Historically, new processes are expensive
Typically, all organisations have many IT systems which have been built over the years to provide core business functionality. Each year, business groups must compete for limited development time and resources to get changes made across the systems to support new customer services or enhancements to streamline existing business processes. The business and IT will prioritise core functionality changes and many other improvement ideas will be placed in a “backlog” to be dealt with at a later time (if ever). In the meantime, business groups have to plough ahead somehow, and often this involves setting up a manual, workaround processes using spreadsheets, email, desktop databases and hand-crafted SQL. This approach is not IT-compliant, it’s not scalable, it’s not multi-user, it risks revenue loss, security breaches and is a new source of errors. However, stuck between a rock and a hard place, it’s the only option available.
PhixFlow provides new approach
At PhixFlow we believe that many of these new processes can be configured outside of the existing IT infrastructure, but in a way that is still IT-compliant. Using PhixFlow a designer configures new “applications” which leverage the functionality of existing IT systems. To introduce a new piece of non-core business functionality, it is no longer necessary to change each of the core IT systems (at some expense). Instead, with drag and drop modelling and spreadsheet-like expressions the designer can configure new components:
- Forms to display data and take user input
- Menus and buttons to link forms, dashboards, workflows, data processing models etc.
- Dashboards to display linked data grids and various graphical charts
- Data processing models to read data from anywhere and then process the data to enrich, blend, merge and transform in anyway needed to support the application
- Integration models to update any system either directly or using APIs, or to communicate with web services, send emails with attachments etc.
The PhixFlow approach is IT-compliant
Secure
Integrate with your company’s authorisation and access controls and define who has access to both applications and data
Scalable
Capable of processing hundreds of millions of records an hour
Multi-user
Able to handle processes from one to thousands of simultaneous users
Documented
All logic and rules contained and documented in one place
Auditable
All user actions and changes are tracked in PhixFlow
Provide apps in the office and on smartphones
The PhixFlow applications that you design for use (over browsers) in the office can also be published as native smartphone apps to provide business functionality at the time and place that it is needed. Simple smartphone apps might only enable the user to view the latest state of some key data. However, because PhixFlow delivers the same configurable functionality to both browser and smartphones, the phone app can also be set up with forms and menus to take user input when the user is remote from the office.
