NHL’s Vancouver Canucks implement BPM

The Vancouver Canucks are implementing a unified communication system to boost business process management within it’s Vancouver Arena, GM Place. This three year project will implement Nortel Networks Corp’s VC product suite. This software will allow voice, data and wireless communications to function together to improve the business process throughout the arena. IT World Canada covers the story here. The management is expecting this software to improve internal communications and even beyond that. Concession stands are hoping that the new software will help them to, by monitoring the amount of food in stock at individual stands. Security is also expected to be affected, as they can direct security guards in real time to where they’re needed most.

Intalio Releases Latest version of Intalio BPMS

As reported here, Intalio released version 5.2 of Intalio BPMS. The biggest benefit is the real-time process monitoring that has been added to the capabilities. Titled Business Activity Monitoring, this allows companies to define Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and sets alerts for business process activity. The dashboard shows both charts and graphs, and reports created can be exported into PDF format. CEO and founder Ismael Ghalimi also mentioned that:

Interoperability is another cornerstone of the release. Intalio BPMS is now certified to work with a broader combination of application servers, databases, hardware and operating system

Anacomp's CaseLogistix is Named Trend-Setting Product of 2008

MarketWatch reports that Anacomp’s business process solution CaseLogistix has been named Trend-Setting Product of 2008 by KMWorld.

CaseLogistix allows legal teams to organize, review, and analyze digital evidence. CaseLogistix was noted for its value, functionality, and ability to streamline different business processes. Wayne Ford, Anacomp's Senior Vice President of Marketing mentions:

"We are honored to have CaseLogistix recognized as an innovative and trend-setting product. Our inclusion on this list exemplifies our position in the litigation support and content management realms as both a pioneer and a leader."

What are some applications that your company is using to ease business processes? Is the application your company using buzz worthy, or is it time to look for another vendor?

How to start your process management

In a recent article at TV Technology, they talk about approaching business process one step at a time. Business process management is all about aligning your business goals with technology. When the technology changes, its important to see that your processes shift, too. With this software integration of your business to technology, it’s important to see that you’re continually improving and developing your business processes. It’s also important to realize that your technology falls in line with the way your business and people work.

Some of the greatest results that come out of aligning technology with current processes are the agility that comes into your organization and how communication is increased as a result of the formalized processes.

The article also gives a great starting point to adapt process management, document your current processes (colons are used for lists, so you just need a comma instead. Once you’ve done this, you can see which process would benefit the most from turning it into a business process.

Savvion Planning Customized BPM Solutions for India

As announced in this article from CXOtoday, Ma Ketabchi, CEO of Savvion mentioned that Savvion is “planning a hot of customized BPM solutions”. The specific sectors they are targeting include healthcare, retail, and BFSI. In addition, the company will launch the Savvion Business Solutions Alliance Program. As Ketabchi stated:

‘The core objective of the program is to aid in developing more and more business applications for enterprises. Companies such as Oracle and SAP develop business applications that only have broad applicability, but companies need much more than that.”

Managing Your Business

This afternoon I came across this post ‘Manage Your Business in 4 Easy Steps’ from Jeremiah Whitehead on GK Business. He details four steps business should take in order to ensure that their business will not fail. Here’s a brief recap of what he proposes.

1. People – Your company’s first concern should be to keep employees happy. By creating an environment where people know exactly what to do, you will ensure that the quality of the product/service does not suffer.
2. Applications - Using good business process management software can provide structure, control, and an easier way for people to manage conflicts. Applications that employers use on a daily basis can be controlled and monitored through BPM software.
3. Databases – Databases can wreak havoc within the organization. Make sure that your BPM software allows for the programmability in multiple languages to avoid this problem.
4. Quality Control – With solid tools and BPM software in your company you can rest assured that the quality of work will be high.

What steps has your business taken to create a more efficient and effective workplace?

Kaiser Permanente adopts new BPM software

According to The Call Center Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare company, has adopted Pegasystem Customer Process Manager for Health Care. They’ve adopted this system in order to: optimize customer experience, drive higher first call resolution rates, and lower call handling times. The CPM HC is built specifically for health care organizations and will help Kaiser Permanente by giving them software that includes: multi-channel, intent-driven customer service to increase productivity, loyalty and growth.

Alan Trefler, the CEO of Pegasystems had this to say:

"We are delighted that Kaiser Permanente has selected Pegasystems to support their contact centers. Kaiser Permanente is well respected for its high customer service rankings and the deployment of BPM technology will allow them to reach even higher standards of excellence for customer care and quality of service."

Toyota Motor Europe Selects Active Endpoints

Toyota motor announced, as reported in this article from market watch, that they have been able to successfully use ActiveVOS. According to the article

An application orchestrated by ActiveVOS enables users to more readily access Toyota's sales education curriculum, guaranteeing that the education is widely used within the company and that each student's progress is tracked.

In response to the news, Eric Egertson, VP of Sales for Active Endpoints stated:

“We are pleased that Toyota Motor Europe selected Active Endpoints to develop their SOA applications. Modernizing important systems like learning management to take advantage of ActiveVOS's business process management (BPM) and workflow capabilities delivers immediate return on investment."

Microsoft: Does it own the BPM space?

BPM means different thing to everyone in the corporate world. This post on The Register discusses that whether you view BPM as Business Performance Monitoring, Business Process Modeling or Business Process Management Microsoft seems to be leading vendors in supplying users with workflow solutions, middleware, analytics, and much more.

It will be interesting to see how some of Microsoft’s competitors like IBM, Oracle, and Lombardi will position its BPM Suites to combat Microsoft’s majority share of this area. What are your thoughts on Microsoft and BPM?

Haldiram looks to Infogain Corporation for BPM

According to Moneycontrol, Haldiram, a manufacturer of famous Indian snacks, has turned to Infogain to help align their retail manufacturing needs. Infogain will help develop and implement a dispatch management solution to streamline its business processes across it’s global network of manufacturing units. Infogain is known for its expertise in retail business process management.

Pramod Kapoor, Infogain’s retail delivery services head, had this to say about the deal:

“Infogain has extensive experience in planning and executing implementations that optimize our client’s business processes. We aim to provide a reliable and futuristic automation solution to Haldiram that will redefine its dispatch management practices to bring in more productivity and business efficiency. Infogain’s technology framework, tools and best practices will ensure minimum risk and high operational competence for Haldiram’s business. Infogain will follow a planned approach and methodology to execute and deliver the solution in the most timely and cost-effective manner.”

Positives of BPM

This post from big think, eloquently explains the many benefits of business process management. As the post states, Gartner has forecasted the BPM will continue to rise, and investment in these practices will have a correlating trajectory. Below is a summary of the “advantages of BPM”:

1. Save time and money
2. Improve quality of work
3. Curing business processes
4. Realization of process automation
5. Implementation team
6. Optimization Process
7. Knowledge based enterprises to change

This list highlights some of the positives of BPM but what are other benefits that your organization has seen after utilizing these type of processes?

HCL Automates BPM for the State of Nebraska

MarketWatch reports that The State of Nebraska’s Worker’s Compensation Court has awarded HCL America Inc. a contract to create a Business Process Management application and framework.

The court has invested much time in trying to become a ‘paperless’ court, but in its efforts has had a tough time tracking and reporting data on events as workers compensation filings pass for approvals. BPM tools can automate this process and make a paperless environment work. The objectives of NWCC is to streamline workers compensation processes while separating process management rules and controls from structured data interaction.

Pitny’s Delicious Foods looks to BPM for efficiency

Business process management can increase the speed and efficiency of data running through a company. IT Business of Canada has the report here. Pitney’s Delicious Foods, of Burlington, Ontario, is looking to increase exactly those things while reducing the number of errors in their data keeping by adapting BPM. This fresh and frozen chicken product company is looking for their “Golden Egg” by investing in new BPM software but installing using products within SAP and Business Objects. Their aim is to help the migration of reporting processes from excel sheets to a fully automated process. With their current software, it takes five days to produce sales and financial reports. Within these reports, there tends to be errors due to the manual work required with an Excel sheet.

With this new software, they hope to automate this process which will lead to better control of their inventory, and in turn leave them with better warehouse stock numbers and provide them with more accurate restocking schedules.

The next step in their process to implementing BPM is to install the software, a seven week process. This new software will show the benefits of an automated process from the front lines of the factory to upper level management, as they will now have better control over their inventory numbers.

E-mails Role in Business Process Management

This article discusses how e-mail, instead of being simply a supplement to BPM, has morphed into a tool that is increasingly taking up more and more of an employees time. The author, Ramon Padilla, quotes Ross Mayfield, President of Socialtext,

“(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”

Padilla further expands by discussing reasons as to why e-mail has become time consuming in organizations:

1. [We are] Making it up as we go along
2. Not enforcing business process
3. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs
4. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms
5. Lack of communication alternatives besides e-mail

These points raise questions regarding organizations use of BPM. If e-mail is taking up much of an employees time as a way to deal with exception in BPM, does this mean that the company does not have effective business processes in place? Do you agree with the author’s points? Is there anything you would add or detract from the list above?

Iontas Helps Solve BPM Issues

According to this article on Market Watch, Iontas has added a function in their Focus software suite which will capture every step that people take to conduct business tasks, without interrupting their work or requiring integration. The application will graphically map out how processes are being followed, which will be a huge help for managers in order to determine where and how to focus resources for process improvement.

This software will end guessing games about how people use information technology. With focus, managers can look forward to improving efficiency and reducing operational costs. Iontas CEO Joe Stockton mentions:

"Every manager at every company needs to understand their processes before they can optimize them.”

Community College moves to BPM

In a recent article by Fox Business, they reported that Edmonds Community College, in Washington state, is transforming to a BPM system to manage their processes. They believe that by automating the business process, they will improve the efficiency of the administration and improve employee activity

The new system they’ve adopted, Liquid Office, will help create, deploy, route, approve and manage many digital documents a year. The current system for management of documents is primarily done with paper.

Here is what Victor Portolese, manager, Application Development Services at Edmonds Community College, had to say about their transition:

"Previously, all of our administrative information was managed using paper-based processes that were labor intensive and prone to error. We required a solution that would reduce the time and costs associated with the management of forms while also integrating easily with our existing system framework. The LiquidOffice solution provides us with out-of-the-box robust capabilities that can be rapidly tailored and deployed by our staff with little to no programming. With Autonomy Cardiff, we will be able to automate and streamline our HR-related business processes that have historically been paper based, helping to decrease the time it takes to process our digital forms, while increasing our employees' productivity.”

BPM and SOA

This latest post on SOA Evolution details the evolution of business process management from the 1980’s all the way to today’s day and age. In the 1980s BPM consisted of jotting down processes on pen and paper, getting a team of programmers to build it, and then implementing it usually on one huge computer. In the 1990s BPM changed to a more organizational approach. Systems included process diagrams, IT and business change. It is easier to make sense of business process management than SOA, and this is why businesses are hesitant to embrace SOA. IT departments are aware that SOA is needed in order to make SOA work, and this is how BPM will eventually “save” SOA.

Business Processes and Management

Adopting a business process approach to management can sometimes be difficult to navigate. This article from BPMenterprise.com offers a useful guide on the appropriate steps needed. First as they say, the two questions that are asked about this process are

“Who are your customers/stakeholders, and what are the benefits that your organization offers them?”

After determining the answer to that question, the following outline can be applied in order to implement a business process approach to management.

1. Determine the value chains that deliver these benefits
2. Decompose the process and determine the process boundries
3. Select appropriate metrics based on critical success factors for the identified processes and overall strategy
4. Appoint process owners for each core process
5. Begin a never ending cycle of business process improvement

Is there anything that you would change in this outline, or is this a process that you would follow?