WAS (Workflow Automation System) is a new ingredient in IT infrastructure. Many vendors are now coming in the market of WAS. It is getting popularity and hope we will see some serious generic implementation in the near future. WAS, as implemented by many organizations, has proved itself as an excellent replacement of manual workflow systems of organization. Organization now moving toward WAS because many of them really don’t want paper full offices. In fact they want paperless offices. WAS has many advantage over manual workflow systems but before describing its advantages let me define the two terms, workflow and automation.

Workflow is defined as the flow of documents in any organization from one member of the organization to the other or from one member to group of peoples or may be between departments and usually it is.

For example if I am the manager of production and my company has two departments only. Suppose our company’s sales department got an order from customer. Sales department needs to forward this order to production department. Now sales department have a choice, they can forward the order to production department with out wasting of time or may be they wait for a whole day, collect all orders from different customers, complied them in a file format and at the end of the day forward them to production department.