LongJump’s introduction of its new Workflow Designer had some great comments from the media. Its ability to map, route and automate business processes is something everyone can easily understand and see value from. Plus, its uniquely simple visual design definitely breaks away from most web-based applications.

Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch says in “LongJump Wants You to Stop Pushing Paper Around the Office“:

“This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various ‘in’ and ‘out’ boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.”

Leslie Poston of Profy says in “LongJump Releases New Features“:

“Workflow is a nice addition, not only because it helps all of the features of LongJump work together well, and go to work for you, making sure emails are sent, events are added to the calendar, customers are served promptly and more, but also because it does the same with the third party applications.”

Phil Wainewright of ZDNet analyzes the entire customization trend in “Customization: curse or blessing?”

 ”Smart vendors are the ones that, like LongJump, go the extra mile and actually build applications that their business customers will find useful. This tackles both aspects of the curse of customization: you give people somewhere to start, and you constrain them into choices where you at least have some idea of what their needs are likely to be, so you can make sure you’ve built those needs into the platform already.”

David Sims of TMCNet says:

“Human Resources may establish a customized workflow process for new job candidates, whereby the workflow process takes the potential candidate’s record through multiple hand-offs and stages, including resume review, telephone interview, in-person interview and multiple interviewer sign-offs and approvals.”

Businesses are faced with a rising challenge today: There is more data that they have to deal with rather than not enough. This fact, coupled with the increased speed in which everything now has to happen, has meant that businesses more than ever have to take all of that data and automate as much of their actions as possible to maximize productivity.

Workflows themselves are nothing new. Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Business process reengineering, and Lean systems have all focused on some aspects of workflow management and improvement. By establishing and standardizing best practices, many organizations have streamlined the physical aspects of operational tasks.

But more often than not, the software tools to move that information across the organization (such as forms, faxes, emails and even intranets) have not kept up, involving additional complexity, consultation, and process-slowing human error. Systems that are built are often customized to such a point that changing them would cost businesses considerable time and expense. And in most cases, workflows are only built for the most important activities rather than the most common.

LongJump today introduces a graphical Workflow Designer to help businesses map out their data-driven, repeatable processes and route actions across an organization, enabling consistent best practices and streamlining delivery cycles. With the easy-to-use, web-based Workflow Designer, users sharing data and activities in LongJump are empowered to improve operational efficiency and quality and information flow.

With a simplified workflow metaphor, yet with extensive capabilities to support to virtually any business process, both simple and compless processes can be automated and routed throughout an organization. Everything from vacation and expense approvals to hiring processes to creative production projects, to service delivery can be mapped out in LongJump, its data stored, information and actions routed to key constituents, and its status maintained.

To learn more about how to create workflows using LongJump, click here for the feature guide.

Last year, LongJump gave a sneak peak of the customizable business applications platform at the Under the Radar conference presented in Mountain View, California by Dealmaker Media. Today LongJump is back as a member of the Graduate Circle comprising a hand-picked group of companies that have “graduated” from being under the radar and are gaining major momentum.

If you happen to be in Microsoft’s offices, do stop by the break area where we can show you some of the cool new stuff we’re working on. Our CEO Pankaj Malviya is also going to be presenting an update about our current successes as well as our vision and plan going forward.

By the looks of the companies showcased and our own momentum, it is an exciting time to be providing webware business services and applications as more of your typical backend operations and enterprise data moves necessarily to the web. The on-demand application promise is key to strengthening collaboration, management and information exchange between staff, departments, partners, and customers.

Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco had a followup interview with CEO Pankaj Malviya and how LongJump was able to reach a point of self-sufficiency and profitability without backing from any venture capital firms.

Pankaj states that when you are bootstrapping on your own, the key is working every customer relationship to its full potential so you can build revenue as well as an enduring customer.