Workflow

Workflow refers to the orchestrated, repeatable pattern of activities through which resources are systematically organised into processes that transform materials, deliver services or process information. A workflow may be depicted as a sequence of operations performed by an individual, a group, an organisation or a mechanism. From a higher-level perspective, it functions as an abstract representation of real work, illustrating how documents, services or products move from one stage to another. As a structural element, workflows integrate with organisational components such as information technology systems, project structures and hierarchical arrangements, forming an essential foundation for coordinated activity.

Historical Development

The concept of workflow emerged across several overlapping eras, beginning with early attempts to rationalise work in industrial settings.

Beginnings in Manufacturing

The modern study of workflow can be traced to the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Gantt. Although the term itself was not widely used during their lifetimes, their investigations into the rational organisation of labour laid the foundations for systematic workflow analysis. Early twentieth-century industrial research introduced time and motion studies, job shop models and queuing systems based on Markov processes. The term work flow appears in technical literature as early as 1921, demonstrating growing interest in structured work organisation.

Maturation and Growth

The spread of office technologies such as the typewriter and photocopier extended workflow considerations from factory settings to administrative environments. During the mid-twentieth century, optimisation theory contributed new mathematical tools for modelling and improving workflows; linear programming, for example, originated from efforts to optimise industrial production. Large-scale projects such as those in the Second World War and the Apollo programme accelerated developments in process improvement, encouraging systematisation of complex, interdependent tasks.

Quality Era

Post-war quality management movements, led by figures such as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran, further transformed thinking about workflow. Approaches ranging from total quality management to Six Sigma shifted emphasis toward systematic process improvement. Business process reengineering later introduced more qualitative assessments of organisational flow. Simultaneously, theories addressing critical paths and bottlenecks—such as those developed by Eliyahu Goldratt—highlighted the need for dynamic coordination of interdependent tasks.
Within this period, workflow management became recognised as a specific domain concerned with the movement of information across organisational value chains. Analysis increasingly focused on cross-organisational workflows, raising issues such as data validation, verification and usage practices when information passed between different institutions.

Workflow Management Systems

A workflow management system (WfMS) is a software platform designed to define, execute and monitor a structured sequence of tasks or processes. Key aims include increasing productivity, lowering operational costs, enabling organisational agility and improving the exchange of information.
WfMS designs vary, but they typically:

• represent workflows using graphical or formal notations
• manage task execution in a process-centric or data-centric manner
• integrate with external applications through extensible interfaces
• support wide-area workflows that coordinate geographically distributed activities

These systems are widely employed in industries requiring high levels of coordination, monitoring and process reliability.

Related Concepts

Workflow connects with numerous disciplines that study work organisation and task structure.

Processes

A process is a broader concept encompassing any ordered set of actions, including physical and biological phenomena. A workflow refers specifically to processes situated within human or organisational work contexts, such as the activities occurring on a shop floor.

Planning and Scheduling

In project management, a plan specifies the logically necessary, partially ordered set of tasks required to meet a goal under given conditions. When supplemented with scheduling and resource allocation, a plan becomes an executable series of operations. A workflow may be viewed as the repeatable realisation of such a plan.

Flow Control

In operations contexts, flow control concerns dynamic regulation of work-in-motion, distinguishing it from static buffer control. This dynamic orientation is foundational for advanced job-shop strategies such as just-in-time or just-in-sequence management.

In-Transit Visibility

Monitoring the movement of parts, documents or work-in-progress constitutes in-transit visibility. This concept applies equally to physical logistics and to information workflows.

Examples of Workflows

Workflows appear in a wide range of settings:

• In machine shops, parts move through sequential processing stations.
• Insurance claims processing provides an example of a document-driven information workflow.
• Online collaborative environments such as encyclopaedia editing can be modelled as stochastic workflows.
• Personal productivity systems such as Getting Things Done represent individual information workflows.
• Follow-the-sun operations in technical support distribute work across time zones to maintain continuous progress.
• In printing industries, workflows include preflight checking, raster image processing and digital press preparation.
• Scientific research often represents its tasks and data flows as directed acyclic graphs, particularly in distributed computing contexts such as brain-imaging analysis.
• Healthcare data analysis uses workflows to structure complex sequences of analytical steps.
• Service-oriented architectures model distributed applications as executable workflows coordinated by management systems.
• Shared services may employ robotic process automation and artificial intelligence agents to execute repetitive or structured tasks.

Features and Phenomenology

Modelling

Workflow problems can be analysed using graph-theoretic frameworks such as Petri nets, which allow formal representation of concurrency, resource allocation and process dependencies. Such models support the diagnosis of bottlenecks and the simulation of alternative configurations.

Measurement

Many concepts developed for quantitative analysis of workflows derive from operations research, performance engineering and management science. These include metrics for throughput, cycle time and resource utilisation, which provide insight into system efficiency and areas in need of redesign.