Effektif is workflow simplified. It puts tasks in a flow and integrates your enterprise systems. The shared task list in Effektif supports collaboration. When work becomes repetitive, it’s easy to explain to Effektif how tasks are assigned and coordinated in a flow. And then it’s easy to configure interactions with other enterprise systems like email, document stores (ECM), sales solutions (CRM) or any other system.
There is an existing BPM and workflow market ($5B) with companies like Pegasystems, Appian and IBM's BPM family. These products are built for heavy duty enterprise architectures and are sometimes too much or too expensive for simple workflows.
We started Effektif because we believe that simplicity is key to make workflow work on a broad scale. Too much upfront investments require visionaries to see the value of BPM. Effektif already starts saving time as soon as work becomes repetitive. And even before that moment to be precise.
Effektif’s leadership has a solid track record in that market. Tom Baeyens has created jBPM (acquired by JBoss, now RedHat) and Activiti at Alfresco. Those are popular open source alternatives for the proprietary BPM systems. With those projects, Tom has architected a large portion of the current running BPM engines in the world.
And Signavio http://signavio.com is a successfull SaaS startup in BPM modeling that in 4 years time acquired 500+ customers and now employs 40+ people. We joined forces because we believe this market needs a much simpler and cheaper solution. Signavio is the company that made the 1.2M € investment in Effektif.
The last couple of years, the cloud has seen a massive boom of new startups that drive innovation. Much of that innovation is also applicable to workflow. Combine that inspiration with our background in BPM, the trend towards cloud computing and you can see why we got so excited that we started Effektif.
Ifttt.com and zapier.com are 2 very good examples of services from which we took inspiration. They show how integration can be made simple. Just imaging all the services you’re using right now and the events that happen in them. For example, a document got added, an email arrived, a lead object was created, etc. Effektif can use these events as triggers to start a new flow. And it’s not hard to do. Effektif helps to connect the internet of enterprise things.
In the BPM market, there is a trend towards 'Case Management', catering for more unstructured types of processes through a range of flexbility mechanisms. Also in this area, there is plenty of innovation in new collaboration SaaS products that show a simpler and much better approach. Asana, Trello, and Wunderlist show how a task becomes a small collaboration space with a rich discussion, documents and links to relevant context information for the task.
And Wufoo.com inspired us to create a simplified form builder. This allows business users to build forms that must be filled to complete tasks. No need to learn HTML or CSS for building something that works.
So basically we apply the inspiration we get from new and great cloud services to the market that we know.
Effektif offers collaboration for free and we charging for the process capabilities once you use it in teams larger than 4 users. We’re the first service that has a free solution for collaboration. Enjoy!
To wet your appetite, here's some screenshots showing Effektif in action.
A task can be as simple as a checklist item, or it can be a small collaboration space.
A process can be seen as a template or a recipe for repetitive work. In Effektif creating processes is intuitive and quick.
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