Recent posts about BP Logix (4)

As companies expand into new geographies and adapt to rapidly-changing technology, the very nature of their work has changed. When we consider the intense scrutiny now being placed on their operations as a result of increased regulation that work has becomes even more complicated.

 This is the natural state of today’s financial services industry. Retail banks, investment banks, savings and loans, brokerages, hedge funds etc., all deal in the world of data and transactions. As a result, and to satisfy the best interests of customers and stakeholders, they need to adhere to specific sets of standards. Due to both government and industry regulations, they face legal jeopardy if they cannot demonstrate compliance management solutions with legal mandates. With the proper mindset and tools to address issues of consolidation, compliance, reporting and a host of other activities, financial services firms can operate more effectively and efficiently.

In this highly regulated industry, businesses tend to have fairly complex actions as part of their regular business operations. This magnifies the need to develop and manage activities as actionable and reportable processes. An example of this is Stillwater National Bank and Trust company (SNB), a BP Logix customer. We began working with SNB to automate its loan credit and accounting processes and more than 150,000 forms used by employees across 28 locations. SNB turned to BPM to improve its customer service, address compliance requirements and ensure a more efficient and cost-effective operation overall.

Streamlining the loan credit process, as well as improving Accounts Payable processes, were key requests from Laura Briscoe, SNB's Director of Information Services. Her initial requirements indicated that the solution needed to be:

1) Browser-based

2) Provide rule-based routing

3) Be able to handle complex logic

4) Offer a user-friendly dashboard with search and proxy capabilities

5) Provide integration with SQL, Active Directory and SharePoint

While doing a cost-benefit analysis Briscoe found that she could do everything she needed to with Process Director -- including complex logic for forms, spawning, different rule sets and calculations on loan documents. As a result of streamlining the loan credit process, SNB is reducing  man hours, time and money and  have a well-documented and audited process. According to Briscoe, “With Process Director, we will be doing what we do now – on steroids.”

Process Director enables users to review historical and current data related to business processes, understand the implication of activities in running processes and implement corrective action to overcome a pending problem, if one is present. Process Director fuses traditional business process automation software technology with BPLogix Process Timeline™. The Timeline enables process builders to specify dependencies and conditions, determine the planned duration of a process, and define the order for all activities within the process.

Process Director BPM software provided business process governance and BPM compliance solutions which led to business process improvement that SNB required, that demonstrated compliance with regulatory and industry standards. The result was not just adherence to those standards, but improvements in end user productivity and SNB’s bottom-line.

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Just about every conversation about business process starts with some promise of "increased productivity" and ends with at least one party frothing at the mouth in anticipation of a demonstrable improvement.  ("Just how much productivity improvement did we see?")

There are all kinds of formulas for deriving a metric for business process improvement (BPI). Just as numbers and percentages can be impressive, so, too, can they be deceiving. Each organization operates with its own set of goals and relies on performance indicators to determine its success. As a result, it is difficult to provide a specific number or percentage that indicates better or more productivity. (Remember the old adage about the shady accountant who, when asked to do the books, said, “Just tell me what you want the numbers to be, and I’ll make sure they add up that.”) We all can identify impressive numbers however they will probably not be defensible, nor appropriate, for making reliable business decisions.

Surprisingly, we find that the same principle applies to many vendors who will show prospects a ‘25% increase in productivity or a 31% decrease in redundant processes.’ Those numbers are likely to be unique to a certain industry or to a specific organization.  Applying the logic, process and BPM software for an auto manufacturer doesn't automatically equate to identical success with a chain of donut franchises. This isn’t news to anyone who has ever scoped out or implemented an automated workflow process, yet it is still how software is often sold!

We, on the other hand, believe that making decisions regarding how you develop your BPM system requires knowing what you ultimately want to achieve -- and the results you will use to determine your success. To start, there has to be agreement within your organization that using BPM software begins with a specific mindset.  We initiate BPM with one fundamental understanding:   when we talk about automating any set of processes the result is, often, changes in the way those processes are performed. The hope (and goal), is that the automation alters things to a point where the organization recognizes and eliminates waste, reduces and eliminates redundancy, and identifies a “better way.” That is not necessarily a Holy Grail, but if anything ‘should’ be derived from a focus on business process management (BPM), it is that a “better way” inherently brings with it an increased sense of how to achieve increased productivity.

With this new mindset you can truly begin to apply business change management to what you are doing. Some organizations leave this aspect of business change to training (and to pleas about “working smarter.”)  That is a tall order for any organization – as businesses do not (and cannot) come to a grinding halt while we figure out how to change the way we work. BPM tools institutionalize this new way of doing business – and automating business processes is probably the simplest yet most impactful aspect of a BPM system.

If your organization’s mindset is geared towards thinking through its processes in a thoughtful, rational way, then in automating these processes you will start to see tangible changes to productivity: fewer people required to perform certain tasks, less time needed at decision points, greater transparency and more flexibility.

Consider implementing a BPM framework at Lucille’s Global Widget Corporation and another at Fred’s Fish Hatchery. The decision points and actions for effective widget production are completely and totally different from what is required to hatch fish (or breed fish… I’m not altogether clear on what hatcheries do.) Lucille sees a 17% increase in productivity that is saving her $5.3M over her closest competitor. Fred, meanwhile, is increasing his company’s productivity by 38% which, as it turns out, is ‘average’ for those in his industry. Both are reaping huge benefits and both require constant attention to the methodologies and management of their BPM tools. Both are feeling positive about the improvements to their businesses -- and both can point to automation of processes as the main reason for these improvements.

There is no doubt that the value in implementing BPM is real.  Ask any of our customers! They are saving real money; money they are re-investing in their businesses and distributing as increased profits.  Part of that “real” value, however, lies in knowing they have a solution that fits their needs and is specific to their businesses.

Traditionally, a fine line has divided process from project in the enterprise. The Project (or Portfolio) Management Office (PMO) is responsible for oversight of projects—however that is defined within that organization—while business process governance is often distributed throughout the organization, perhaps with some input from a business process improvement team.  The business process improvement group is usually organized around a set of principles, often Six Sigma or Operational Excellence, while the PMO is operated according to its own guidelines, such as a project life cycle or systems development life cycle (I'll refer to these, collectively, as SDLC). Finally, the PMO is generally responsible for efforts that cost money, while the business process improvement folks have a clear mandate to identify savings.

At BP Logix, we feel that process and project have been separated for too long. The SDLC after all, is itself a process, requiring planning, oversight, and documentation, and subject to review, audit, and regulatory examination, just like any other process. Furthermore, the SDLC is one of the most important processes in the enterprise, often involving tremendous expenditures of money and resources. Other enterprise processes have benefited from leveraging BPM solutions: could the SDLC benefit as well?

In upcoming posts, I will talk about the challenges and benefits of using BPM software, and specifically, BP Logix Process Director, to automate the SDLC even as it makes the work of the PMO easier and more transparent. In the meantime, if this topic interests you, be sure to participate in our webinar on Tuesday, February 8, at 1pm. View our BPM events page for more information, or just drop a note to info@bplogix.com. The webinar will feature well-known BPM expert and Forrester analyst Clay Richardson.

What do you think about BPM in the PMO? Are they doomed to forever be separate? How will one or the other have to change for them to come together? Leave your comments beow.

My career has taken me a lot of places over the past two-and-a-half decades. As a technologist, I spent a lot of time creating purpose-built solutions for a variety of business needs. As a manager, I faced the challenge of supporting those solutions, sometimes long after the individual who created them had gone elsewhere. And as a CIO, I saw how the accumulation of off-the-shelf point products and custom-built BPM software solutions can create an ungovernable, change-resistant headache for an organization trying to stay nimble in a tough competitive environment.

On and off throughout these years, I have also worked for some pretty terrific BPM vendors. In those roles, I saw the other side of the coin: customers unwilling or unable to abandon costly legacy products, convinced their careers are tied to a specific way of doing things, and suspicious of "not invented here" solutions.

All of these experiences led me to the BPM software industry. Business process management (BPM) software opens the door to the possibility of smaller software portfolios, flexible response to business needs, and easy customization. BPM software enables data to flow easily from the organization's various data repositories to its employees and partners while actually strengthening the governance of the data itself as well as that of the processes driven by that data. And, perhaps most importantly, BPM-based processes are indeed "invented here", custom-configured for the needs of the business, often without programming.

Sure, business process management (BPM) has its challenges, and I hope to touch on those in this space. Ultimately, though, BPM software holds out the promise of a revolution in the way that technology impacts business, and the way that business, in turn, views technology.

Things got pretty busy around here in the last quarter of 2010, so before I get too deeply entangled in the demands of the new year, I thought it might be a good moment to put down some ideas about where business process management (BPM) might be going in 2011. I may be wrong, but if by some chance I’m not, be sure to remember: you heard it here first.

1. BPM software adoption will continue to trend upwards. I’m not a fan of the school of thought that suggests that business process management (BPM) has become a mature, widely adopted technology.  Yes, many companies have procured a BPM solution, but BPM isn’t like CRM, ERP, or other big, centralized software suites. The most effective BPM deployments have been, and will continue to be, tactical, meaning that there is room for many such installations within an enterprise.
2. BPM initiatives will increasingly originate on the business side, not on the IT side. I see this phenomenon every day. BPM has been around long enough for non-technical managers to become familiar with, and eager to obtain, its benefits. Moreover, IT is often not well positioned to identify inefficiencies or risks in many business processes. So business units will increasingly reach out to directly vendors, independently or in partnership with their IT organizations, to address those needs.
3. SharePoint 2010 roll-outs will accelerate, but at a careful pace. Businesses are still unsure what to expect from SharePoint, which is surprising considering the investment many are making in that platform. It will be immediately obvious to most users that SharePoint’s workflow automation tools fall well short of even the most basic solutions offered by pure-play BPM vendors; nonetheless, customers will demand zero-programming integration with SharePoint’s lists and libraries, and BPM providers will have to get on board.
4. Predictive BPM (what we here at BP Logix refer to as business process automation software) will gain mindshare throughout the year. It’s one thing to automate and measure business processes, but it’s quite another to get an early view as to where a process is headed while it is still in progress. The power of predictable processes is the leverage it offers the business, enabling it to adapt to changing conditions at the earliest possible opportunity.

We can’t always see the future, but we can certainly hope for the best. All of us at BP Logix wish you a very healthy, happy, and prosperous 2011.

[This post originally appeared on Redux Online, where I am a guest blogger.]

Where I used to work (a big, now defunct, financial services firm), we automated everything.  In the HR workflow category, we had online, web-enabled processes for time reporting, employee status change, leave requests, bonus calculation, expense reimbursement, and on and on and on.  On the operations side, we had similar online support for PO processing, invoice generation, ordering supplies, and so forth.

You might think that, with all this automation, we were extremely efficient.  Unfortunately, exactly the opposite was true.  Not only did these workflow applications fail to save me any time:  they weren't really intended to.  Each had its own look and feel, its own data sets, its own supporting team of programmers and SMEs.

For example, rather than sending HR an email that said, "John X. is transferring from the IT operations group to the systems analysis group," or something like that, I had to navigate my way through one of the most non-intuitive, confusing, and clunky user interfaces ever designed.  Because this same system was used for a number of HR-related tasks, over the course of my career I spent countless hours hacking my way through a jungle of a UI to complete simple administrative procedures. (Of course, delegation was rarely an option.)  Worse yet, often I ended up having to work with somebody from HR anyway, as they had to jump in to either fix something I'd done wrong, or to bridge a gap in the system itself.

Think about your company's new employee on-boarding process.  Is it smoothly efficient, built intuitively from easy-to-use components?  Does it cover all aspects of the task, handling approvals, hand-offs, and dependencies in an elegant and transparent manner?  No?  How about invoice approval?  How about expense reporting?

The fact of the matter is that companies are still, in the words of Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, running errands for their computers when the computers should be doing the work for them. We purpose-build systems from scratch, or acquire narrow, off-the-shelf point solutions, when we ought to be devising a general solution that can be applied to the array of processes that businesses run through each and every day. This is the promise of BPM software and workflow software.

It's also BPM's best-kept secret.  Ask an average user what business process management (BPM) is for, and they'll tell you that it's for automating manual processes.  The more sophisticated among them might point out that their BPM solution provides a platform for modeling processes and connecting those processes with the data that drives them.

These are all good answers.  But I suspect that, for the vast majority of corporate end users, the real benefit is more straightforward:  BPM software offers a consistent, understandable, and transparent mechanism that is reused over and over again to navigate a wide variety of processes.  The end user can, quite simply, do her job, liberated from the training, troubleshooting, and hair-pulling associated with any large set of unrelated applications.  And, in the end, getting the job done is what BPM is all about.

I've talked about business process management (BPM) in general in some earlier posts, and I'll keep doing that.  But once in a while, everyone is entitled to toot their own horn.  We're gonna do some horn-tooting today.

Often I'll find myself in a conversation with an enterprise architect or CIO or even CEO, only to discover that they really have no background in BPM software and workflow software, and haven't learned (yet) what BPM software and workflow software can offer their business.  I like to take that opportunity to highlight three key benefits of our product, Process Director.

1. Transparency.  It can be difficult for senior business leaders to gain a comfort level with the various hardware and software “black boxes” deployed by IT.  Process Director bridges that gap with a solution that is fully customizable and extensible, and yet does not require programmers.
2. Efficiency.  If process improvement is important to a business—and in today’s world, it needs to be—then automation and metrics are a core requirement.  Process Director measures the performance of each activity within a given process; as the process is executed over time, Process Director learns how its actual timeline varies from the original forecast. This unique capability, called predictive analysis, alerts process owners that upcoming activities may not complete on time, even before those activities have started.
3. ROI. In any growing organization, the number of homegrown and off-the-shelf solutions accumulates pretty rapidly. Each one brings with it another team, another vendor, maintenance, updates, infrastructure, and training.  Process Director gives the CIO the opportunity to start replacing those one-trick-pony products with a flexible, customizable solution addressing a huge variety of business needs in operations, finance, HR, IT, sales, and other areas. Fewer vendors, less maintenance, reduced training costs, smaller infrastructure.

Transparency, efficiency, and ROI make a pretty valuable triumvirate at a time, like now, when businesses are struggling in all three areas.  It's great to be able to address those areas for our customers, while (I admit it) having a great time doing it.