CHALEX
An Intuitive Tool to Simplify Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to Business Process Management (BPM) focus on automating backend processes. However, with more knowledge intensive operations, the arena now requires a more agile approach towards process management. “BPM implementations require a strong understanding of the business process. But in the commercial marketing world, it can be challenging to reach immediate consensus about an accepted process. Therefore, the best solution is to simplify how process models are created and edited,” says Murray Oles, President, CHALEX Corp. The company provides web-based workflow, digital asset management, and project management software to help companies manage high-volume distributed graphic production.

CHALEX’s flagship solution, SmartFlo is an agile solution that helps project managers ensure on time delivery of goods and services. “With SmartFlo, the marketing team can create and share their workflows without the need of IT support,” explains Oles. The logical nature of SmartFlo shortens the learning curve and the ability to make changes on the fly eliminates the potential for prioritization conflicts between the IT department and the BPM users. As a hosted solution, SmartFlo places very little burden on the IT support staff.

SmartFlo creates competitive advantages for its users by helping them be agile. The solution is rapid to configure and extremely intuitive. It orchestrates project workflows and automates secure filing and sharing of digital assets. SmartFlo also provides spontaneous dashboard views of projects and jobs to help managers and their associates anticipate problems and maximize efficiency. Access to project and job assets are role-based. “Every interaction with users, assets, tasks, processes, schedules, and jobs is logged in the database. Key performance indicator reporting provides managers with the information they need to continuously improve and maintain a competitive advantage,” remarks Oles.

At one instance, CHALEX’s client, Madden Communications installed SmartFlo to manage over 12,000 annual promotions for a global beverage brand. With SmartFlo, they were able to reduce the cycle time for production and review by 50 percent. These cost and time savings lead to wide spread adoption of SmartFlo by the client’s customer. The business has since doubled the number of registered SmartFlo users and expanded the use of SmartFlo to manage all regulatory, compliance and production aspects of product marketing. At a global consumer packaged food company SmartFlo was implemented to replace an existing BPM system simply because key marketing department associates were refusing to accept the complexity and rigidness of the legacy system. Since deploying SmartFlo, all associates are engaged with the system. They have tripled the number of registered users in one year, and are now expanding the use of the system to other parts of the business.

With SmartFlo, the marketing team can create and share their workflows without the need for IT support

CHALEX is constantly innovating SmartFlo’s functionality to meet customer requirements. “This month, we are rolling out an HTML5 client to allow users to complete assigned tasks using their mobile device. This will include mobile access to the digital asset management service to upload, download, and search for archived digital assets,” says Oles. For instance, insurance companies will then be able to use the mobile service to allow customers to initiate a claim process using their mobile device. “SmartFlo. biz provides open access to individuals and affiliated groups to one multi-tenant SmartFlo instance. Users can form secure ad hoc production groups around projects. Options include access to an integrated file viewing and annotation tool that enables markup on PDF, Image, Video and 3D CAD files. SmartFlo.biz establishes a global community,” concludes Oles.