The power of the press

I have a good friend who worked for a company where they had an elaborate workflow design process. Their workflow was managed by PDMWorks Enterprise. (Actually back then it was Conisio.)

In my opinion their designed workflow was way to complex…but I digress… It would take quite a while for their parts to go through this workflow and my buddy was always the scapegoat! In reality the parts sat on his boss’ desk waiting for approval almost as long as my friend had them…and he had to do the design changes.

This boss was the kind of guy who was never wrong. You couldn’t go to him and directly tell him he was the root of all evil -errrrr the company’s major design flow bottle neck.

[I learned a long time ago, the best way to get someone to agree with you is to get them to think your idea was their idea in the first place.]

We told the boss about the power of PDMWorks Enterprise report generation. Since PDMWorks Enterprise tracks who did what, where and why to every document, we could generate reports showing the status of every document in the vault. It took us a few more dots to connect for this guy, but eventually he came up with the idea to generate a report showing every document in every state and the length of time it was there.

As we expected, the report showed the documents were in the “Waiting for approval” state nearly as long as in any other state! As I recall, the report was only run one or two more times, before his boss decided the reports were “not really as helpful as they should be”. Less than a month later, the workflow was changed and his boss was no longer directly involved in the approvals process.