, On-the-fly modification of authorizations, creation of e-mail messages to vendors based on templates and process data, Skipping specific authorizations according to process data, Dynamic pre-authorizations, Ready-made reports, notifications and other through modern and simple user interface.

Sky Flow BPM is a lightweight business process modelling and execution platform enabling users to create processes, execute them and implement features in the same manners as using custom developed BPM solutions by expert IT companies. Sky Flow BPM implements online workflow creation, document generation, reporting, notifications though simple and modern interface. Organization using Sky Flow BPM can also use library of prepared application packages which includes process implementation defined by Sciomagis. These packages can serve as a base implementation or can be immediately used.

Sky.Flow platform is offered as a cloud or on-premise installation. Both include Sky DocPortal solution for easy business digitalization, award winning Sky ap.GO Account payables application, Sky orders.GO application for supporting ordering process and Sky Flow BPM for creating custom business processes.

Platform is continuously enhanced with new features. Planned development for 2019. Include contracts management application, HR archiving specialized solutions, Checklist process implementations and others.

All application included are fully administered though user interface and can be further customized based on end-user needs.