Australia’s Dataract has announced a significant update to its e5 Work Allocation Management Suite, adding a graphical workflow designer to the SharePoint solution for the first time.

Version 3 of e5 enables document imaging, automated data capture, and document management for SharePoint, plus workflow, work allocation management and business process automation.

The new e5 suite from Dataract incorporates a Studio Workflow Designer that is based on Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This is a Microsoft technology that provides tools to design and host long-running processes as workflows within .NET applications.

Dataract principal Craig Van Zeyl said the company has also recently opened a new US office to support the company’s global push for its solution to automate document driven business processes and work allocation management.

e5 manages the transformation and exchange of business critical or high valued information from paper, fax, and electronic formats more accurately, timely, and cost effectively using Microsoft SharePoint as the document repository.

Originally developed in 2003 with the first iteration of SharePoint, Dataract’s e5 is now used by  17 health insurers in Australia, as well as travel & life insurance customers and a number of pathology labs in the US.

The solution is designed to aid in automation and allocation of work across  a range of business processes including claims processing, accounts payable, case management for government users and human resources tasks such as employee onboarding and employee management.

“For mid-range enterprise users, SharePoint provides an excellent platform for imaging workflow and automating backoffice processes,” said Van Zeyl.

“NIB Health has been running e5 and SharePoint since 2005, with over 440 users handling between 3-8000 new scanned items every day without missing a beat. Correctly managed, SharePoint is a fabulous mid-range imaging and workflow solution.”

Designed to work with a variety of on-premise or bureau capture solutions, e5 was initially developed by Dataract, when the company was a Filenet reseller.

“We looked at SharePoint and figured we could deliver a lot of the functionality that Filenet was delivering for the backoffice for high volume imaging workflow and document management,” said Van Zeyl.

“We aimed to provide a highly configurable framework that delayed the point at which you needed to cut code.

“Our job is to manage the allocation, delivery and management of cases and work, not to be an all encompassing ECM. We figure that market’s been done quite well.”

e5 incorporates imaging, document management, fax management, document production, email archiving, workflow, statistical reporting and business activity monitoring to provide a total Business Process Management Suite environment.

By configuring your work structure and the underlying workflows, users can specify the flow of activities, both human and automated, and then manage that flow both graphically and in real time. e5 continuously monitors the performance against service levels, calculates the end-to-end cycle time and determines the human cost of processing.