Recent posts about BPM (8)

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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There are dreams -- and then there's reality. For those of us who have spent time in enterprise software, we've seen ambitious plans and big hopes turn into unusable or "unsavable" projects more often that we may want to admit. With a lot of BPM software and workflow software tools, there are implementation and BPM application and workflow application integration issues that become complicated early on.  These end up taking up a disproportionate amount of time and, as a result, ultimately end up causing many of these projects to be derailed or shelved.

• Function: Where will you use your BPM tool? Product development, marketing, finance? Because BPM is so highly customizable and flexible, you need be specific about what you'll use it for, as well as for which specific aspects of that function. There's a mindset to the people who carry out certain tasks, and they are successful when they can rely on proven ways of meeting their goals. But the way an IT team operates is different from the way a finance group works. All of this thinking will eventually need to be embedded into the BPM, so it's essential that the functions are considered when creating a model.
• Environment: Here's where you'll need to map the tools and technology components you have available to you to the BPM. Maybe you won't rely on much of the technology functionality, but you need to be aware of what you could do so you can adapt your processes to the potential and limitations of the tools. If technology won't provide the backbone of your BPM operations, what will? This is where you need to consider how methodology applies to process.
• Processes:  The result of activities, decisions and a workflow produces a process that enables a result. At this point in your modeling, you should be thinking specifically about processes that will need to be created or modified, and what the impact of these processes will be on the overall landscape of your BPM.
• Workflow: Your workflow will be comprised of a lot of tasks that must be done in an orderly way. But just completion of those tasks is not enough to justify a BPM roll-out. Rather, you should be thinking not just of the linear way of getting things done, but what decisions, roles and activities will be involved that will impact the workflow.
• Roles: If you've scoped this well, then you not only know what each player does, but you know how to optimize their time and resources so they're adding the most value to the process. It's crucial that each person is able to impact the business process by contributing their strengths. This is where BPM is most evidently not just a technology-dependent thing.
• Decisions: If you can, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, determine what decisions will need to be made during the workflow of your BPM, then you'll have a greater likelihood of success when it comes to defining your workflow and assigning roles appropriately. Too often, a decision point is considered to be either a "yes" or a "no" situation. In some cases, there's more nuance to what's required; after all, the decision leads to the next step in the process, or it leads to completion of the process. The key is anticipating what the decisions will entail and what the results of those decisions will likely be.
• Activities: While separate, distinct activities will be what governs how the BPM will function, it's important to note that there are very different types of activities. Keep in mind that activities that are provided and handled by an individual are different (and provide a different impact) to those activities coming as a result of an entire group or business unit. Note not just what the activities are, but who performs them, and to what end they will arrive.

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.

Recently I talked about BPM's ability to pull together data from a variety of sources, including those big-dollar software suites with the famous acronyms: CRM, ERP, HRIS, and so forth. As exciting as it is that BPM software can tie these systems into everyday business processes, the thought does beg the question: does this mean we have to buy another big-ticket BPM software suite?
No. At least, not usually.

The truth is, it depends on the type of business you're in, and the type of problem you're trying to solve. You can certainly find seven-figure BPM solutions in the marketplace, and a few large enterprises may well need them. High-end BPM suites are often tied to other expensive products by the same vendor, such as complex event processing (CEP) systems. If your enterprise needs those specialized solutions, and requires the high level of workflow application and/or BPM application integration promised by the vendors that package them with equally expensive BPM products, then get ready to sign a big PO.

In virtually all other organizations, though (and even at the departmental or divisional level within those large enterprises), it makes sense to choose a more modest BPM solution. Large BPM products, like those other big software suites, are usually deployed top-down through the organization. Because they are meant to tackle highly visible, strategic processes, it will sometimes be the case that divisional, departmental, or routine processes are starved for attention. Right-sized BPM solutions can be deployed tactically, at little expense, to address those challenges efficiently.

Indeed, I am familiar with more than one customer whose enterprise has designated an "official" strategic BPM solution, but whose department is facing significant challenges that cannot be addressed in a timely fashion by that system. So, the customer selects and deploys a tactical BPM product, one that flies under the budget radar and is configured and deployed using a minimum of corporate resources. As a result, the department is able to meet its goals, efficiently and flexibly, without sparking conflict at the enterprise level. Isn't that what business process management (BPM) is all about?

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.]

BPM software is an important consideration for companies for reasons I've discussed earlier:  end users, CIOs, and CFOs all see direct benefits from the technology.

For better or worse, however, business process management (BPM) doesn't mean the same thing to everybody.  Some BPM products involve months-long, top-down implementation efforts.  Others boast rapidly deployed point-and-click workflow builders, but provide little flexibility in building forms.  Still others offer flexible data links across dissimilar applications, but require skilled programmers to build and maintain these connections.

To some extent, these variations simply represent the diversity of business needs faced by customers.  Ultimately, though, there has to be a unifying thread, a core principle joining together the panoply of solutions claiming the BPM mantle.  Lacking such a foundation, there is nothing businesses can use to determine whether or not they need to look into BPM solutions at all, much less decide which one to acquire.

Fortunately, BPM does indeed have a central tenet:  returning control of business processes to the business.  While business needs vary, it is a fairly universal truth that process owners and operators generally desire to have more control, and more flexibility, with respect to their processes.  Bringing control over processes directly to business users leads to improvements in a number of areas, including:

1. Business process improvement (BPI), which requires an intimate knowledge of the actual process being improved, rather than the technology that happens to implement it;
2. Flexibility of response to changing business needs;
3. Process Efficiency, as processes are defined and operated by those who use them, without suffering the translation errors intrinsic to the business/IT requirements dance.

All of which is why I'm so looking forward to participating in an upcoming webinar entitled Giving Control Back to the Business.  The June 23rd event features well-known analyst Sandy Kemsley.

According to Sandy, the webinar will focus on the ways that "dynamic, leaner BPM is implemented within enterprises: the drivers for adopting it, the types of workflow application and BPM application integration to which it is best suited, and the knowledge workers’ role in creating and participating in processes."

I hope to see you there!

[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.

Spring is in the air, and things are hopping at BP Logix.

First, the nice folks here at BP Logix have seen fit to bring aboard a new member of the team: namely, me, your humble blogger. My goals are to bring our customers the latest updates and information; to help determine, with our customers' input, the appropriate product strategy; and to support our customers with high-quality, expectations-busting service.

Speaking of our products: I'd like to point out a nice review of Process Director posted by the sharp folks at BPM Redux. Theo at BPM Redux tells us the same thing we hear from smart researchers at Forrester, independent analysts, and customers: Process Director revolutionizes the way that companies model, monitor and measure their complex processes.

Also on BPM Redux, you can find an interview with your humble blogger. (My wife hates the picture, but hey, if I had one that made me look like Brad Pitt, I'd definitely have used that one instead!) Speaking of matters photogenic (or otherwise): keep an eye on this space for some short video discussions about BPM, BP Logix, and the meaning of life.

Finally, I'd be remiss in letting you go without letting you know about our newest customer profile. Abbott, the pharmaceutical giant, is leveraging Workflow Director to meet challenges across the business, including HR, finance, marketing, customer service, and more. Download and enjoy reading the story of this innovative market leader, and discover why they chose BP Logix as their lean BPM partner.

I'm so excited to have joined BP Logix at this point in the company's growth, and I look forward to meeting with customers and potential customers. Please share your feedback, either using the comment form on this page, or by contacting us directly.

[Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/ / CC BY 2.0]