BP Logix

As economic growth spreads across the globe, one of the main engines of progress is manufacturing. Especially in the United States, which produces more than 18% of the world’s goods, the manufacturing sector is driving not only financial health, but also innovation. Increasingly, manufacturing companies are looking for competitive advantages which are being facilitated by business process management as a way to encourage digital transformation. Organizations that are effectively pairing agile business process management (BPM) with things like Six Sigma and other operational excellence frameworks are able to move fast to respond to market trends and customer demands.

Digital Transformation is Necessary for Manufacturing

To realize just how important manufacturing agility and innovation is to business growth, consider just how important and impactful it is to the U.S. economy:

• In 2018, manufacturing drove 12% of overall economic output, accounting for $2.3 trillion.
• Every dollar spent to develop and improve manufacturing operations contributes $1.89 in business growth to other economic sectors.
• Manufacturing in the U.S. is projected for continued growth into 2020 and beyond.

The primary benefits of digital transformation in manufacturing include better efficiency and reduced costs. Those two goals alone, once achieved at a sustainable scale, can create massive value for companies that want to differentiate themselves from competitors. Manufacturers that are employing digital transformation strategies that can immediately address a variety of use cases where innovation can deliver incremental changes in quality, performance, process management, analysis, or other aspects of operations.

Agile and Six Sigma in Manufacturing Digital Transformation?

Technology intended to support manufacturing can often look overly complex. But when agile and Six Sigma thinking is applied to it, one starts to recognize that technology is really only focused on getting the actions in the manufacturing process from point A (initiating manufacturing activity) to point B (finished product) faster, and more efficiently that was done previously.

Digital transformation enables this simplification of these processes through the application of effective BPM principles. Typically, processes handle everything involved with the development, creation, collaboration, and fulfillment of every manufactured good. BPM forces organizations to identify not just what points A and B are, but also incorporate workflow management software to determine what intermediary steps are involved in every process, and evaluate how valuable and/or important those steps are.

Manufacturing organizations have to know what’s happening at every step in every process. This includes development-related documents (many of which don’t fit standard document types, like blueprints and photographic images), compliance information, change orders, distribution tracking, parts ordering, inventory control, and a massive number of actionable steps that must be included in order to be optimized. A surprising number of manufacturers operate with a cobbled-together structures of paper-based systems and manual operations that are impediments to speed. Ad hoc processes used to manage the flow of unstructured data can create knowledge gaps which can slow processes and even prevent essential data from being part of the manufacturing continuum.

Streamlining Manufacturing Business Operations

Especially as manufacturing becomes more complex through the addition of additional content sources, suppliers, and other stakeholders, BPM is needed as a foundation to streamline every aspect of manufacturing processes. It helps eliminate organizational redundancy AND oversight, both issues which contribute to slow down of activity and confusion. These are the “enemies” that digital transformation seeks to eradicate, and an effective BPM solution like Process Director rapidly delivers an actionable framework for elements such as:

• Product development: Gone are the days when a blueprint was created and then years and years of consistent delivery of that product constituted a healthy business. Today’s planning and design requires the input of many (often many who are not internal employees) and it must be adaptable so incremental improvements can be made along the way. A BPM solution like Process Director enables collaboration, data management, and change capabilities through its lightweight, low-code application development capabilities.
• Procurement: To get the best cost efficiency, companies need an agile approach to working with vendors and suppliers. The ability to rapidly integrate with a stakeholder’s systems and share necessary data means fewer roadblocks on the way to incorporating the advantages of that vendor into your own processes.
• Production: Here again, the essence of effective manufacturing is getting from point A to point B quickly, painlessly, and with the right outcomes. However, in today’s connected world, nothing seems linear, so making that connection is a major challenge for companies that are producing goods. To overcome that, BPM can act in a way that captures data and assets, includes the necessary inputs from the right people, and ensures that all of that information is available, automated, and correctly inserted across and throughout processes.
• Distribution: Manufacturers need visibility and awareness so they can fulfill orders and plan accordingly for changes in demand. Process Director provides unique functionality in this regard through the use of its patented Process Timeline, which models workflows to anticipate capacity, demand, and activity. This predictive analysis means better notifications for stakeholders, as well as automated reassignment and rerouting at the earliest possible notice that a future milestone or deadline might be at risk.

The right mix of digital innovation with a logical BPM-focused approach means that manufacturers can build a framework to rapidly and efficiently coordinate their operations. Process Director is purpose-built with the needs of enterprises that take advantage of modern methods to operate their manufacturing with lean, agile principles. As the economy gets more complex, Process Director is helping to simply how manufacturing gets done.

“In practice, digital process automation (or DPA) refers to the use of intelligent interpretation, automation and presentation of business solutions to their intended service customers. DPA includes by nature the dynamic assembly or reordering of a given process, based on declared business objectives and customer requirements.”

- Jason English, Analyst, Intellyx

From workflow management software to BPM, now to digital process automation – it can be difficult to keep up with the ever-changing trade terms… and the overlaps therein. Digital process automation (DPA) enables enterprises to identify and manage new channels where their data and services can be pushed, and when paired with technologies facilitating this journey (often sharing space with BPM platforms), it provides companies with major competitive advantages over those who still rely on traditional methods. Not all organizations that tout themselves as BPM have the agility or adaptability to facilitate business goals around digital process automation, and now more and more that do provide these advantages are promoting themselves as DPA platforms.

Processes have always been at the foundation of how businesses operate, and in an environment where organizations seek to increase their reach through new channels, they are using modern technologies like the cloud, machine learning, and even social media to extend their digital footprint. It’s through this digital process transformation that companies are able to become more efficient and better able to deliver their services and brand.

Process Director includes DPA capabilities like a foundation of rapid application development, as well as smart forms, predictive process management, and a flexible deployment model. This creates a comprehensive solution that makes Process Director a digitally-enabled DPA platform that dramatically shrinks the gap between technology functionality and desired business outcomes.

DPA for Stakeholder Engagement 

A platform created to be a digital process automation solution will give you the means to engage your customers, gain exposure, and increase customer satisfaction and retention, simply and quickly, without the overhead of traditional software development or legacy packaged applications.

This solution should be agile, and support rapid environments with automation, case management, predictive analytics, and more. As well, a low-code BPM approach to rapid application development gives the ability to be highly responsive for all types of stakeholders, and digital capabilities means the solution will be able to reach those stakeholders through channels where they are accustomed to operating.

Does Digital Process Automation Just Mean Agile and Innovative BPM?

There is still an overlap between BPM and DPA, and the products that successfully embody this new generation of digitally transformative tools fulfill the promise of helping companies be more customer-focused, as well as enabling the employ of analytics and other context-necessary data. As market competition becomes fiercer, there is a corresponding need to provide immediate access to processes and data. DPA platforms pave the way for these digitally transformative applications, ones that that facilitate efficient management and the streamlining needed for an organization to be a market leader and instill a culture of growth.

With DPA combined with BPM, enterprises are able to build, operate, and automate processes that are driven by both data and human decision-making, and they can also then distribute and connect them more effectively as business needs change and adapt. When different types of stakeholders can contribute to process development and goals, the organization benefits from a more collaborative mindset and lens; this provides and advantage in both technology and business scenarios because data is used more efficiently and the enterprise gets a more accurate view of how data and applications are being used.

DPA and BPM combined in Process Director

Process Director brings process automation to an organization's digital transformation initiatives in a number of different ways: for one thing, it delivers a scalable, no-code platform that is widely used by IT as well as business users. This democratizes enterprise problem solving so it can be extended to anyone, irrespective of whether or not they have a background in coding. Process Director operates as a perfect marriage of BPM with digital process automation capabilities by providing:

• Diverse platform deployment options including on-premises, cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid environments.
• Multiple APIs, connectors, and other frameworks for using and distributing data across third-party apps and even IoT.
• Smart forms and menu-driven builders for easy data capture and usage.
• Ability to combine structured and unstructured data into different types of process patterns.
• Case management capabilities for project focus and sophisticated, case-aware applications and reports.
• Process Timeline, which enables a simple, rapid, and time-aware way to execute a process-driven engine for digital channels.

IT can no longer operate as the sole driver of digital change; there is simply too much demand placed on IT departments from businesses hungry to adapt and move fast to meet aggressive business goals. Digital process automation helps by giving organizations a way to both distribute operations and to increase the reach of the results of those operations. Process Director helps by implementing digital business excellence across the entire organization, so that a company is better equipped to manage their human capital and optimize their technology investments.

Through DPA combined with BPM, the tactical steps required of processes are able to be managed in an automated process flow. The human element can enhance automation with insights that can be used as needed to refine outcomes. Together, these two operate to make efficient organizations equipped to put those efficiencies to work immediately, and for those who can best benefit from them.

How Does BPM Help Operational Excellence?

“An organization cannot simply shut down operations while processes are re-tooled for operational excellence.”

With greater flexibility and a framework for innovation, business process management (BPM) is improving how organizations apply technology towards their digital transformation goals. More than ever this connection is integral to an organization’s cultural improvements, as well as their contributions to overall operational excellence. BPM is driving digital transformation, and with it, is delivering greater efficiency, more widespread user adoption, and agility. All of these create an environment of continuous innovation. And now everything from meeting business goals to the management of IT infrastructures are undergoing a rapid evolution of operational capabilities, paralleling the evolutionary path of BPM technology itself.

Better outcomes through BPM and Operational Excellence

There is not just a single way to apply business process management for operational transformation. Organizations must be thoughtful in their approach— perhaps it’s employee efficiency, more collaboration, reduction in paper-based processes, or any myriad of outcomes. For organizations that have a concept of what “ideal” looks like, they will find that BPM provides them a platform to make the changes required to transform the way they operate and the results they get.

With an organizational mindset that encourages collaboration, efficiency, and continuous improvement towards becoming a true digital enterprise, BPM acts as a foundation for transformation. The right tools in the right organization can go a long way towards helping transform how work is accomplished, but giving people the ability to actively engage with these tools and contextual data to effect change is what truly has a transformative effect.

Process Director delivers a complete operational platform for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, one that provides low-code development, application integration, AI-driven decision-making capabilities, and other elements that map to organizational transformation goals. For those who rely on processes to drive their business goals, Process Director is recognized as much more than workflow software - it's a fundamental platform for how they operate their business.

Organizations that want to improve their operations through their digital transformation efforts need to concentrate their efforts around three key areas:

BPM Adoption and Usage

To build engaging tools that meet the needs of fast-moving organizations, Process Director delivers a way to create sophisticated, low-code digital applications that take into account the necessary data and workflow sources on the back-end, and considers how users on the front-end will actually use an application within a process. By being able to create simple apps that integrate relevant information, including smart forms and processes, users can get information they need, can contribute with their own informed input, and can glean insights that will help them perform better.

To truly enhance operational efficiency, processes must be easy to use for those who need to build and use them. True BPM provides that and reflects it in elegant, simple usability that encourages repeatability and adoption.

Collaboration is Key to Operational Excellence

With capabilities that facilitate connecting and communicating across departments, and even externally, BPM enables organizations in creating a digital environment where applications, forms, and data sources can be included into a collective portal. This delivers the assets, timelines, and other important information needed to change how work gets done. It enables more engagement and participation, too, because it is optimized to deliver and transact through digital channels that older systems cannot do.

The digital transformation of enterprises cannot happen on an application-by-application basis, however. Companies that want to align their processes to business goals need the ability to apply digital transformation through the use of smart workflow and processes. To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative and contextual workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution of documents and assets, and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.

Transparency Provides Clarity

Process Director maps directly to operational excellence is because of the transparency it provides. BP Logix has customers who, prior to using Process Director, could not place the location of a document during its approval routing, and did not know when to expect a business action to be completed. By employing BPM technology actions are now automated and each status is given real-time visibility, enabling quick remediation. That visibility means that goals and deadlines can be applied and met rapidly and in context with business goals. That, in turn, leads to far more efficient planning according to whatever schedules (quarterly, yearly, by-project, by team) are demanded by the organization.

With the added level of visibility comes the ability to review and analyze outcomes. Knowing where things tend to stall, and where there is room for process improvement enables the business to continuously improve and optimize its actions -- and as they do, purposeful transformation begins to take shape. There are huge advantages to being able to review and understand in the midst of a transformation project. Like a continuous post-mortem, this allows a team to identify areas that can benefit from being modified or changed — and can bring together the players that will help them achieve their goals. This can be done concurrently with an eye towards efficiency and profitability, and involves all necessary decision makers in the process.

This is how transformation happens. An organization cannot simply could shut down operations while process are re-tooled for operational excellence. This is not a “lift-and-shift” activity because for it to be successful, it requires context for those who will be close to processes - end-users, LOB managers, decision makers; pretty much everyone in the organization has to internalize operational excellence into their business approach. Process Director enables consistency and enhancement of technology by creating better, more inclusive processes.

BP Logix recognizes that those closest to business issues are in the best position to create corresponding solutions. Having the ability to adapt as goals and business needs change, all without having to engage with IT or apply technical expertise results in faster implementation of meaningful solutions. People being able to respond rapidly to issues, coupled with tools that support their need to make changes, all leads to the best kind of digital transformation.

The transformational advantages provided by Process Director are championed by a wide variety of BP Logix customers in different vertical markets. While they may seek different goals, the common thread among them is less about the computing capabilities themselves, and more about the benefits an organization realizes from more visibility, more collaboration, easier ways to collect and distribute information relevant to processes, and a culture that is steeped in the idea of operational excellence.

The Origins of Business Process Management

Business process management has been around for as long as there have been systems. Adam Smith penned “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 and described the division of labor as a way to improve organizational processes. In 1911, Frederick Taylor Winslow, often considered the father of modern management, published “The Principles of Scientific Management” that emphasized standardization of methods, considered improved working conditions, and espoused cooperation among different groups within an organization. Even as the world has become enamored with the latest technology, smart enterprises recognize that the best way to optimize these solutions is when they are deployed across teams that have a process mindset.

What Business Process Management Software Should Do

In terms of approach and goals, not much has changed about BPM - it is still the most effective way for organizations to optimize the way they assign tasks, use resources, and ensure efficiency. In an environment where digital transformation efforts are causing both IT and business unit teams to accelerate the speed at which their teams can meet new, and changing goals, business process management software is called upon to facilitate success. If properly executed, BPM supports process design, execution, optimization, and continuous improvement, backing efforts to drive digital transformation. Applications, workflows, new tools, and entirely different ways of working can be normalized when they are driven with a process-based mindset. In fact, no company can thrive without a dedicated approach to change and adoption of new solutions. Fortunately, the right business process management software serves as an agile, adaptable foundation for companies that need to change rules, deploy resources, and act with real-time immediacy in order to stay competitive.

Process Director: The Next Generation of Business Process Management Software

Rather than approaching business process management as a linear set of functions, Process Director applies machine learning to help teams derive analysis of events, responses, and decision points to predict activity that can be enhanced through rapid, agile improvements to processes. With capabilities that support validation, verification, optimization, and deep insights, Process Director helps users evaluate the performance of their processes. And as a platform for process-based collaboration, integration with social media and enterprise apps, and real-time decision management, it is a business process management software solution that extends its capabilities across the entire enterprise.

BPM as a Customer Retention Tool

Peter Drucker, the great management thinker, famously said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Businesses know that they must also retain that customer to continue to derive sustainable profits. The most astute companies understand how to use BPM to create a customer-tailored chain of events and activities that deliver exceptional value to these customers.

These companies use their business process management software to create end-to-end processes that extend outside of the company walls, connecting with customers and delivering results at a speed and efficiency that differentiates them from competitors. Customers are no longer satisfied with having a product sold to them. They seek relationships with the vendors with whom they do business, and want to know their needs are not just met in one-off fashion, but that they are integrated back into the company processes to ensure continuous improvement.

Your business process management software solution is an integral tool in creating a better customer journey through things like case management and predictive processes. These things allow for customization of processes that ultimately deliver a unique solution for customers, and anticipate what customer needs will be. Smart BPM solutions are also highly adaptive which gives companies an easy and rapid way to correct aspects of product delivery and customer interaction.

Business process management software solutions like Process Director apply a case management approach which enables companies to integrate data and documents from various applications into a shareable profile of each customer. This provides clarity for all workflows so that decision-makers can identify potential issues and rapidly apply improvements; this ultimately enables them to achieve results faster and with better context, and demonstrates to customers that their needs are important.

Process Director also has native integration with many modern enterprise applications which enables workflows to be comprehensive in the data they can deliver. Users can build workflows with Process Director with the benefit of data from the full complement of application modules that impact decision making. In this way, case management-based workflow becomes a critical component of outreach, responsiveness, and retention for key customers.

Business Process Management Software Should Facilitate ALL Connections

For more than a generation, business process management (BPM) has been used by forward thinking enterprises to create an efficient path to achieving their objectives. Organizations may subscribe to different schools of thought around how best to use their business process management software, but all have benefitted from the idea that good processes—adapted as needed and adhered to with discipline—are the most important tool they apply to achieving operational excellence.

What they have discovered is the essence of BPM: when technology is used to support and improve business activity, while adhering to principles of operational excellence, it can lead to dramatic competitive advantage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUuQYbYdOro

As software “is eating the world”, it seems that EVERY company is a software company, at least to some degree, and the software they use and manage becomes one of their most valuable assets. In order to operate at the speed of business and deliver the best solutions, both internally and to customers, it is critical that companies use all that their software solutions have to offer. In terms of strategic assets, having the latest, most feature-rich versions of software will facilitate the agility required by modern enterprises to create and sustain their competitive advantages. To reduce constant learning curves and internal disruptions, incremental upgrades of successful enterprise software solutions gives the greatest lift, for the least time and effort.

Software upgrades lead to operational success

By upgrading to new software versions, companies benefit from “outsourcing” innovation at the tooling and platform level. With a process engine that extends to new channels and drives towards new goals, an agile platform equipped with modern workflow tools becomes the facilitator of IT and LOB team strategy. Teams are better equipped to test and execute pioneering changes when they are building on a tool equipped with the latest code base.

BP Logix has always been hyper-focused on two things: 1) product innovation and 2) customer success. The Process Director development team continuously explores how best to enable customer success within their BPM software investment. Additional features and functionality are not meant simply as a way to keep score against our competitors. Rather, continual advancement enables customers to operate on a stable, consistent, and innovative BPM platform, one that will always be able to support their changing business needs. We recognize that upgrading software is a fundamental element of business continuity and this becomes a critical aspect of our competitive differentiator.

Continuous innovation relates to better outcomes

Some organizations seek to disrupt by being the first to market with something new and exciting; others focus on ensuring the delivery of a consistent, stabilizing workflow software solution which supports repeatable business outcomes. Doing either one of these things (or accomplishing anything along this spectrum) requires a foundation on which organizational strategists and developers can build.

When a company doesn’t upgrade to the latest versions, there is not only the opportunity cost of not taking advantage of new features, but there is also the sunk cost of falling behind. With each new version comes a learning curve as well as some up-front changes to how the supporting team manages processes. As an example, when Process Director was upgraded to its current version, 5.0, users had immediate access to a host of functionality that could deliver new benefits, including:

• Support for compliance frameworks through out-of-the-box controls and compliance automation.
• Sentiment analysis for contextual data to make operational improvements.
• Addition of machine learning capabilities to drive behavioral and timeline-driven decision making.
• UI enhancements for iterative list search, inline text editing, calendaring, and knowledge views.
• New connectors for a variety of enterprise applications, including SharePoint 365, Microsoft Exchange, and Laserfiche.

Software upgrades map to customer needs

Among the inputs used to build new innovation should be insights from analysts and a deep understanding of business and market trends. But the most significant effort, however, goes into delivering a product that equips customers with solutions to real problems. This means incorporating a bit of crowdsourcing into the model, where key requirements needed by actual users are built back into the product in a continuous cycle of development and delivery. This model reduces the total cost of ownership and provides “future-proofing” for users. Rather than having to reinvest in new integration models and establish connectivity with other assets and applications in the customer’s IT stack, upgrades ensure a continuous compatibility with operating systems, browsers, applications, and third-party solutions.

The solution product team should understand the trends that are being adopted by customers and seeks to implement functionality that supports these trends. All of our developments — among them, no code/low code BPM, AI, digital application development, support for IoT — have been created to support the changing landscape of organizations that are adopting new technologies and environments for their business processes. Some are aggressively moving workloads into the cloud, while others are building a hybrid infrastructure of on-premises and multicloud systems. Because Process Director upgrades are all governed by general principles of aiding the flexibility and adaptability of customer needs, companies are able to take advantage of new technologies at a pace with which they’re comfortable.

The economics of upgrades

New versions of software happen in incremental steps, but they can lead to transformative effects. The time and cost savings of not having to hyperfocus on platform improvements enables teams to emphasize the implementation of the business goals they are trying to achieve. Through upgrades, new technology is readily available to complement the organization’s desires to make advances in capabilities and in reduction of costs and complexity.

Software is like any other type of asset; its utility and value diminishes over time. But upgrades generate continuous value; it’s like there is a built-in evolutionary component that adapts to meet new needs and reduce any identifiable issues. This becomes a critical asset for organizations that want a cost-effective, sustainable way of driving newer and better solutions.

Higher education institutions must adhere to a disciplined cadence of organizational milestones in order to operate effectively. To manage workflows and processes, ensure that documentation is delivered and acted upon correctly, and instill accountability across all stakeholders is a hugely demanding job, irrespective of the size of the school. Low-code process automation is being employed by many higher educational organizations to help automate business processes around every aspect of the educational lifecycle, including student management, hiring, facilities, vendor management, capital expenditures, compliance and governance, and a host of other issues that demand continuous oversight and action.

Business process management (BPM) supports the various needs of a higher education administrator’s department, as processes drive virtually all aspects of campus and academic life. BP Logix customers regularly cite an agile approach to process which ensures higher education IT departments are able to serve a wide variety of stakeholders (administrators, parents, students, financial aid organizations, among others), and still maintain adherence to governmental, organizational, and industry governance requirements and compliance frameworks. Finally (but definitely not least importantly), higher educational institutions are often constrained by limited budget, and BPM provides a foundation for delivering effective solutions in a cost-effective way.

Process Director’s digital process automation capabilities enable schools to focus on what they do best: deliver quality education to students eager to improve their lives. Different schools look for various ways to achieve this, and the use cases of BP Logix customers illustrate how BPM can be a critical aspect of higher education digital transformation and organizational growth.

There are plenty of higher education BPM examples that show successful implementation and deployment of BPM Software across colleges and universities.

Higher Education BPM Examples

UCF Global is part of the University of Central Florida system, and acts as a hub for students and faculty who are studying and teaching abroad. In order to manage the thousands of students (the entire university system supports more than 64,000 students every year through 93 bachelors, 86 masters, and 27 doctoral courses of study.

A key challenge for UCF Global is handling the massive amount of private student data. While student records are protected by federal and state regulations, it’s also important for the school to build trust with students by doing everything possible to safeguard their data. Process Director helps solve for these requirements by providing:

• Comprehensive and automatic logging, with digital signatures, of every action taken by any actor, human or automated.
• The highest levels of encryption of data at rest and data in transit.
• Digital signature of documents.
• Granular permissions structure, with temporary privilege escalation.

By ensuring a safe environment for transactions and storage of student data, UCF has been able to build processes that automate the flow of student information through all processes in the student lifecycle, from admissions to graduation. UCF is a great higher education BPM example of success and efficiency.

Technical School BPM Example

For Davis Applied Technology College (DATC) in Utah, continuous innovation is core to its strategy for growth and student success. Another higher education BPM example, it uses Process Director for digital delivery of academic programs and other types of campus services, and it also supports staff by providing easy-to-use rapid application development capabilities to enable HR, finance, and other staff departments to create agile apps and process that are specific to their departmental needs.

Prior to using Process Director, these efforts were hampered by an outdated system of data collection and integration. The school had cabinets filled with paper forms but accessing them and applying them to digital routing channels was time consuming and inefficient. The IT team recognized how the processes that were manifested in those forms would benefit from workflow automation.

DATC's IT team created requirements, scope and criteria, then decided that Process Director BPM would be the most effective way to deliver on their goals. The IT team rolled out Process Director to a number of departments in only a short amount of time; in the student services department alone the school was able to deliver 17 completed processes within only a few quarters after being deployed. The Finance, HR and IT departments all showed massive progress in short tie. The Director of IT for DATC said of Process Director, “Knowing where our business processes and workflow are without having to chase them down is invaluable. What used to take days is taking hours — what used to take weeks is taking days.”

Higher Education Electronic Forms (eForms) Example

One of BP Logix’ higher education customers, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), used Earth Day as the impetus for adopting a BPM approach. With a mandate to reduce paper usage, the UTEP IT team embarked on a plan to eliminate paper where possible by relying instead on the digitization of forms through scanning and digital storage. It quickly became clear that efforts to improve reviews and approvals through digital means could lead to other efficiencies through BPM.

With the rollout of this new digital emphasis, the UTEP IT organization began to implement Process Director BPM across more parts of the University. They focused their efforts on 1) the easy movement of documents across campus via electronic workflows, 2) enabling the review and approval of electronic documents via email, 3) the ability to have dashboards that allowed users to edit, view and receive messages regarding activities and tasks as well as to retrieve reports, forms and notifications, 4) Having electronic records signed via a digitized image of a signature and 5) ability to populate a series of form fields by extracting information from a database instead of requiring users to input that data.

With broad usage of Process Director’s capabilities, UTEP has instilled an agile, prowess-driven mindset in how IT delivers solutions to various departments. Speed has been a critical driver, but so too is how comprehensive Process Director is at ensuring that necessary participants are included in reviews and other transactions throughout the various university lifecycles.

Higher Education Digital Transformation

Higher education institutions are seeing more demand as young people come to rely on higher education as a path into the global economy. To serve these needs, Process Director is providing digitally transformative education workflow solutions, facilitating efficient distribution, as well as streamlining the monitoring and management of information.

The democratization of technology is completely reshaping business methods and the outcomes they seek to achieve. Helping organizations take advantage of this revolutionary shift in technology and business operations is low-code development. Low-code/no-code solutions, when leveraged properly, put users in positions to create applications that solve their immediate problems. By employing low-code capabilities that enable non-developers to connect various stakeholders and implement sophisticated functionality, users and teams create greater efficiency while business goals are achieved more accurately. Essentially, those closest to the problems can now have the greatest impact at solving those problems.

Low-Code Development: Enabling the Citizen Developer

When business process management was first delivered as a solution in the later part of the 20th century, it was seen as a revolution. Mostly driven through elements of workflow, BPM came to symbolize efficiency at mass scale at a time when technology was rapidly becoming widely adopted. As business users came to rely on BPM to achieve their business-related tasks, more demand was created on the IT teams that had to build complex applications. The IT queue began to lengthen and process-related applications weren’t being built to solve the problems needed to maintain an agile, growth-oriented culture.

So into the fray comes the notion that empowering employees to create their own applications would reduce the onus on IT, AND deliver applications faster. To deliver this, a highly visual dashboard of drag-and-drop workflow tools and software components were created so that “citizen developers” could create an application without having to use code. The combination of rapid development capabilities along with the low-code approach offers enterprises the ability build, deploy, and iterate quickly. Additionally, it provides ways to identify deep insights into usage and performance of applications.

Low-Code and Rapid Application Development

By integrating workflows and application functionality, comprehensive low-code platforms offer a solution that can move business objectives rapidly from conception to implementation. And by using an agile model for creating functionality as well as enabling users at different levels to contribute critical modifications to workflows and processes, organizations are able to respond more quickly to customer demand because they can build and modify customer-focused solutions based on the deep insights and predictive capabilities. With low-code (or no-code) solutions such as these, teams can deliver their own rich digital applications, on any platform, before competitors have laid down the first thousand lines of code.

Organizations that want to enable their teams with an agile low code development software solution should consider how this will change their current relationship with IT, and what demands it might place on their own team members. They should also, however, look closely at what is required to fully implement using low-code development and how it can best be applied. The following help to illustrate the realities of using low code development within a BPM environment:

Efficiency Means Different Things for Different People

The low-code option makes it easy to build applications fast, and speed has real economic value. But applications built from low-code environments are typically meant to address narrow issues and may not be optimized for efficiency. Business leaders need to understand that full-fledged, comprehensive applications typically still must adhere to the rigors of the full application development lifecycle.

Low-Code Development is Still Development

Anyone can drag-and-drop, but for it to generate anything meaningful, one must understand not only WHAT she is dragging and dropping, but how to use all that dragging and dropping to achieve a desired outcome. Those using a low-code platform need to understand the business context for what they’re building, and they need to also recognize how the “chunks” of applications work and fit together.

This requires that you create a culture that encourages employees to learn the basics of how applications are structured, where they fit within the internal technology stack, and how to build them around specific goals. It is also important to instill in process actors that application development takes more than just clicking; even though it can be done rapidly, it needs attention and oversight.

All Low-code Development needs Project Management

Many vendors position low-code development as a way for anyone to go into a room by themselves and come out hours later with a usable application. It’s just not that simple. While low-code gives many people the ability to contribute, they must still adhere to some level of requirements and apply discipline to keep application projects within scope.

In addition to building the applications, these citizen developers must also build tests, identify issues, scale easily, and ensure that they can deliver a highly secure application.

Low-code Security

Applications built through low-code are typically optimized for a speedy deployment. While not the same approach as DevOps, which prizes continuous iteration, low-code applications still are not necessarily built with a comprehensive set of security rules built into them. These applications, and the data they transact, will need to rely on third-party tools that the IT department must procure and deploy. This doesn’t slow down anything, but it is something that applications developers must be serious about because all applications must use some level of security monitoring and remediation capabilities with them.

Executing sophisticated business logic and using complex rules typically requires a standard application development approach. But getting solutions addressed rapidly and specifically can help organizations solve problems quickly after they are identified. Ultimately, using a low-code approach can save millions on expensive technical staff, incompatible packaged applications, and maintenance of obsolete code.

In order to organize and focus an organization’s efforts, and the people involved therein, business processes are developed. While the intention is to drive efficiency, issues of complexity and scale can creep in to derail their efforts. Even structured, disciplined organizations can get off track if they don’t adhere to the requirements they’ve built for their processes. To help maintain order, business process modeling and the ability to effectively build and manage parallel processes assists those tasked with managing processes. This results in more focused efforts, and acceleration toward target goals.

Time and Business Process Modeling

Time is a critical ingredient of a business process. It enables organizations to gain control over outcomes, while creating the ability to predict how later process stages will be impacted by earlier actions. This early notification leads to early intervention and response, which results in a more comprehensive view of business options, the players that can affect them, and how they can be executed. The capability to predict changes the entire nature of how we perform business tasks, and this is where Process Timeline becomes a defining element of Process Director, providing BP Logix customers with a particularly unique view into how BPM is handled.

BPM is often thought of as a linear function, but the reality is that any type of work is abstract. Most BPM vendors also tend to view processes through the lens of methodology, rather than for practical action and reaction. Process Director takes into consideration that processes, actions, and decisions are time-dependent, and that the amount of time needed to complete, route, authorize or do any number of actions for a given activity is dependent upon other activities in the process. Activities that may need to be adjusted as the process evolves.

Optimize with Parallel Processing

Effective timeline management provides advantages for organizations wanting to plan beyond just day-to-day operations. At any given time organizations must operate multiple processes to maintain continuous improvement and growth. The more valuable aspect of the timeline, therefore, is in the reliability of how it manages parallel processing; in other words, the most effective way to deliver better business outcomes is through the agility of multiple, disparate processes, all being managed through a realistic lens of timelines.

We created Process Timeline to enhance our customers’ abilities in measuring and predicting process execution times, and to do so for different stakeholders who need to manage different types of projects and processes. Process Director enables organizations to be flexible in modeling parallel processes, and to give non-technical users the controls to build and adapt these processes as their business goals change. Every step of the way is governed by three specific ways of thinking:

• What must complete before this step can begin?
• How long will this step take to complete?
• What processes do I have running in parallel?

Using Business Process Modeling to Deliver Value

The questions above help users apply elements of dependence, duration, and disparate-ness. Each activity will begin as soon as its prerequisites, if any, are complete. The result is a solution with many valuable features:

1. Modeling is greatly simplified: project owners list each activity, estimate its duration, and then drag-and-drop it onto the activity or activities that must complete before it can begin.
2. As many of the activities as possible will run at the same time, without the need to explicitly configure parallel behavior.
3. The status of the process can be determined at a glance.
4. At any point — even the moment the process is launched — the system can determine which activities, if any, may not complete by their due date.
5. The system records actual versus predicted execution times each time the process is run, and adjusts its time estimates accordingly.

Organizations look to Process Timeline to help them deliver better results with more addressable solutions. The benefits from Process Timeline include:

• Faster time-to-value: The simplified model gives businesses the opportunity to go from discovery to full automation faster than was previously possible.
• Proactive response: The earliest possible notice of potential delays (and the resulting missed deadlines) — even for tasks that haven’t yet begun — means that your business can predict a future problem, adapt to changing circumstances, and succeed in overcoming those obstacles.
• Improved compliance: Every approval, every piece of data entered, and every step of every process is permanently stored by Process Director, and can be made available to internal or external auditors, regulators, or risk management personnel.
• Rapid changes: Business processes must respond rapidly to changing requirements. Process Director is configured through a simple, intuitive graphical interface, requiring no programming skills. As a result, Process Director makes it possible for your processes to change at the speed of your business.

When a business goal is addressed through a realistic application of governance and execution, the likelihood of success is significantly increased. When a reasonable timeline can help identify potential issues and predict outcomes, the organization can adapt and be flexible in how it handles the situation.

Security is at the forefront of everything we do at BP Logix. By ensuring the safety of our customers’ data we facilitate their journeys to better, more secure, process applications. This means happy customers, and better business operations. Our recent SOC 2 certification is testament to our ongoing commitment to deepening the trust of our customers and other stakeholders in Process Director.

Achieving SOC 2 status gives us verifiable proof that we demonstrate operational excellence and deliver to our customers the assurance that we are committed to ongoing client security. It’s something that is both integrated in how we conduct our business, as well as in how we build our solution. Customers and partners want assurances that their data is not only being treated securely, but that the company that stands behind Process Director operates as a trusted source, and with continuous application of processes and methods that meet strict security-first requirements.

The SOC 2 standard was created, and continues to be governed, by standards developed and managed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It was designed as a way to enable organizations that transact private data with options for communicating information about their system descriptions and deliver sensitive information. While there are different SOC standards, SOC 2 is especially important for business processes because in addition to making sure data is safe when stored, it also pertains to data when it’s made accessible to external sources.

SOC 2 provides detailed information related to, and gives assurance of, an entity’s controls surrounding the security, availability, and processing integrity of the systems used to process users’ data. This also extends to the confidentiality of the data processed by these systems. SOC 2-compliant companies must demonstrate that they are managing customer data against five “trust service principles”—security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

For BP Logix customers, our SOC 2 compliance means they can trust that we operate with the following principles tightly integrated into Process Director and in every interaction with customer data:

BPM Security and Process Data

One of the most important aspects of any process is the data being used within the process. That data drives decision-making and enables various actors to apply their knowledge in the right context, at the right time. Contextual insights drive process activity, but what if that there was a compromise of your IT infrastructure? Data could be compromised, and it would normally require forensic analysis to understand just what was affected. SOC 2 compliance requires that organizations gather information and store them as logs. If a data breach is discovered, an audit of these logs means the customer can easily identify where issues exist, the data affected, and then more easily apply fixes. This is a huge help for customers because it can help them isolate issues before they become bigger problems for their company.

SOC 2 and Process Integrity

Process Director users not only actively develop process applications, but also constantly point to the demonstrable benefits yielded from them. In essence, this is all about identifying the right data within the organization’s infrastructure, putting it to use in the appropriate, contextual place, and transacting with it to achieve specific goals. And in order to do this, business processes have to be complete, substantiated, accurate, timely, and accessible.

However, the integrity of the process does not necessarily translate into integrity of the data. SOC 2 offers a framework so that the data being used is accurate and devoid of misuse. Adhering to SOC 2 means that data that containing errors prior to being included in a process will be detected. Process Director’s adoption of SOC 2 principles means that data, and the processes used with the data, are monitored with quality assurance procedures and ensure processing integrity.

Data Confidentiality and BPM

Process applications rely on specific levels of access and entry points; it’s one of the ways that control is applied to ensure consistency. Limiting access helps maintain a level of confidentiality, and SOC 2 Data is considered confidential if its access and disclosure is restricted to a specified set of persons or organizations.

Process Director supports this approach through federated identity management which enables companies to include third parties as active participants in their processes and workflows.  Authentication mechanisms like ADFS, SAML and OAuth give partners and suppliers access and create a new dynamic of collaboration, while giving companies greater control over who has access to what information.

Process Director was developed to provide the highest possible service to organizations that want to improve business performance through process-driven methods. With SOC 2 certification, Process Director can now ensure that customers get the highest level of availability, security, and consistency in our operational practices.

Invoice Process Solutions

Though digital transformation is upon us, many organizations still face a pesky outlier in the form of paper (or otherwise outdated) invoices. Because of this, invoice processing solutions are becoming a heightened priority. The most common complaints include:

• Lost invoices
• Incomplete information
• Illegible data
• Errors in data entry transfers
• Purchase order matching
• Supplier/vendor discrepancies

Accounts payable and management become so frustrated with these issues that they have turned to Process Director as their invoice processing solution. BP Logix client IDEX, has met with tremendous success from implementing Process Director.

IDEX’s Cost Savings

"We discovered that Process Director’s business logic lets you go as deep as you need to be consistent with your business process. With auditors, this has made our lives a lot easier."

IDEX Corporation manufactures and markets a wide array of engineered pumps and other industrial products
and is the world leader in fluid-handling technologies. They needed an invoice approval workflow automation software solution to centralize their CapEx process.

Accounting wanted to control the process for capital expense (CapEx) requests, a manual, paper-based process at that time. As a result of misplaced documents, Accounting was missing deadlines for audits.

After an exhaustive search, they decided Process Director  was the best fit for their invoice processing requirements as it:

• Would require minimal coding
• Would enable users to make changes easily
• Be scalable
• Be cost effective
• Be deployable out-of-the-box

Process Director Invoice Processing Benefits

Businesses choose Process Director to:

• Reduce errors
• Avoid delays
• Track invoices
• Consolidate multiple formats of invoices
• Reduce costs associated with paper forms

Process Director allows businesses to streamline the approval process when invoice processing begins. This can be triggered by the scanning of paper-based forms, completion of online information, or even manually triggered when certain conditions are met. Invoices are easy to find as keywords, metadata, and indexing creates multiple search criteria, removing the problem of losing the document.

Easy integration with current accounting software, as well as other systems and software, reduces the learning curve and the need for expensive, time consuming coding. Reporting is critical to invoice processing, as is having all approval activities to create a complete audit trail for business process governance. And finally, approvals can be made on any device, making mobile workforce approvals and submissions faster and easier than ever.

The flow for invoice processing typically follows a fairly standard process, but can get stalled if the processes lack automated mechanisms for ensuring smooth movement from creation to completion. Process Director enables these processes to be easily created and modified to meet the specific finance and operation needs of a company. It provides the flexibility to incorporate different requirements and procedures that map to changes in invoice automation policies. With Process Director, IT teams can create electronic forms the enable uploading of receipts into a convenient online workflow, either as one-off expenses, or as a bulk upload.

Additionally, Process Director allows for invoice categorization capabilities for different regions, amounts, and expense types, and can automatically generate accounting codes that correspond to those categories. Those codes can be used to populate the auto-fills to validate that the dropdowns are correct.

Transform your manual, paper-based processes with audit friendly, searchable, consistent electronic forms, automation processes and simple integration with current programs. Reduce redundancies and delays through streamlined invoice processing with Process Director.

Because processes use and transact massive amounts of data, much of it of a sensitive nature, enterprises must apply a security-first approach to their process management discipline. It is the responsibility of organizations to properly protect the data that is transacted within their environment; it’s a measure of responsibility to their own organization, and to partners and customers. To do so means asking the right questions and performing the necessary due diligence in creating an appropriate framework for data and asset security.

Organizations using BPM to digitally transform their processes are combining both technology and business best practices to support a more responsive, and responsible, way of managing data, people, and decision-making. BPM solutions like the SOC 2 Certified Process Director facilitate these goals through the integration of multiple applications into a platform that allows for collaborative, data-rich solutions.

What is the Right Type of BPM Security

Identifying the right type of security for your organization requires both technology and strategic thinking. One of the key reasons for adopting a BPM approach in the first place is to take advantage of the flexibility and dynamic nature that process management and workflow can deliver; it's an environment that maps to your business needs while effectively leveraging your technology investment.

Process Director has been developed to be an effective enabler of data transactions and communication, both into and out of your enterprise environment. Your business depends upon integration with both internal and third-party applications and the ability to share unique (and usually very sensitive) data with different types of stakeholders. This requires that your data be controlled effectively, but also not totally locked down.

Within all of this must be a security posture that safeguards data and ensures your technology assets and resources cannot be penetrated. Users can certainly apply security controls in their environment, but you have to continuously be aware of the risks and vulnerabilities. Ensuring you have processes in place to alert and remediate allows you to fix issues before they result in your company being the next corporate poster child for data breaches.

How to Ensure BPM Security

As you begin developing your framework for security, consider things like internal policies and requirements, compliance, application development, security training, automation, remediation, and other critical elements that are necessary to having a comprehensive security mindset. The following questions should help you and your team make smarter decisions around how you're going to procure, develop, apply, and manage security while you’re using Process Director:

• Support for alerts and remediation: Do your security policies demand that you alert partners and other stakeholders, as well as trigger remediation processes upon detection of security issues? If so, you should apply an automated, process-driven approach that will integrate security alerts so users can be made aware of issues based on the risk, along with information that identifies where the issues lives. Only with a clear view over your entire IT surface can a user adequately rectify issues.
• Customizing security settings: If you’re using Process Director in the cloud, your cloud security provider (CSP) will likely offer out-of-the-box security settings, but these might not be totally appropriate for your specific needs. Process Director in an on-premises environment will give you some predetermined controls, but these also may need to be customized to your needs. You will want to create guidelines for what levels of security are adequate, and then apply those requirements as controls across Process Director and other assets in your environment.
• Security management: Is security handled by a single team within your organization, or is responsibility handled across your enterprise? It is likely a team with the IT organization, and they should be aware of how broadly Process Director is being used, with specifics about teams and the role within those teams that are using it. Management has to be flexible enough that your security solution can extend to different teams based on their needs, skill levels, and requirements.
• Security Training: Process Director maximizes the contributions of more team members so they can be active participants in how applications are built and decisions get made. With that in mind, it's critical that there is a training roadmap for whatever security approach you choose to use. How will you handle security skills and training? Not every user will have a background in security, but training and education will go far in enabling them to innovate and build while adhering to smart security policies.

The goal of security, no matter what platform or environment you use, is to protect your critical data from attacks and from internal misconfigurations. By customizing your organization’s security framework to fit your architectural and platform needs, you can be better assured that you will be able to maintain continuous awareness and apply risk mitigation best practices.

Making an investment in a BPM solution has far-reaching implications, extending across many different areas of your organization. While the decision-making process most likely involves the IT department, beneficiaries include end-users in a myriad of business units. The chosen solution must be able to meet the demands of a wide range of users and business needs, but much of purchase team input will be biased towards their own individual priorities. Therefore, spending time considering what you will have to address in order to generate achieve structured success in your organization is critical.

Many technology solutions are purchased to address fairly specific use cases. LOB-specific applications, security tools, databases; with these kinds of tools, people can fairly anticipate the outcomes. A BPM solution, however, delivers value in a wide variety of ways and its benefits differ along with each team’s unique processes. With that in mind, it’s critical to establish a disciplined approach to the journey of vendor discovery.

Starting Your Journey To BPM Purchase Success

Initiating your plan to adopt BPM should begin with an honest and insightful analysis of the needs of the different groups within your organization. One of the things you’ll need to effectively assess the economics of your project is agreement among the different stakeholders who will be impacted by adoption of a new solution. Once identified, you should consider kicking off your vendor search by getting agreement on these questions:

• Process breadth: Will the solution need to enable our processes to work only internally, or externally as well?
• How will processes be accessed? What impact do I anticipate from mobile, social and other types of digital interaction?
• Are we looking at short-term, repeatable processes only? Is this limiting our ability to achieve better results from BPM?
• Are there documents and data sources that, if included in my processes, could make it more valuable?
• Could my processes be more valuable if it provided data analysis and metrics?

With a better overall sense of how the organization wants to proceed, and with a more accurate barometer of what you’re looking for, your organization should evaluate your decisions with these steps in mind:

Gathering requirements

Start by knowing the desired outcomes for your BPM solution, and then consider the requirements that will help you arrive there. These requirements are represent the functionality that the solution must deliver. This may seem laborious, but it’s best done by having team members walk through decisions, processes, milestones together. Almost like reading the script before actors go on stage, it allows team members to develop fine-grained clarity over what constitutes “have to.”

Remember that requirements must be both of a technology and business nature. If your solution needs the ability to operate in IoT devices and through social media integration, identify those things are requirements - those are technology elements that have to be part of your ultimate decision. Perhaps there are specific ERP systems you need to integrate with; ensure that information is accounted for. But also recognize that some solutions may have been deployed in verticals like yours and therefore may be better equipped for your environment. If that’s important to your team, make sure it exists in your requirement list.

Also consider your staff and resources; if this solution will be used broadly by non-programmers, then make sure you seek something that is low-code/no-code and uses a graphical user interface that empowers business users to participate in process management.

Evaluating BPM vendors

You’re looking at features and functionality, but you also want to work with a vendor that has a trusted brand and a legacy of happy customers. Ask to speak with customers that are actively engaged with your prospective vendor, read case studies, find the word on the street.

While you may need to kiss a few toads before you find your prince, spending time with different vendors will help you determine where there’s the best fit. It’s important to keep criteria like the following in mind:

• Does the solution map to my requirements?
• Does the product team have plans for future versions that will meet anticipated needs for my organization?
• Can the solution capable of doing things I might not yet have considered as critical for my organization?
• Can I do a proof-of-concept (POC) that is an accurate representation of the solution?
• What is the customer turnover rate for the vendor?

Remember that you are investing considerable financial and human resources into this endeavor, and the vendor should be able to patiently and effectively address your current and anticipated needs.

Getting buy-in

Many BPM projects fail because executives and decision-makers do not fully understand its value and how it will be used. Some will view it only as another technology solution and will either tacitly, but noncommittally acknowledge it, or perhaps they will actually question its overall variability. Getting buy-in for your BPM project from your business and technology leaders ensures that you will be equipped with the long-term resources required to deploy a sustainable BPM solution.

Educating execs about how BPM is a critical bridge that delivers cross-functional processes should be one of the first steps to demonstrating comprehensive value. When done correctly, cross-functional types of processes lead to a more collaborative working environment that demonstrate real, measurable results. Without a tool to support this interactivity, companies will continue to rely on inefficient modes of communication and application development, and because these inefficiencies breed delays, companies will always lag in their efforts to deliver meaningful solutions.

You have a vision for your BPM solution, but does your purchase team really understand what that is? Some educational material will be required, in-person meetings with influencers are important, and framing the conversations around value will all help you make your pitch. Create a vision that demonstrates how they can be part of something really important, like digital transformation, and show them the path to be a player in that process.

Do some modeling that actually shows what “value” actually looks like. Create a PowerPoint that highlights goals and plans for achieving them, a spreadsheet that shows cost savings, and flowcharts that show before and after scenarios. You want to paint a vivid picture of what differences you anticipate ahead. And not just differences, but also the subsequent benefits.

Preparing for launch

Whoever leads the BPM charge in an organization needs to communicate the impending changes in a way that emphasizes preparation. BPM adoption can be initially disruptive because it is something that can only be conducted through humans. That disruption, however, can be minimized by willingness to embrace the change.

The staff should understand what to expect and feel supported in their efforts. There are a lot of stakeholders, and it’s incumbent upon you to set expectations for how this project will impact them. For the IT team, they will have to build some connectors, do some testing, and identifying ways to add continuous change into the new BPM system. End-users will need some level of education before they begin to see demonstrable outcomes. Provide your team with timelines and milestones, but with a continual reiteration of the big picture, or ‘mission statement’.

Identifying “improvement”

All enterprises seek improvement from new technologies and business methods, yet there is a certain amount of naiveté in thinking that simply buying and using a new tool will ensure success. Remember that a BPM solution is not just deployed; BPM needs to be integrated into how the organization works. The essence of what BPM is and provides has to be embedded into the minds of employees and manifested in their work.

Do you know what results you are trying to achieve? A workflow is wonderful only if it improves results by delivering a result faster, better, or more efficiently. The key for you and your business is knowing what that “thing” is. You should give serious thought to the results you are currently achieving— and create a model for what a post-BPM world would look like. Make intelligent, thoughtful predictions about the improvements you will see, then measure whether or not you are actually achieving them.

Once you have initiated your solution, you can begin to look at the results: Are projects being accomplished faster? Did you eliminate time-consuming steps? How is process automation contributing to your company’s overall efficiency and effectiveness? Remember to think about the metrics that will demonstrate the improvements you wanted to achieve — then analyze your processes to determine whether or not BPM is helping you reach them.

Good luck on your journey – the future is bright ahead!

The Gartner-generated term bpmPaaS is being used with increasing frequency in the technology media and among analysts, but just what is bpmPaaS? On its surface, it seems like a logical part of the evolution in the realm of process management and services-based architectures. By combining them, organizations conceivably have a solution to apply and adapt processes to specific business needs as they arise. It’s a perfect way to deliver on the promise of BPM as it was first conceived - a way to create processes that make work more efficient, build reusability into those processes, and track the progress of the people, data, and assets involved with those processes. By invoking the power of the cloud and microservices, bpmPaaS now adds the advantage of on-demand development and delivery.

For almost any organization, this is the “a-ha” moment. IT managers have been looking for a way to empower business users to create and deliver processes, and to be the central hub for change management. When delivered as a service, BPM is more flexible and adaptable, which is key at a time when business demands change rapidly. The promise is big, and some organizations are already benefiting from this platform-based, services-based, BPM solution - these are the ones that are using Process Director.

Process Director as a Services-Based BPM Platform (bpmPaas)

Process Director was originally developed as an easy-to-use, low-code development platform to enable teams to build and adapt processes to changing needs, whether those changes were mandated from outside or inside the company. While the cloud was not as popular when Process Director was created as it is today, its developers recognized that BPM on a platform, especially one that is agile, is the only true way to provide organizations with the promise that effective process management can deliver. After all, if teams are stuck having to deploy, build integrations, update, and manage the engine that’s running their processes, it eliminates the ease and flexibility that BPM is supposed to offer in the first place.

Gartner, who has been articulating the concept of bpmPaaS, pointed out last year that Process Director was already en-route to capturing the essence of what the category is all about. They, and countless BP Logix customers, point to how Process Director is able to integrate new technologies like predictive analytics, process intelligence, and machine learning in a solution that is built to continuously optimize for organizational process efficiency. This optimization gives business teams a platform on which to create tasks, processes, and systems, while allowing more flexibility and human guidance to create truly intelligent business process management that assists not just in creating efficiencies, but also in effectively meeting customer demands.

To capitalize on the services model, Process Director is available through a variety of platforms, including the cloud. For those that take advantage of the cloud, companies can use Process Director as they evolve in their needs. As they grow from using a multi-tenant environment to a solution with customization applied to it, they are able to build an agile process machine with minimal capital, infrastructure, and IT expenses.

bpmPaaS Drives Transformation

Consider the entire concept of digital transformation. While organizations dedicate considerable time to planning the tools and behavioral changes they need to make to transform core to how they run their business, they never stop transforming once they commit to it. The tools that enable them to do that need to be foundational and provide the necessary functionality to operate as a solution-of-record that provides continuous innovation and change on-demand. Just as transformation never stops, the organizations that want to close the gap between concept and solution must look to the services-based model provided by the cloud that offers a path to process optimization.

Process Director uses inherent rapid application development, the concept of time, and a cloud-native approach to deliver on the promise of bpmPaaS. Specifically, it looks to improve users’ business conditions and efficacy of processes with these following elements that are optimized for cloud delivery:

• Built in application integration and database connectors that enable connectivity, on-the-fly, to any data source that can inform processes and deliver information to improve business outcomes. It must have the ability to access data directly through SQL and integrate that data directly into forms and workflow.
• Ability to build, pilot, and adapt applications that ingest and use data from a variety of internal and third-party sources.
• Operate on a process engine that applies rules and provides compliance management to ensure processes are working as intended.
• Identify and predict outcomes, and then use that time-informed intelligence to automate building of better processes.
• Coordinate and choreograph how various services work together to deliver transformative outcomes.

bpmPaaS solutions can be used across different types of environments. Process Director, for example, is used in cloud-native, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Ultimately, its flexible architecture enables a better approach to identifying the most optimal data, applying it in context, and giving end-users a faster path to decision-making. An effective bpmPaaS like Process Director gives IT departments and line of business managers a way to respond quickly to market changes and internal business demands. Because it is built to deliver processes in a services-based environment, team members can emphasize their expertise in implementation, uptime, security, and getting the processes created the right way.

Arbiter of digital transformation, or early adopter regret? This is the question many enterprises are asking as they look back on their efforts to move into a more modern approach. But with the luxury of perspective, many have discovered that their early digital transformation intentions were either short sighted or totally missed the mark. The promise was attractive, but the ultimate goal not yet totally understood. This resulted in these early digital pioneers frequently shuffling their way through half-baked ambitious projects that never completed or took companies in misguided directions that ended up costing them dearly.

The Early Digital Transformation Promise

Walk the show floor of any technology event and you’ll find all kinds of vendors who promise to be “next generation”, “emerging”, or “built for a new [fill in the blank].” While they may be truly developing something innovative and exciting, organizations can only implement a certain amount of new technology before they overwhelm their IT teams and end users to the point of adoption fatigue. Many of these early adopters become rigidly beholden to making a nascent strategy work, and in their attempt to use that strategy to move ahead of their competition, often found themselves married to technology that wasn’t actually ahead of its time and didn’t offer any of the benefits of continuous change.

A Bridge is not the Path Forward

Originally, enterprises became enamored with the promise of digital transformation because it was the bridge from legacy tools to an environment that made more productive use of technology, employee resources, and data. Though building this bridge should not have been the end-goal, it is nonetheless where many early adopters stopped. They invested heavily in tools and software solutions, but now find that they are now saddled with systems that don’t talk to one another, are not agile, and cannot support the speed and scale required by modern enterprises.

The real value in transforming a business has to begin with a clear vision for how it can boost productivity and efficiency while being an enabler for organizational change. Early attempts were often derailed because they lacked a roadmap and neglected the inevitable need for streamlined automation and integration with multiple applications. These organizations typically fell into traps around the following issues:

No Clarity on Digital Transformation Ownership

The advent of digital business often looked like an attempt to be more inclusive - that inclusivity was supposed to extend to people, data, and technology sources. But in order to deliver on those goals, transformation processes require distinct ownership of design and implementation processes. Successful optimization always demands some level of executive sponsorship and top-down control, but it’s especially the case when a project includes such a far-ranging set of activities like digital transformation. To keep the project in scope and prevent overwhelming implementers, organizations needed to solidify operations and management around key decision-makers. In the absence of that type of ownership, many projects simply became too unwieldy, or veered off in directions that didn’t adhere to original goals.

Over-Emphasis on Replacement

Many saw ‘transformation’ as replacing existing tools or processes, rather than being a way to improve overall operations. This made the project easier to manage, because it only demanded 1:1 mapping of old too new. But this totally neglected the importance of why a company would embark on digital transformation in the first place. The idea was to build processes into a company that could rely on digital methods for implementation. Doing so meant that the organization could benefit from automation, a faster way to develop applications, and the reduction or inefficiencies. Being so tactical in their approach prevented many companies from truly taking advantage of becoming a digital business.

Wrong Endgame

The whole notion of transformation is that it never truly stops. Once a transformation begins, it is supposed to pave the way for continuous evolution and enablement of other things that transform and change as well. But many organizations sought an endgame that was narrowly focused - maybe they just wanted to integrate key applications, or perhaps they wanted the ability to pull data from internal sources and deliver it to customers through forms. In that light, the transformation project ends once the goals are achieved, but as we now know, the ability to apply digital methods for process-oriented outcomes, and to continuously improve on those processes, never ceases. Companies that sought the former approach were rewarded with new solutions, but they still lacked a foundation that was enabled continuous innovation.

Today’s organizations have access to more data, more connections, and an ever-expanding list of new technology. For these organizations to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace, they must evolve from previous models to ones that engage more stakeholders and make better use of data. But they must also be able to support the need for rapid development of new solutions and subsequent delivery through all necessary channels.

A business is, among other things, an assortment of activities that are intended to produce profit-generating products and services. To arrive at the successful goal of delivering those products and services, a company has to rely on a myriad of actions, events, resources, and decisions. As economic demands require companies to move faster, and as technology creates a more efficient way to adapt, organizations need a way to coordinate and manage the different, but related, recurring tasks that form the foundation of a business. The vehicle for these management efforts often come in the form of a workflow engine.

Workflow Engines vs Intelligent Process Modeling Engines

At its core, a workflow engine is the technology used to apply logic and rules to move operations toward completion. At BP Logix, the thinking is that while that is all fine and well, generic workflow is far different from applications driven by an intelligent process modeling engine— one that uses automation, can adapt to changing business needs, and is able to apply the concept of time to help users predict a path for better outcomes.

Those are precisely the reasons for developing Process Director. With organizations operating in a continuous, non-linear world, Process Director employs a process modeling engine that goes beyond workflow to unify different business elements into models that can be executed to derive more efficient processes.

Legacy Workflow Systems: The Enemy of Productivity

The enemy of productivity isn’t just lack of action, it’s waste. It comes in the form of wasted time, wasted effort, and unnecessary resources that don’t apply to the intended solution. Legacy workflow systems hand information and documents from one actor to the next, all with the presumption that each decision point was arrived at with all the necessary data needed to make an actual decision. As workplaces and systems have gotten more complex with multiple digital input channels and a working style that prizes collaboration, old style workflows cannot rely on the standard style of handoff. As a modern solution for transformative enterprises, Process Director uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to incorporate predictive analytics and create not only seamless processes, but ones fueled by informed, data-fueled decisions.

A Workflow Engine Heading Where?

Popular author and researcher Brene Brown uses a concept called, “what does ‘done’ look like” to emphasize that there are many ways to arrive at the completion of a task, but it requires all parties to be on the same page about what they’re trying to accomplish. Process Director uses Process Timeline™ to enable the aggregation of different viewpoints and methods, and arrive at an agreed-upon goal. We get a sense for this through the element of time, a major component missing from the standard workflow engine, that is heavily leveraged by Process Director customers in a variety of vertical markets.

Traditional BPM focuses on quality and business process governance, but adding a modeling engine with business process automation capabilities (along with the predictive element of time) gives the user the ability to see how later process stages will be affected by the previous ones. This adds huge value to the managed process by allowing the earliest possible notification of potential delays to allow intervention before timeline problems arise.

Beyond Review and Approval

In most workflow engines, there is a review and approval step in place, but it doesn’t answer questions about the specifics of completion. These questions are of huge importance to management, because while it may be great to know you are on track to hit a specific goal, it is still important to know what is currently happening. It is similar to comparing the act of looking at a transaction in a register to discover errors, rather than simply looking at a monthly profit and loss statement. This is where Process Timeline within Process Director can establish a continuous assessment of, and application of actions for, the direction of where the process will move in its effort to guide processes forward.

With a process modeling engine that uses predictive capabilities, simple models can be created to help businesses go from discovery to full automation faster, yet more intelligently. Process Timeline gives each activity with its duration estimate to create faster processes. Activities can run at the same time, without complicated coding to configure parallel behavior. The status of the entire process, as well as sub-processes can be determined at a glance, which allows for proactive response and the earliest notification of potential delays to allow for quick intervention. When confronted with similar ‘tasks of parallelism’, standard workflow engines tend to stumble.

A Predictive Workflow Engine?

The predictive nature of Process Timeline is such that it identifies potential problems in the course of the process, and can trigger actions to the changing circumstances. This results in obstacles being overcome before deadlines are missed or production halts. Process Timeline records predicted execution versus actual time, every time the process runs and adjusts the time estimates for even better management. Process Director stores every aspect of the process for audits, internally or externally, for improved compliance.

Today’s workflow engine takes a very different form: with a foundation that combines IT process automation with BPM software solutions, Process Director provides a codified way to deliver timely, effective processes for organizations of all types.

We all know that as technology has become more accessible, it’s also created more data and more connections that users must manage. According to ZDNet, the average medium-to-large enterprise uses between 300 - 400 different software applications. The irony of this proliferation is that it creates a gap between the data we should use versus the data that’s most accessible to us. In the past we used the term ‘workflow tools’ to describe the bundle of amenities used by organizations to tackle these issues, but is ‘workflow tools’ still an appropriate fit?

Intelligent Process Automation vs Workflow Tools

‘Intelligent process automation solution’ has replaced ‘workflow tools’ in many spheres, but a process-driven approach still embeds a mindset within organizations around how to develop and deliver better data, be more agile, and ensure that approvals and requirements are addressed according to expectations. What has changed is the scope available in the modern BPM solution, now workflow tools are just a component of a larger whole.

When business (and thus processes) were simpler, workflow simply looked like a series of lines and shapes that veer off into multiple directions. And this worked, for the most part. Workflow tools streamlined a goal-oriented task, and was a critical tool that made life easier. But the modern organization is hardly linear, and workflow tools have hit the ceiling of enabling communication between disparate people, data, and decisions. For the modern solution to be successful, it must allow processes to be easily centralized and distributed.

Process Director: The Way Forward For Workflow Tools

Serving these widespread needs was the reason we created Process Director in the first place, with its unique Process Timeline process modeling engine– a replacement for the standard workflow tools of the past. At the time we first developed it, we couldn’t have known how rapidly and completely digital transformation would change the nature of business and technology. Yet, part of our mission was to give organizations a foundational structure that they could use to adapt and grow their business.

But Process Director is so much more than a workflow tool, it was also created with the mindset that those closest to problems are likely the ones best equipped to solve for them. Rather than building a complex application development solution that demands highly skilled coding capabilities, Process Director allows for non-programmers to build robust, comprehensive process-driven applications. Additionally, it helps organizations reduce complexity and enhance results through these advantages, which could be considered tools for your process tool box:

Workflow: A Part of a Greater Whole

1. More collaboration: Whether through more access points (mobile, Internet of Things), communication channels (social media), or platform (on-premise, cloud, hybrid), a solid workflow management software solution gives everyone involved with your processes—both inside and outside of your firewall—the appropriate level of access along with the BPM tools to make a difference.
2. Insight through analytics: Process is a facilitator, but it delivers additional value when it provides insights about your operations. Process Director uses analytics to deliver regular insights into what is occurring within your processes, the people involved, and a sense for how effectively your organization meet its deadlines.
3. Moving from paper to digital: Even in the digital age, so much data is collected and transacted through paper-based documents. It’s hard to process and requires dedicated manual effort to store and retrieve. Process Director enables the digitization of documents as images so they can be included as assets within workflows. This delivers relevant data directly to decision-makers and ensures relevance throughout the process.
4. Maximize skill sets: Process Director can automatically assign tasks to people based on their strengths and skill sets. By giving people the most appropriate tasks, you can improve productivity and keep employees more engaged.
5. Avoid redundant behavior: Process Director views workflow tools as an organized, automated way to eliminate unnecessary steps. It does this by initially identifying the critical points of activity, enabling teams to define specific actions, participants, and results that should occur.
6. More inclusive: Process Director applies rapid application development capabilities that enable and encourage non-developers to build, adapt and manage process. Non-technical employees can apply their knowledge directly to workflow solutions that will both reduce the IT burden, and deliver solutions in context.
7. Enable rapid validation through digital approvals: Process Director enables non-developers to rapidly create eForms , which enables fast approvals (including executives on the go) and the reduction in time lost as a result of waiting for paper-based signatures. This is where workflow becomes a critical factor in supporting speed and real-time action.
8. Automation: Automated workflows allow you to set up processes, then let them run. The majority of work that occurs within processes can be automated, freeing up time and allowing you and your team to focus on more strategic activities.
9. Adapt the concept of time to processes: Business activities are deadline-driven. Process Director provides triggers that keep processes moving according to a timeline, enabling participants to see precisely when and where input is required.
10. Tracking provides historical data: Every activity in digital workflow is tracked. Whether you need information for compliance purposes or to review how your organization operates, the ability to quickly see the ‘who, what, where and how’ of your processes provides important insights.

Is Your Digital Transformation Toolkit Ready?

To produce anything meaningful in today's market requires discipline, repeatable actions, and a foundation that will help conduct ideas from inception to desired outcome. The pace of today's business demands that traditionally time-consuming tasks like collaboration, reviews, and approvals all be done with incredible rapidity and yet still be brand compliant and impactful. Workflow tools have traditionally been proven to be the most effective way of achieving that, but the tool box has expanded to include so much more. The very foundation on which agility and transformation needs to take place rests on the shoulders of intelligent process automation.

All businesses rely on financial transactions between buyers and customers, with partners, and investors. But financial relationships also exist with staff who pay for certain expenses out of their own pockets and must be reimbursed. Without a consistent invoice automation process for tracking and funding these transactions, however, organizations cannot operate efficiently and meet their financial obligations to their most valuable resource -- their employees. Invoice management is a critical part of all modern organizations, and it requires a process automation foundation that ensures employees are repaid, and that also gives companies insight into the accounting and tracking of finances.

Invoice automation processes can be complex— approvals and reviews are performed through the work of multiple people, and timeliness is a critical factor. Companies tax the trust of employees when they’re left holding the bag for out of pocket expenses because of delayed reimbursement. Process automation must be simple so that employees can adhere to a repeatable process, comfortable in the knowledge that they will be repaid. But every invoice management process must also be rigorous so it is not abused with illegitimate claims.

Invoice Automation

Modern organizations, therefore, must balance these different needs with a solution that gives their invoice processes the flexibility and agility to adapt as needed. At its core, invoice process automation is a combination of capturing, tracking, approvals, and transactions. Process Director addresses all of these aspects as a comprehensive solution that enables an organization to automate, track and report on all review and approval processes. Process Director invoice management solutions ensure that proper approval process will be created and followed, and it also allows for historically lengthy, sequential, manual processes to become efficient, highly parallel automated reimbursement processes. The end result is effective compliance and accountability, both for the company and for employees.

Many invoice automation solutions were created as part of legacy ERP applications, and they retain much of their inherent complexity. This means that integration, management, and updates require dedicated teams with specific skill sets in order to deploy and manage these applications. It also typically reduces adoption, as employees are required to work with outdated interfaces and complicated sets of rules. Process Director gives organizations the ability to rapidly develop expense-related applications with an easy-to-use integration framework, and can be built and managed by non-developers. Included is the ability to apply rules to auto-route to specific managers and supervisors for approvals.

From Paper-Based to Invoice Process Automation

When most people think of invoice management, they visualize a variety of receipts, print-outs, and other paper documents. But physical documents are easily lost, hard to read, and require a lot of manual data inputs. As a proven driver of digital transformation efforts, Process Director applies capabilities that reduce, and even eliminate, the need for paper document delivery, storage, and management.

Process Director enables the collection and organization of photo receipts, so employees can snap pictures of receipts and submit them immediately, along with contextual information about the reason for the expense. The photo becomes part of that employee’s expense case, and the company now has a record of the expense and some supporting data that helps during review and approval processes. Imagine a scenario where an employee meets with a customer over a cup of coffee and light breakfast. The expense might be relatively small -- maybe less than $10. Yet, those expenses add up, and if employees lose receipts, they’ll eventually be out a significant amount. By providing a digital way to submit an expense with immediacy, they can be assured of repayment, and don’t have to make a project out of creating their reports.

To further reduce the burden, employees can also email receipts that are automatically imported and assigned to the user’s profile. This ensures that the necessary data is captured and the necessary triggers are initiated to move the expense through approvals.

Invoice Automation Supported by Case Management

Process Director is built with case management functionality tightly embedded into its foundation. It can pull together processes, data and rules around accounting and compliance rules, and actively assesses, coordinate, and plan every aspect of a given expense report (treated as a “case”) ultimately working toward time-based goals.

These processes, transactions, and responses that define a complex set of activities like expense tracking and approvals must be tracked over a period of time, with a very specific deadline (most companies abide by a timeframe in which an employee can expect to be repaid). This allows invoices to be reviewed by as many different people, both inside and outside of the organization, who are required to evaluate them. Every action, message, response, and document generated during this complex activity becomes part of the case, and that gives the organization a trackable log of data about the employee, his or her expenses, and how/when they were reconciled.

Better Reviews with Invoice Automation

The process flow for invoice automation typically follows a fairly standard process, but can get stalled if the processes lack automated mechanisms for ensuring smooth movement from creation to completion. Process Director enables these processes to be easily created and modified to meet the specific finance and operation needs of a company.  It provides the flexibility to incorporate different requirements and procedures that map to changes in invoice automation policies. With Process Director, IT teams can create electronic forms the enable uploading of receipts into a convenient online workflow, either as one-off expenses, or as a bulk upload. The bulk option allows employees to submit mass numbers of receipts, and for workforces that are mostly mobile, or that require a lot of travel, this significantly reduces the workload for employees and their managers. The forms that are built can also apply auto-filling, so regularly used data is automatically populated, also saving time.

Additionally, Process Director allows for invoice categorization capabilities for different regions, amounts, and expense types, and can automatically generate accounting codes that correspond to those categories. Those codes can be used to populate the auto-fills to validate that the dropdowns are correct.

Process Director gives organizations the ability to develop and deploy invoice automation capabilities that are robust, but that don’t come with the complexity of legacy solutions. It enables integration of multiple applications into a single user interface that gives employees a fast and easy way to submit expenses, for companies to validate and track them, and ultimately for fast and effective reconciliation.

Cloud platforms are rapidly being adopted by enterprises as an agile, adaptable foundation for their IT environment. The move to the cloud requires serious consideration, however. IT leaders should understand the impact on their organization and how they will need to change. But they should also understand how the cloud can provide them with a new, and fundamentally better way of using technology to support business goals. Organizations that use the cloud as a foundation for their IT and business operations are deriving true economic value and demonstrable improvements in efficiency.

It is important to think of a cloud environment in the right context: it's not so much a solution or a tool as it is a foundation for the intersection of technology and business. The cloud offers a way of managing your technology investments that is more efficient and aligned with the needs of a growing enterprise. It lowers management and maintenance costs dramatically, while also providing the scalability that allows an organization to use computing and transactional resources as needed.

Cloud platforms operational efficiency: Reduce IT maintenance and support tasks

IT teams are filled with highly specialized staff who look out for the various parts of their technology strategy. While they may be focused on specific initiatives, invariably, issues arise that require an "all hands on deck" approach to problem solving, and it will take the time and attention of even your most specialized people. When your team is working to avoid outages or handling other infrastructure issues, they are not being as productive on critical issues as they could be. Nor is your company getting the maximum benefit from their valuable skill set.

IT departments will always have KPIs around daily technology-related tasks, but imagine if you didn’t have to actively manage them. Consider the difference in staffing and cost when much of the usual heavy lifting is no longer required. Besides the reduction of fixed costs like staffing, meetings, and physical requirements, having your applications in the cloud means that you can determine KPIs for what's critical for your business, rather than your technology, and rely on the vendor to perform accordingly.

Find out from your cloud vendor how different your allocation of resources could be. Analyze what it would look like if you deployed your people to projects and tasks that will move the company forward. Doing so will benefit from efficiencies around economies of scale and distribution of responsibilities— efficiencies that can only be achieved in a cloud environment.

The shared responsibility model of security

The reputation of your brand is based on trust among your company’s various stakeholders. Providing information so business users can make better decisions creates benefits, but there is potential risk. Every endpoint that your technology touches becomes a potential security risk.

Enterprise organizations require solutions which ensure data is only accessible for intended purposes and by known users. As more data and functionality become available and usable, CIOs must find ways to make data available where it can be most effective, without opening up the organization to potential risks. Yet, as more data is used by more people on more devices in and new ways, are you able to keep up with the ever-present potential risks?

Using the cloud means you can take advantage of a platform that has the ability (and for reasons of business sustainability, the necessity) to dedicate staff and resources solely to the pursuit of protecting their tenants, applications and customer data. Consider the focus your team can place on strategic issues and initiatives if you could reduce the need to constantly stay up to date and focused on security.

Make sure you are comfortable knowing that, while your data is owned by your company, it is being handled by the vendor through their ability to continuously deliver better security solutions. Security is important to an organization’s operations, so ask hard questions and insist for proof points from your vendor to ensure risk is mitigated.

Controlling your data and how it's used is critical to a company's health, and is fundamental to the CIO's role.

Economic advantages of using the cloud

Purchasing enterprise-grade technology hardware requires a lengthy review process, an implementation phase, ongoing management, and then finally depreciation and updating tasks. Every one of those tasks is time consuming, non-productive, and expensive. They also involve the valuable time of staff whose expertise could be used far more effectively and productively.

The cloud eradicates most of these wasted costs and instead uses a more efficient model where customers are billed on a subscription basis. Even more appealing is how cloud service providers break down spending based on usage type and amount. Cloud users pay on a per-minute model, rounded down to the nearest minute. In this way, organizations can efficiently manage costs and plan for growth.

When moving to the cloud, some of the money normally allocated for management of physical resources and upgrades can be used to develop a skilled staff that’s capable of using the cloud to implement innovative new services. Additionally, the cost effectiveness of the cloud is recognized in terms of scale. Organizations can grow without having to meet corresponding needs of more hardware, networking assets, and other manifestations of legacy, on-premises environments. That level of scalability is precisely what is required for modern enterprises that need to be highly responsive to changing market and customer needs.

A new model for modern enterprises

IT departments must respond quickly to market changes as well as shifts with internal KPIs. It is incumbent upon them not just to manage technology tools, but to figure out how to best use those tools to drive an agile business agenda. Instead of spending so much time on things like implementation, upgrades and uptime, the modern IT can now use the cloud to optimize the tools at their disposal, and create optimized, and secure, business solutions.

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