Opinionated Workflow

Mark on Jan 11, 2017

You start out innocently enough, wanting to improve your business’s processes. You open your browser and bring up google and do a few internet searches. Before long you’re overwhelmed with terms, acronyms, and definitions. Business Process Management (BPM), Process Definition Tool (PDT), Business Process Optimization (BPO), Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Use Case Diagrams, Extended Business Modeling Language (xBML), Workflow Engines, State Transition, Process Instance, Domain Model, bpm methodology. The list goes on and on. Of course, there are plenty of very good reasons for all of those terms and formalities when managing enterprise business processes. It's just that those types of processes do not apply to most small businesses. Managing business processes at a Fortune 500 company is very different from the processes at a small to medium size business and probably do need to be more formalized. But you’re probably not a Fortune 500 company. Not yet. So why act like one? Why fight through a complicated bpm system only to realize you’re paying too much and only using very a small percentage of the bloated, overpriced package. Not to mention that your users don’t like it and feel overwhelmed. Trust us, they will. Just as we have during our careers.

What is it your business is trying to accomplish anyway? As a business owner or stakeholder, your focus is on making sure the processes at your business are completed. Completed correctly and efficiently. That your team understands and follows all the steps, in order, every time. It’s as simple as that.

Now, how do you make sure that happens? That’s where Flowmingo and our unique view on business management software will help. Go figure. We have streamlined Business Process Management. Taken out the clutter, the fluff and the senseless feature bloat. Made it simple. Made it make sense. Made it what we wish we had way back when we worked for a large telecommunications company. Where we painstakingly recreated our workflow processes (step maps) each time a change was needed and manually wrote the code to insert the updates into a database. Talk about painful. We have taken out all the formality, pageantry and complexity to give you a clean and simple interface that you and your users will appreciate. And use! We created the easy business process management system we wish we had.

Our philosophy, simplicity. Simplicity in improving processes is what drives Flowmingo development. Since launching Flowmingo in 2012 we have constantly focused on how to keep workflow management simple, focused and uncluttered. It’s what we think about when first considering a new feature or feature request. Is the feature really needed? How simple can we make it and how well does it fit in the product? Sometimes simplicity means not implementing features. Sometimes it means iterating on the way a current feature works. We strive for little or no setup, a low learning curve and as few options as possible. Sometimes keeping the product concise means a client may "outgrow" us and move on to a larger BPM suite. And that's okay.

We believe that simplicity in our product is mutually beneficial for us and our clients. For our clients, the benefit is obvious. You can bring your business processes online quickly. Usually in the matter minutes. Your users will immediately understand how they fit in the system and what is expected of them. For us, a simple, concise product means fewer bugs and fewer support requests. A simple, focused, product is a win. A win for all of us.

With Flowmingo, you draw out your business process steps, assign users to them, and connect the steps in the right order. It really is that easy. No acronyms, no long meetings, no business jargon, and no programming. Your users will follow the workflow you created, completing their tasks in the correct order. Every time.

Does bpm software really need to be any more complicated? We don’t think so.

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