A picture-perfect workflow

The National Gallery in London—which houses a renowned collection of Western European paintings—is home, too, to some new business process management (BPM) software.

The National Gallery's Photographic Department has rolled out the BizFlow BPM platform from HandySoft. The solution is expected to improve the efficiency with which photographic jobs are processed, providing visibility of task status to department coordinators, generating management reports and creating an audit trail of completed work.

"A crucial factor in our choice of BPM solution is its capacity to support a variety of other business processes in the Gallery," says Richard Allen, systems development manager. "We have approximately 300 network users and I believed that much of our work, both within and between departments, could benefit from business process support. It is a positive sign for us that staff in the Photographic Department are impressed by the system's user friendliness."

The Photographic Department is responsible for providing a variety of technical, conventional and digital photographic services. Its main responsibilities are to produce records of works of art during conservation, support the Gallery's exhibition and education programs, and supply images for publication and a historical record of the gallery and its activities so that images can be reproduced. The department is also responsible for ensuring that the images are accurately recorded in the Gallery's asset management system and stored in controlled conditions in the photographic archive.

Using the graphical process design editor in the solution, analysts can map the business processes and rules that specify how jobs are routed. When a job instruction is received, the coordinator captures the details, sets deadlines and uses the pre-set processes to route the job to the appropriate photographer. Once completed, the work is sent back to the specified manager for approval. If modifications are necessary, it is routed to the photographer until approval is given.