Fremont, California-based Independence Technologies Inc was touting workflow management system software at last month’s Unix Expo show in New York. Available from December, iWork is said to be the first workflow management system designed for Unix transaction processing environments. The client-server system, which has its own graphical user interface, runs on top of Independence’s iTran or other Unix transaction processing systems, and, being scalable, is said to manage information flow at individual, departmental and enterprise-wide levels – from several individuals to several thousand, according to Independence president Kal Krishnan. iWork treats each piece of work as a separate object, leaving it to users to define attributes such as priority and classification, security needs and distribution. Each object is tracked so that current location and status and historical details are available. Supervisors can manage and control work in their area and establish logistic and routing queues day to day – they can also assign and adjust security authorisation levels. Reports on task loads and audit trails are available, and critical work-load situations can be assigned, giving advance warning of bottlenecks. Prices start at $25,000 along with the iTran transaction processing monitor, but the system is also available as a stand-alone package, or as an upgrade to existing iTran or other transaction processors.
