Recent posts about business process automation

Business processes are the lifeblood that keeps organizations thriving. Yet, not all processes are created equal. Some are straightforward and linear, while others resemble labyrinths with multiple twists and turns. Welcome to the world of process complexity, where the challenges of managing intricate workflows can lead to a cascade of issues that significantly impact operational efficiency and compliance.

In this article, we explore the world of complex processes and dive deep into one of the most frequent components of complex processes — approvals. Whether you're navigating the convoluted paths of complex processes or cruising down simpler workflows, our insights will help you make an informed choice when selecting an automation solution that aligns with your unique needs.

Complex processes vs. simple processes

Suppose you’re deciding between investing in a robust process automation platform or opting for an off-the-shelf SaaS solution. You must first determine whether your process is simple or complex.

Simple business processes are typically straightforward and linear, with minimal decision points and a limited number of steps. In contrast, complex business processes are characterized by their intricacy, involving numerous decision points, conditional pathways, and interactions across various departments or stakeholders.

Managing complex processes manually or through inadequate process automation tools can result in increased operational costs, higher error rates, compliance risks, and bottlenecks. Organizations can avoid these headaches by implementing a robust process automation solution specifically designed to handle complexity, like Process Director. Such a solution can streamline workflows, reduce error rates, ensure compliance, and mitigate bottlenecks, ultimately driving operational efficiency and cost savings.

Of course, while robust process automation solutions excel at handling complexity, they may be overkill for relatively simple and straightforward processes. When dealing with simple processes, opting for a less sophisticated Software as a Service (SaaS) solution could be a more cost-effective and efficient choice.

Four telltale signs of a process complexity

By accurately assessing the complexity of your workflows, you can ensure you are leveraging the right level of automation to enhance efficiency without tacking on unnecessary complexity. But how do you know if your processes are complex?

Here are four indicators that you're dealing with a complex process:

Responsible for sensitive information

You need a secure way to handle trade secrets, financial data, and personal information.

Rigorous regulatory & data integrity standards

You need to maximize traceability and quality control so you can prevent errors and close compliance gaps.

Sophisticated routing & integrations

You have intricate approval processes and must integrate data spanning multiple departments or parties.

Advanced conditional logic required

You need a smarter system with workflow options that change dynamically based on specific attributes.

Process complexity in approval workflows

Let’s zero in on how complexity actually manifests in processes with an example. 

As one of the most critical facets of business operations, approval workflows can make or break operational efficiency. That’s why it should come as no surprise to learn that approvals frequently exhibit all four signs of process complexity. Here’s how:

• Sensitive information handling: Complex approvals often involve reviewing and authorizing critical documents and decisions, such as financial transactions or access to sensitive data. Ensuring a secure and confidential handling of this information is paramount to prevent data breaches or unauthorized access.
• Regulatory and data integrity standards: Many approval workflows are subject to strict regulatory guidelines, especially in industries like healthcare and finance. Compliance with these standards is non-negotiable, requiring meticulous tracking, auditing, and quality control to avoid costly errors or compliance gaps.
• Sophisticated routing and integrations: Approval processes can span multiple departments or even external stakeholders, necessitating seamless integration and data exchange. Ensuring that the right people or groups review and approve documents in the correct order is vital for efficient and compliant operations.
• Advanced conditional logic: Complex approvals often involve intricate decision-making criteria. For example, approval may be contingent on specific attributes or conditions being met, such as budget thresholds or compliance with company policies. These rules require a sophisticated automation system to ensure accurate and consistent decision-making.

Complex processes often involve intricate approval workflows that can make or break operational efficiency. Approvals demand a level of sophistication and precision that standard automation tools may struggle to provide.

To accommodate complex approval needs, process automation solutions like Process Director can leverage a range of different approval types. Let's examine three approval types frequently encountered in complex processes.  

1. Conditional approvals

Grants approval based on predefined if-then conditions or criteria, allowing for automated decision-making and streamlining the approval process.

Example: Purchase requisitions

2. Nested approvals

Allows for hierarchical approval structures, where multiple authorization levels are required sequentially.

Example: Marketing content review

3. Parallel approvals

Enables simultaneous review and approval by multiple individuals or groups, reducing approval time and increasing efficiency.

Example: Publication management

Don't let chaos hold you back

Whether you're dealing with straightforward workflows or tackling the challenges of complexity, choosing the right automation solution for your business processes requires a keen understanding of their intricacies.

Contact us today to learn how Process Director can help you conquer complexity. 

IT Process Automation (ITPA) is an approach to streamline IT operations through automated workflows. An analysis conducted by McKinsey at two financial services organizations revealed that a staggering 90% of IT departments were focused on inefficient and manual tasks such as testing, code-fixing, and maintenance. ITPA automates these kinds of inefficient, repetitive, and manual IT processes to improve operational efficiency and eliminate costly human errors.

A few widely-known ITPA use cases are:

1. Service request handling
2. Bug reporting and testing
3. Compliance monitoring and IT security
4. Incidence response, messaging, and notifications
5. IT asset tracking and management
6. Server automation (automation of server shutdown and restart, and automation of server disk space cleanup)
7. Network automation (deploying patches to network devices and triggering upgraded configuration settings)

As ITPA becomes increasingly popular and beneficial, Gartner predicts that 40% of Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams in large enterprises will use AI-augmented automation to improve IT productivity and achieve greater agility by 2023.

We put together a complete guide that reviews the steps involved in IT process automation and explains how it benefits enterprises across all industries.

How does IT process automation work?

IT departments should create predefined events or workflows before setting up ITPA tools. For instance, the IT department may need to create a bug-tracking workflow involving steps such as capturing bugs, prioritizing bugs, assigning bugs to the relevant team, fixing bugs, and pushing the fixed code to deployment before setting up an ITPA tool.

An ITPA tool can automate workflows using three vital steps, which include:

1. Monitoring
2. Trigger
3. Reaction

1. Monitoring

ITPA tools may monitor the performance of the system against the pre-defined performance metrics until a trigger or a defect is detected. For instance, the bug-tracking ITPA tool monitors for bugs in the software application until a bug is detected.

2. Trigger

3. Reaction

How does it differ from business process automation (BPA)?

Business Process Automation (BPA) is an approach to streamlining general business functions with the help of digital technologies. Though both BPA and ITPA automate manual and repetitive tasks, there are several differences between both of these approaches.

Main benefits of IT process automation

ITPA plays a vital role in the digital transformation of the business. It helps the organization improve the efficiency of IT service delivery. Here are some of the other main benefits of ITPA to businesses:

Cost-savings

IT businesses waste a lot of resources on repetitive and manual processes. For example, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) spend huge amounts of money on the Service Desk. Nearly 40% of calls that a MSP service desk receives are about password resetting. According to Forrester, a few large-scale organizations spend over $1 million for password-related support costs. The average service desk labor cost for a single password reset is $70.

An ITPA enables MSPs not only to automate routine tasks, but also to create a self-service interface that allows their customers to remediate incidents such as password resetting on their own. The self-remediation helps MSPs save money that they otherwise spend on password resetting help desk service or other menial requests. Gartner also predicts that hyper-automation technologies may help enterprises reduce operational costs by up to 30% by 2024.

Increased transparency between tech teams and management

Automation makes internal processes more transparent. ITPA tools not only show business users what the process looks like, but also the status of the process after it starts. The authorized people can control who can view the process and give user-based permissions.

By implementing ITPA tools, the management of the enterprise can track the status of network infrastructure and collaborate effectively with tech teams to improve the compliance, security, and efficiency of the IT operations.

Improved productivity and better utilization of IT staff

In a recent survey, 74% of IT and engineering leaders said that process automation helped their human resources save up to 30% of the time previously spent on manual processes.

ITPA software tools enable enterprises to free up qualified IT personnel from doing manual tasks and engage them in activities related to strategy, innovation, and technology. The productivity and utilization of staff can be measured in various ways, including employee time savings, cost savings, and faster operations.

Mitigate costly IT and human errors

One of the most obvious benefits of ITPA is that it mitigates costly human errors.

Did you know that most service outages are caused by human intervention? In fact, on February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services S3 got disrupted due to a small mistake done by an authorized executive.

According to Amazon, the glitch happened after the person wrongly entered the command which resulted in the removal of additional servers. This human error took down Amazon Web Services for around 4 hours. An ITPA tool might have helped prevent the Amazon Web Services S3 outage caused by human error. Enterprises may need to implement ITPA tools to mitigate costly IT errors.

Increased compliance

ITPA tools restrict unauthorized data access and improve compliance through granular process monitoring, automated reporting, and audit trials. For instance, enterprises need to change server administration passwords every 30 to 90 days as per the security compliance standards. ITPA systems can automate and complete this laborious and time-consuming task with zero error and meet the compliance requirements.

Likewise, an ITPA tool can run an automated workflow to check if servers, applications, and networks meet the compliance before triggering and performing an update.

IT Process Automation Solutions with BP Logix

IT Process Automation tools work just like Business Process Management (BPM) or Robotic Process Automation (RPA), but they are narrowly focused on IT operations. Enterprises can use ITPA tools for network automation, server automation, storage automation, and application automation. ITPA tools, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, are often built with advanced functionalities that require technical proficiency and coding skills to deploy.

A few main benefits of ITPA are cost savings, increased compliance, reduced human errors, improved productivity, and higher transparency among internal staff. Enterprises may need to implement ITPA tools to improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of IT operations.

Discover how the Process Director, a workflow automation software from BP Logix, can help you automate your IT workflows and improve the efficiency of IT service delivery.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

In this article…

• What is business process automation (BPA)? 
• What kind of tasks and processes should be automated?
• Business process automation use cases and examples
• Why are businesses turning to BPA? Benefits and advantages 

What is business process automation (BPA)?

Business process automation (BPA) is the process of automating complex functions (beyond traditional data collection and record-keeping activities) with the help of digital technologies.

Business process automation is not the same thing as case management. (Case management deals more with a group of processes, and therefore is much more complex. Cases typically involve multiple people and/or departments.)

Organizations implement workflow automation solutions such as Intelligent BPM and Business Rules Engines to enable accurate data reporting, improve accountability, identify and eliminate inefficiencies, streamline communication, and reduce operational costs. 

The market size of the global Business Process Automation (BPA) industry was approximately $9.8 billion in 2020. It is forecasted to grow at an annualized rate of 12.2% and reach $19.6 billion by 2026. 

In this article, we will cover the advantages of BPA and highlight its use cases in areas such as logistics, education, bookkeeping, human resources management, finance, contracts management, and more.

What kind of tasks and processes should be automated?

Did you know that employees waste 22% of their productive time on repetitive tasks and wasteful procedures? As such, every organization should aim to increase operational efficiencies by eliminating wasteful procedures and practices. One way to do this is through business process automation and business process management (BPM). 

BPM software helps organizations achieve optimal performance by automating very specific processes such as:

• High-volume, repetitive tasks that involve the same steps
• Tasks that require multiple people
• Back office workflows
• Time-sensitive tasks 
• Compliance and audit trails
• Scheduled tasks which occur at the same time on the same day each week
• Employee onboarding
• Purchase orders, accounts payables, and bill payments
• IT services desk support
• Marketing automation across multiple promotional channels
• Sales activities like lead qualification, prospecting, and funnel creation

To learn more about how to prioritize process automation projects, you can view our guide here.

Business process automation use cases and examples

Business owners may not have an idea of what processes and workflows they can automate at the workplace. Because of this, businesses often postpone adopting business automation platforms and end up wasting millions of dollars due to repetitive processes, low employee productivity, and poor compliance. 

The BPA use cases and examples below can help determine how automation efforts can improve operational efficiency and provide a competitive advantage: 

Human resources

The manual HR process is likely to result in an unpleasant experience for new employees. It may also lead to excessive paperwork for the HR team, inconsistencies in the hiring process, and a low employee retention rate. In fact, 36% of HR leaders feel that the lack of automation is the reason for their inability to better organize the onboarding process.

BPA empowers the organization to automate paperwork, map the employee onboarding journey, meet compliance standards, and so much more. BPA also makes it easier for HR teams to enroll benefits and assign key performance indicators (KPIs).

A few human resource management (HRM) functions that BPA can automate are:

• Hiring 
• Onboarding
• Training
• Leaves management
• Performance management

Legal and contracts management

Legal and contracts management comprises all legal tasks related to the management of contracts. A few vital tasks involved in the process of contract management are drafting contracts, preparing bids, processing claims, monitoring contract performance, and managing change requests. 

BPA enables organizations to create a central repository of contracts with a search function, automate contract drafting, send reminders to relevant teams about contract deadlines or renewals, automate approvals with e-signatures, meet compliance, create touchless contracts with fully-executed NDAs, and build conditional workflows.

Some legal and contract management tasks that BPA can automate are:

• Procurement and supplier management
• Contract management
• Contract compliance
• Claims processing
• Audit trails

Financial

Typically, finance-related tasks rely heavily on manual, repetitive, and time-consuming activities. Most finance tasks include invoice processing, financial data recording or reconciliation, budgeting, and financial projections, and more. These tasks are prime candidates for automation because of their highly-structured and rule-based nature. 

BPA automates these rule-based finance functions to reduce the likelihood of errors and fraud, achieve greater efficiency, meet compliance, and save time. It’s projected that organizations can automate 42% of the financial department’s work with the help of automation technologies like BPA and RPA (Robotic Process Automation).

Some finance-related tasks that BPA can automate are:

• Purchase orders
• Accounts payables
• Financial reporting
• Payroll processing
• Invoicing and accounts receivables
• Tax compliance and reporting

Data aggregation and bookkeeping

Improper data aggregation is the reason why accounting teams struggle with financial close and consolidation. Due to this, accounting teams have been failing to provide critical decision-making inputs to business owners. It also forces accounting teams to spend more time on mechanical data and manual financial consolidation adjustments. 

BPA enables organizations to automatically update and approve journal entries, conduct audit trials, create financial close checklists, match transactions with general ledger, compare account balances against sources to identify discrepancies, and give automated alerts on uncollected invoices.

Some data aggregation and bookkeeping tasks that BPA can automate are:

• Journal entries
• Basic data entry 
• Bank reconciliations
• Expense management
• Credit control
• Risk management

Education

27% of tasks in educational services can be automated with the help of existing technologies like business process management (BPM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

BPA helps educational institutions transform from paper-based procedures to electronic procedures. It eliminates the hassle for students to visit the college premises multiple times to enroll in courses. Automation streamlines the process of student enrollment and engagement.

Some tasks that BPA can automate in the educational services industry are:

• Student enrollment and course registration
• Immigration compliance for international students
• Financial aid services

Logistics and shipping

Automation has become a common trend in the logistics and shipping industry. As business trends and demands evolved, organizations in manufacturing industries quickly learned that they cannot survive without an efficient logistics department and automated processes.

BPA software enables logistics and shipping companies to reduce inventory costs, eliminate the scope for costly errors, meet compliance standards, access real-time freight data analysis, improve stock visibility, and manage the distribution.

Some logistics and shipping processes that BPA can automate are:

• Lead management
• Inventory tracking
• Shipment scheduling and tracking

Why are businesses turning to BPA? Benefits and advantages

Gartner predicts that businesses will adopt at least 3 out of 20 process-agnostic types of software by 2024 to enable hyper-automation. Why?

It’s because any medium- to large-scale business can greatly benefit from implementing no-code BPA technologies. To name a few, businesses can streamline processes, reduce human errors, save time and money, and improve customer service.

Let’s review a few more of the key benefits to BPA below.

Streamlined and standardized processes

The primary role of BPA is to streamline and standardize complex and repeatable tasks. It enables organizations to develop a set of rules to complete each task and create a workflow that does not require human intervention.

Automation helps employees spend their quality time on tasks that improve organizational productivity. According to McKinsey, streamlining and standardizing processes through automation can increase productivity by 1.4% on a global basis annually. Further, BPA significantly contributes to overall business process improvement.

Compliance records

BPA helps businesses create automated reporting and documentation procedures that meet compliance regulations like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), and The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For instance, employee benefits compliance is one of the major concerns for organizations. Employee benefit laws like HIPAA and ERISA want organizations to roll out employee benefit plans and maintain records of the same. 

A BPM streamlines the employee benefits process and maintains its compliance records impeccably. It simplifies the complex process of collecting eligible employee data, gathering signatures, and generating approvals while processing employee benefits.

Transparency between teams and stakeholders

BPA increases visibility and accountability within organizations. It creates a workflow that all authorized professionals can track.

Likewise, automated workflows may also help an internal auditor assess whether the project team has followed a set of standards, policies, and regulations while executing an operational activity or not with a single mouse click.

Eliminate costly errors

Did you know that the Citigroup credit department accidentally sent $500 million to Revlon’s lenders by mistake? This was a severe human error that could have been avoided if automation tools were in place.

The implementation of automation technologies makes organizations less vulnerable to clerical and reporting errors that cost millions and millions of dollars.

Improved customer service

Customer engagement is the key to an increased customer satisfaction rate. BPA allows businesses to streamline activities like customer engagement, customer support, and customer experience through automated social media, automated emails, and automated service interactions.

For instance, a Social BPM can create a workflow that sends an automated alert or trigger when a customer makes a complaint on a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook.

Choosing the right BPA solution for your business

Choosing the right business process automation software that is more powerful than a traditional ERP or CRM can be challenging. However, you can choose a suitable BPA solution by analyzing if it meets the expectations in the following parameters:

• User experience: It involves analyzing the ease of use and efficiency of the solution. How friendly is the user interface? How smooth is the interaction between the user and the software?
• Artificial intelligence: How much human involvement is required while executing complex tasks? After all, you are purchasing the BPA solution to reduce user intervention. Choose a BPA solution that is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Integrations: BPA platforms should facilitate API integration between existing software and solutions at the workplace for better efficiency. 
• Flexible deployment: Make sure that the BPA vendor offers flexible deployment options. The flexibility allows you to deploy the application on your premises or third-party cloud infrastructure based on your preference and requirement.
• Low code development: Coding can be a hassle and complex. With low-code applications, you can customize and quickly adapt the applications in response to the fast-changing business environments.
• Mobile use: 60% of employees use mobile apps for work-related activities. If the BPM solution is not mobile-friendly, it would not make tasks and to-do lists available for employees on the go.

BPA solutions can boost the productivity of workplaces. They can save millions of dollars to businesses by standardizing workflows in areas like accounting, finance, human resources, contracts management, and logistics. They can also help eliminate costly errors and improve the quality of customer service. Ensure you choose a low-code and user-friendly AI-enabled BPM software.

Ready to learn more about how digital transformation powered by business process automation tools can streamline your complex processes and increase the efficiency of business operations?

Schedule a demo of BP Logix’s Process Director, or get in touch with us today!

Let’s face it, organizational change is difficult. Business leaders who can take an innovative idea and push it forward to adoption within their organizations are hard to find, and they are often rewarded when successful.

When undergoing a new automation initiative, choosing the right technology partner is important, but engaging end users and preparing stakeholders to adopt a change mindset is of equal importance. Here are 10 steps for making your Automation initiative a success. 

• Choose the right process - Collaborate with end users to choose the right process. Initially, choose a process with high impact but low complexity that you can roll out quickly and will generate excitement for end users.
   
• Analyze Stakeholders – Research and identify ALL the stakeholders who will touch, or are touched by the process, including users, managers, and administrators.
  
  
• Communicate! -User buy-in is incredibly important, so discuss the benefits of automation with users, and explain how it will make their job easier.
  
  
• Gather Requirements - Document both the inputs and outputs of the process as well as any pain points, with the context provided by your stakeholder interviews. 

• Map out the current process and define requirements –Sketch out the process from beginning to end, considering the view from the end user’s perspective, and try to implement new efficiencies. 
  
• Build iteratively – Regularly check-in with stakeholders to get feedback on progress and take note of any evolving requirements. 
  
  
• Train end users –Explain to users how to use the new system and to run the process, so they are comfortable with using it.
  
  
• Documentation - Create a process guidebook. Good documentation of the process and how to use it is the key to enabling your users to do self-serve troubleshooting. 
  
  
• Test and tweak -Ensure that Stakeholders test the process and that process designers make tweaks based on the feedback.
  
  
• Roll out to production and monitor the system closely – Have needs been met? Is everything running smoothly? Watch for ways to further improve the process as it runs.
  
  Interested in learning more about how to successfully launch a business process automation initiative?  We're ready to talk.
  
  

Today’s colleges and universities require comprehensive data communication to be successful in supporting the needs of students, faculty, and other stakeholders. In an ideal situation, applications connect seamlessly with one another, but in reality, different software solutions were built to solve for different needs. As a result, they weren’t necessarily designed to share data. Yet, for innovative campus IT teams, achieving harmony among all these systems can be achieved with a smart digital integration strategy.

When applications and technology systems operate together as a functioning, cohesive machine, colleges achieve optimal outcomes with their technology investments, and they’re also better equipped to meet their goals as academic institutions. Achieving that level of interoperability requires a focused effort to align tools and strategies. This includes the processes built around those applications, the methodologies for applying them, and systems and the people managing those processes. As digital transformation changes the way that academic organizations stay innovative, it’s important to know how each can advance their enterprise integration management strategies.

Preparing for Higher Education Digital Integration 

Integrating digital systems is an ongoing challenge for colleges and universities because they require such a diverse set of systems, from ERP to SIS to HRIS. Some are centrally-run systems while others are spun up at the departmental level. Campus IT teams are constantly trying to meet new technology needs that come from things like compliance mandates, the creation of new student services, developments in academic departments, and a host of other changes.

The best way to optimize a school’s technology investments and maximize the potential of its systems is to integrate applications so data can be shared. Doing so requires a foundation, one that is process-based, that will provide the framework for building new applications and connectors between and among applications.

To get started with an integration plan, schools must first identify the outcomes they desire and then map the applications that will provide the necessary data and functionality to meet those outcomes. For example, the registrar’s office could schedule classes faster if it could integrate data about facilities availability, enrollment numbers, and course requirements. In many cases, that information has to be retrieved in separate and disparate formats. A single view, delivered through integration, helps expedite scheduling.

Build Process and Workflow into Integration Requirements

Requirements can then be built, and on top of those requirements, teams can start to build processes. These processes must deliver, at a minimum, these things:

• Workflow automation: most applications will have some level of built-in workflow. The goal of processes is to ensure that workflows are connected so that real-time updates in one application are correspondingly made in applications to which it is connected. Consider how convenient it is for financial aid information to automatically populate with a students’ tuition bill so she knows, in real-time, precisely what her financial responsibility is.
• Connector flexibility: applications are upgraded from time to time, and they deploy new functionality. Make sure that processes are flexible enough to adapt to changes in existing systems, and can be applied to new technologies.
• Productivity gains: the whole point to an integration strategy is to be more productive with the technology that’s available to you. Make sure that stakeholders are actually getting better visibility into data and then able to apply that, through automation, to improving performance.

Deploying a Sustainable Digital Integration Strategy

Once goals have been identified and processes begin to be built, IT teams need to perform some important steps as part of their strategy as the initiate integration efforts:

• Develop a set of proven best practices from process thought leaders. Familiarize yourself with case studies of colleges who have done this kind of work.
• Partner with stakeholders (others in IT, department heads, users, executive sponsors, and others) to determine what their specific needs are. Learn their pain points and understand what constitutes “integration nirvana” for them.
• Establish a content governance framework so that processes adhere to a specific, but flexible, set of requirements.
• Ensure compliance for industry and institutional compliance frameworks.

A Continuous Integration Roadmap

At this point, you will have a vision and an actionable roadmap. With a tool like Process Director, you can initiate the integration process. This can be done by identifying which inputs will inform your integrations, and how that data will be incorporated into it. Typical integrations come from applications like these:

• Databases
• LDAP or directory servers
• Standard enterprise applications like CRM, marketing automation, HR systems, and others
• Specific higher education tools like student lifecycle management, financial services apps for financial aid, scheduling and logistics apps, and others
• Document Imaging Software / Scanners
• File System Monitor Application Integration
• Email Servers
• Social BPM Application and Workflow Application Integration
• SharePoint or other file-related applications

With a process-driven approach, campus IT teams will be able to dramatically reduce cost and improve efficiency. Processes allow them to handle connections among the applications and systems listed above, as well as others so there are repeatability and consistency. Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

With integrated applications, the entire student lifecycle can become far more streamlined, and university operations can be more efficient. Academic organizations can realize significant cost savings and better deployment of resources. By sharing data and functionality, colleges and universities will be able to emphasize their strengths to their stakeholders as they provide the best possible college experience for all stakeholders.

Recently, a bipartisan team of members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill that would promote equal access to academic opportunities, services, and materials for students with disabilities. The Accessible Instructional Materials in Higher Education Act, also known as the AIM HIGH Act, would create a commission to develop voluntary accessibility criteria for instructional materials and educational technology.

The AIM HIGH Act is the result of a collaboration between the National Federation of the Blind, the Association of American Publishers, the Software and Information Industry Association, the American Council on Education, and Educause. To successfully implement the provisions of the Act, schools will need to create processes both for implementation and to monitor compliance. Done effectively, these processes will also generate analytical insights that will help schools become better at delivering services and at meeting their institutional goals and legal mandates. The most effective tool to support these efforts is with a business process solution.

Codifying Accessibility with Processes

Accessibility takes on many different forms. As a general rule, information and communication technology is considered accessible and usable if it can be used in a similar fashion, and to the same effective results by people both with and without disabilities. Essentially, comparable access to information must be provided, taking the needs of all users and learners into account. Digital formats can complicate accessibility for not just the sightless and the hearing impaired, but also for those who are color blind, those prone to seizures, and people with physical limitations that require keyboard navigation rather than the use of a mouse. These are only some examples.

Things like what to make accessible, and how to comply with the Act will fall to individual schools to decide. Without specific guidelines, the effort could be complex, but with a process-driven approach, IT teams can frame the scope of the effort to become AIM HIGH compliant and customize to their own needs.

University IT departments can start by developing workflow standards to guide all aspects of development and implementation. Building these standards will be critical for establishing the consistency needed to be accessible in the eyes of the legislative framework, and the agility to manage the specific needs of individual cases.

IT teams can start by identifying specific categories they need to work on, including:

• Testing and data collection tools: this includes things like Web-based tests (open-ended or multiple choice), or data collection that students might employ in the course of doing academic research.
• Academic presentation material: includes electronic document templates used to create coursework-related documents or presentations. This could be a standard PowerPoint template that’s required to establish a common look and feel for presentations or requirements for using and submitting term papers in Google Documents.
• Educational materials: this covers interactive online courses, which are increasingly becoming used in higher education. This includes self-paced training courses; educational webinars; other educational presentation formats; and support materials for such activities, including electronic worksheets, required reading, and tests. It could also include a course syllabus or administrative documents and tools.

Implementing Accessibility with Process Director

Process Director has long been used in higher education to meet all manner of student and institutional needs. It can be a critical tool in helping to codify and manage the necessary processes that will help schools be successful in administering AIM HIGH and other accessibility requirements.  IT teams can use functionality in Process Director to apply a guided approach that includes:

• Discovery: it’s essential for IT teams to understand the unique needs of the issues for which they are solving. A well-prepared team will be better able to incorporate specific milestones, approvals, and decision-making into workflows if can use a process-driven approach to understanding and implementing necessary tasks.
• Awareness: this is about recognizing when to accommodate and when it’s not necessary. This may seem easy to ascertain, but for someone who has never had to consider accessing a website in a way where they have unique physical or mental abilities, it may be difficult to truly understand how to meet the needs of different users.
• UX design: make sure that the design of any digital format is built in an accessible way, and perform UX testing with the audience for which the solution is being developed.
• Visual design: this is different from UX. Visual design is about the actual placement and layout of web pages, forms, and other tools so they can be interpreted and understood.
• Development: your code should be accessible so that, irrespective of ability, it is able to be deployed in different formats.
• Workflow development: ensure that in all workflows, AIM HIGH requirements accounted for.

To successfully meet the needs of higher education inclusion, colleges and universities will need a dedicated effort that includes some level of complexity. In order to make sense of it and roll it out successfully, they will require a process-driven approach. Being compliant with legislation like AIM HIGH will be one goal of these efforts, but of far more importance will be the ability to create an inclusive learning environment for learners of all types of abilities.

Modern institutions are realizing significant advantages from low code development, an approach to building software which allows non-developers to build applications in a visual, drag-and-drop environment with components for different types of functionality. Low-code platforms have enabled the rise of a business analyst support system who can direct application priorities by abstracting the typically complex coding tasks associated with programming by using reusable components. Innovative college and university IT teams are taking advantage of low-code platforms to improve process automation and derive significant ROI from their technology investments, and it’s changing how they build for the future.

By employing low-code capabilities that enable non-developers to connect various stakeholders and implement sophisticated functionality, users and teams realize greater efficiency. Essentially, those closest to the problems can now have the greatest impact at solving those problems. In higher education, solutions are wide-ranging, and low-code allows schools to benefit from:

• Automating processes, integrate apps with existing systems, and easily connect to data from multiple sources so information and functionality render in a single user experience. Each instance of building a connector can cost as much as $25,000 in developer expenses when using traditional methods.
• Optimizing ROI from legacy applications to deliver better user experiences and increase user adoption.
• Designing and building best-in-class apps that can be deployed when needed. Provide the ability to iterate and improve as needed.
• Recognizing and delivering solutions for all aspects of the university experience. This includes things like HR management, student recruiting, facilities and operations, and alumni relations.
• Migrating applications from on-premises to the cloud.
• Delivering applications in mobile formats to increase usage for students, faculty, and school staff.

Low-code solutions like Process Director give users a highly visual dashboard and software components that can be used to create an application without having to use code. The combination of rapid development capabilities along with the low-code approach offers enterprises the ability to build, deploy, and iterate quickly. Additionally, it provides ways to identify deep insights into usage and performance of applications.

Higher Education Technology Transformation

In higher education, using a low-code approach is about much more than just the applications themselves. It can save schools money, improve how IT resources are used, and deliver services to better meet the ever-changing needs of the 21st Century university student, faculty members, and staff. These things, in turn, make schools more competitive and economically viable.

This is important for colleges because they operate according to prescribed schedules — admissions, registration, financial aid, and the routine of the quarter or semester system. It’s difficult to innovate when the next milestone is right around the corner. Having to adhere to the typical application development lifecycle is slow and typically results in solutions that can be obsolete before they even become available. However, by building and delivering quickly, and with reusable components, university stakeholders can not only deliver fast, but IT teams and departmental groups can iterate and update applications continuously.

Low-code process automation provides a foundation for all university processes, and operates as the engine that moves the student through their journey from first point of contact, all the way through graduation.

Process Management and Workflow for Higher Education

In a university environment, admissions, financial aid, HR, and all departments are using Process Director to effectively manage the complex processes involved with operating a school and delivering effective services. Higher education institutions are able to deploy Process Director to help them meet business-level goals for things like student outcomes, effective recruiting, employee management, and facilities-related operations. It also supports IT goals like integration, process efficiency, and repeatability.

Institutions use Process Director to automate services delivered according to a school’s specific requirements. An example is its digital process automation capabilities, which enable the efficient processing and reviewing of applications across all necessary admissions counselors and administrators. As the application process has become more competitive and rigorous, students are required to provide more data points to make their case and stand out from other applicants. Consider that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) received 102,242 student applications in 2017, each of which required analysis and processing, all within a 3-4 month timeframe. Building the application framework to support this scale of automation cannot be done in normal development timelines. Low-code changes how a school like UCLA would be able to adapt to increased demand through effective process automation.

The Importance of Process Automation for Colleges and Universities

Low-code equips teams to build applications that work in a human-directed work style. Process Director encourages this innovative approach through things like:

Document and forms management: Consider how students submit all manner of documentation in the course of their time on campus. And employees use a variety of forms in order to be hired in the course of their time as employees. Schools like the University of Central Florida Global deliver low-code solutions to ingest and make sense of things like transcripts, test scores, recommendation and letters for students. For employees, it manages applications, personal data, benefits information and a variety of other types of documents. Some of these are submitted and stored digitally, while some are delivered in paper form. Process Director is able to digitize these documents and include them in individual files. This eliminates outdated and inefficient processes like managing files through email attachments and paper-based artifacts. The result is more context about students and other stakeholders, provided through validated documents. Process Director also enables sharing of information with trusted decision-makers so that milestones in the process can be made with greater efficiency.

Application integration: The student and potential employee application submission is the first touch point with the university, and kicks off processes that will lead to admissions or employment. Process Director uses built in connectors for a variety of ERP systems, and allows users to construct forms that can pull and deliver data that can be useful for things like financial aid and scholarships, housing, and registration for students, and things like hiring and benefits administrations for employees.

Decision-making, enhanced with workflow: Process Director uses the following innovations that make it a first choice for many colleges and universities:

• Attractive, web-based, and responsive user interaction;
• Built-in support for multiple languages, locales, and cultures;
• Easy integration with a broad array of databases, web services, and applications;
• Directory synchronization with LDAP, Active Directory, and Windows network security;
• Full integration with federated authentication services, including Oauth and SAML.
• Strong encryption of data at rest, and data in-flight;
• Digital signature of documents;
• Granular permissions structure, with temporary privilege escalation.

Many colleges and universities rely on outdated systems that cannot support schools’ desires to meet the competitive needs of 21st Century organizations. While there is an increasing need to move fast and address specific needs, the low-code capabilities of Process Director can provide digitally transformative education solutions that facilitate efficient management and streamlining of processes.

An article in Educause summed it up nicely, "The digital transformation of higher education is at hand. Leaders must prepare their institutions now to take strategic advantage of the coming shifts in culture, workforce, and technology.”

“A student who is concerned for their personal safety cannot learn.”

- Virginia Smith, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)

Most colleges and universities have made student safety a priority, but campus crime is still an unfortunate reality. Ranging from petty theft to physical violence, crimes on college campuses are far more prevalent than anyone is comfortable with, but thankfully, from 2001 to 2016, the aggregate number of reported crimes committed on college campuses decreased by almost 32%.

Much of this is due to the passage of the Clery Act, which was signed into law in 1990. The act requires all higher education institutions that receive federal financial aid to keep and publicly disclose data about crime on and near their campuses. Adherence with the Act is governed by the U.S. Department of Education, and those who do not comply with its requirements are subject to substantial fines and can be suspended from participating in student financial aid and other federally-funded programs.

In addition to reporting incidents and maintaining statistics, the Clery Act requires that schools also provide warnings and emergency alerts for safety issues, information on victim’s rights, and other important resources that can be used by members of the campus community. In order to comply with all the requirements of the Clery Act, schools need to employ a systematic way of capturing information and deploying it through processes in an effort to effect change. Process automation is the most effective way to support this.

If one were to break down the elements of what’s required to comply with the Clery Act, they would note three main elements:

• Tracking incidents
• Reporting incidents and alerting on safety issues
• Managing data about criminal activity

Solving for all of these needs is best done with a single, comprehensive process automation solution like Process Director. Because it has a process and workflow foundation and uses case management capabilities, Process Director can support the need to capture data from multiple sources and communicate it to necessary stakeholders. These are critical for colleges to manage information and act on it quickly.

It’s important to recognize that inherent in the goals of the Clery Act is not simply data collection. To have a positive impact on reducing crime and keeping students safe, the results of all activity relating to the Clery Act must result in decision making about policies.

University IT departments can initiate a process-based approach to identify and manage massive amounts of data. That data is also coming from a variety of internal and third-party sources, which adds a layer of complexity. Smart processes can identify the right processes to kick-off based on that data. But it can also guide it through streamlined processes that can anticipate future-dependent actions, communicate with necessary stakeholders, reduce errors, and ultimately track all of this activity to demonstrate compliance.

Process Director provides a way to collect that data and immediately apply machine learning to understand the details of incidents (location, time of day, victim information, perpetrator information, and other relevant data), and initiate the necessary processes that will perform the tasks needed to meet the demands of the Clery Act framework. It does this with a variety of critical process automation features, including:

• Access data that can help with decision-making and meeting workflow milestones.
• Efficient approval handling that guides crime-related data and corresponding communication to the right milestones and decision-makers.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.
• Sophisticated reporting that pulls user-identified data points into visual charts.
• Case management to categorize and report on specific incidents and/or individuals.
• Processed-based security capabilities for managing, securing, storing, and ultimately, protecting a massive amount of data including students (student information includes personally identifiable information [PII] like student records, financial aid information, and healthcare data, among other things), staff and faculty HR records, operational data, and records related to government funding.

Additionally, Process Director applies future planning into processes with its time-based process engine— Process Timeline™. This offers a simple way to compose, manage, and modify business processes. Process-related data and analysis, such as process duration and critical path insights, are delivered in a continuous fashion as processes are running. This enables schools to be informed in near real-time and effect necessary changes rapidly.

Process automation is an effective tool for compliance with the Clery Act, but more importantly, it can be a critical ingredient to keeping students safe. Schools that employ a process-focused approach to safety are able to improve response time and awareness about campus crime, which ultimately helps them be better and more effective, caretakers.

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.

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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Internal Process Automation Solutions With Process Director BPM Software

Process Director has always been the internal process automation solution of choice for meeting the business process management (BPM) requirements of enterprises, mid-sized companies, agencies, and non-profits. These business and IT leaders have counted on Process Director to automate and improve internal processes, and have realized the many benefits of doing so.

Increasingly, forward-looking organizations have begun to look for ways to take advantage of cloud-based and social media technologies to extend their internal processes not only more broadly across their own enterprises, but also outward to their customers, partners, and suppliers. Process Director BPM software provides the capabilities and features for internal process automation making this strategic expansion possible.

The Process Director social capabilities were built with three simple principles in mind:

• Engage the customer by making it easy for her to communicate her problems and expectations, and for you to acknowledge them.
• Embrace the customer by enabling him to participate directly within the internal processes you have designed for them.
• Extend the cloud into your work environment by integrating popular cloud services within your workflows.

Engage the Customer

Customers today set a higher price than ever on their loyalty. They expect not only outstanding products at a reasonable price—they demand round-the-clock access to company representatives and swift resolution to problems.

Social media, mobile apps, and cloud-based services have been the primary drivers behind this shift to greater customer engagement. The legacy customer service model of the (frequently offshore) phone center accessed via IVR (interactive voice response) systems has been completely upended by the simplicity and immediacy of Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, brick-and-mortar retailers—those hardy survivors of the first e-commerce revolution—are facing competition within their own walls by customers “showrooming” products on the shelves, seeking lower prices online. Customers are mobile, they’re connected, and their expectations are high.

How can you leverage BPM software to engage these customers? By making sure you can reach them where they live: in the mobile, socially-connected cloud. Process Director BPM software provides you with internal process automation solutions that gives you the power to:

• Drive workflow behavior from social media events (such as a tweet or Facebook status update)
• Respond to your customers via Twitter (tweet, RT, DM, reply)
• Manage Facebook campaigns (likes/unlikes, comments)

Engaging your customer with Process Director will help you improve your internal process management which leads to gaining exposure, increasing customer satisfaction, and ultimately improving retention rates for your organziation.

Use Case

You're waiting for your flight to push back from the gate, comfortable in the business class seat the airline upgraded for you just before boarding. As directed, you are reviewing the safety card from the seat back in front of you when your realize that the overhead light isn't working. You send a tweet:

The airline customer service agent is using Process Director to identify problems reported by customers. He views the tweet, and from the same window, opens a service ticket to have the matter looked at by a maintenance team at the next airport.

Once the ticket has been created, the agent sends a response to the customer via Twitter, again from the same Process Director electronic form:

Fortunately, there's another seat available. You settle in, reassured by the knowledge that you were able to reach somebody at the company who actually cared about your issue.

Embrace the Customer

Engaging your customers by connecting with them on social media is an important step. The next is to give them the opportunity to interact with you directly within your own business processes—processes that extend beyond your corporate boundaries to offer valuable services, not only to your customers, but to your partners and suppliers as well.

Process Director BPM software provides internal process automation solutions enabling you to provide a broad range of services to individuals not only inside your organization but outside of your organization as well. Your customers can participate directly in your workflows as authenticated users by taking advantage of the accounts they already have from providers such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Your corporate partners and suppliers can login as well using federated authentication technology such as SAML or ADFS.

Of course, Process Director BPM software includes strict, granular protections, so your outside users only have access to the workflows, forms, and data that you've authorized them to use. Offer secure access to your custom services to partners and suppliers, prospects and customers, enhancing your value proposition and strengthening your relationships.

Use Case

Let's extend the previous example. Besides simply thanking you, perhaps the airline wants to go a bit further and compensate you for your inconvenience. The customer service agent's response might be:

You go straight to the site and pick up the coupon. Because you're already logged into Twitter, and the offer is linked to that account, only you have access to download the coupon. You download it to your phone, and present it to the flight attendant. Drink in hand, you kick back and relax for the remainder of the flight.

Meanwhile, Process Director internal process automation solutions has opened a service ticket and added it to a group queue for maintenance. The airline outsources its maintenance activities to a third party, but a technician from that company is able to log in to the airline's system and accept the ticket. The technician does not have a login on the airline's network, but rather is able to use his login credentials from his own employer thanks to Process Director's support for federated authentication via SAML.

Extend the Cloud

Process Director has always enabled you to build and manage your internal processes in your datacenter or in the cloud. Now, Process Director BPM software brings internal process automation to the cloud, enabling you to integrate a variety of useful and popular network- and cloud-based services directly into your business processes. Save files to Dropbox, download documents from Google Docs, or populate form fields with data from Amazon SimpleDB. Whether you are filling dropdown menus using Google Sheets, or collaborating with colleagues on a presentation using Sharepoint, Process Director brings the cloud to your internal process management.

Use Case

You work in a widely distributed enterprise. Projects are set up and torn down relatively often, and teams are highly dynamic. Project documentation is tracked within SharePoint, but tracking project organization—who leads which effort, who is involved, etc.—can be difficult. The company is attempting to track this information using the cloud, so that no matter where somebody is, they have access to, and can update, the relevant data.

But organizational data isn't only useful for human consumption—your business uses this information to determine, for example, to whom to assign a given task, or how an overdue task should be escalated. When an escalation event occurs, Process Director BPM software provides internal process automation solutions that retrieve the necessary information from from an Amazon SimpleDB table in real time, combine it with documentation extracted from SharePoint, and forward a notification to the appropriate individual for further action.

Schedule A Demo

Schedule a demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how it's internal process automation solutions empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

Accelerate Digital Transformation With Business Process Automation

In 2009, BP Logix introduced Process Director with its revolutionary Process Timeline, the first business process modeling and orchestration workflow engine to offer business process automation solutions through predictive analysis tied to automatic behaviors such as notification, reassignment, and rerouting. Process Director customers have taken advantage of this workflow engine and its intrinsic ability to provide the earliest possible notice that a future milestone or deadline may be at risk, and to take immediate remedial action.

Prediction Is Just the Start

This advanced workflow engine provides unique predictive/responsive business process automation capabilities that grow from fertile soil: a carefully architected, utterly unique way of thinking about the design and execution of sophisticated, end-to-end, low-code/no-code digital applications.

No flowcharts. No programming. Rapid time-to-value. Process Timeline is the perfect business process automation solution to speed your organization’s digital transformation past the competition.

Process Timeline and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Now, Process Timeline delivers the power of BPM and artificial intelligence (AI) to your enterprise applications. Process Director’s machine learning (ML) technology enables you to customize both how predictions are made, and what response should be triggered, to a greater degree than ever before. Of course, like all of Process Director, the AI features are easy to configure and use by analysts and process owners—yet rich enough to be appreciated by data scientists.

Process Timeline and Process Director have received over 50 awards and recognitions, and that's part of the reason why organizations around the world continue to rely on Process Director for robust, compliant, and flexible digital solutions.

Process Timeline Features:

Process Timeline business process automation solutions are successfully being used by organizations in various industries to compose, manage, and modify business process. Key business process data such as process duration and critical path are available at a glance using a Gantt-style chart automatically produced and updated as your process is running. At the same time, it offers powerful business process modeling and business process automation solutions unmatched by any other BPM solution, including:

No Coding

Designed for business users, Process Director business process automation solutions enable you to build and deploy efficient, robust workflows and business processes, with no programming:

• Build rich, complex applications through point-and-click
• Intuitive graphical user interface facilitates rapid deployment and time-to-value

No Complex Flowcharts

Time is a critical component of any business process. Late activities—or activities that Process Timeline predicts will be late—are highlighted and easily identified. Time to completion for any activity or for the business process as a whole is also immediately available with this workflow engine. Traditional flowchart-style workflows simply cannot offer this level of insight into your business processes—insights that translate into business success:

• MS Project-like builder: list tasks, dependencies
• Automatically generates and updates a Gantt-style chart to show you, at a glance, how (and for how long) the process will run

No Surprises

Any workflow software can tell you when your task is due, or late. But only this workflow timeline software offers the earliest possible notification that some future task is predicted to be late. And it can do more than just notify you: this workflow engine can take direct action, escalating or rerouting activities to account for the predicted delay:

• Business process automation solutions that continuously evaluate your business processes, based on past experience and current status
• A key part of BPM technology that predicts when any future activity is likely to be delayed, offering the earliest possible opportunity for manual or automatic intervention

No Unnecessary Delays

Ideal for automating, tracking and reporting on complex processes, Process Director business process management software is perfect for “activity-based” processes with well-defined milestones. Unlike a traditional workflow system, its workflow engine features “implicit parallelism" modeling and execution. Process designers no longer have to explicitly identify which steps can be run in parallel, a time-consuming and error-prone analysis:

• Every timeline activity will execute as soon as it is eligible to do so
• At any given moment, every activity that can be running, is running

No Excuses For Business Process Improvement

As your business evolves, you will want to analyze the performance of your business process (and your process actors), to find ways for business process improvement to make it even more efficient:

• A workflow engine with business process automation technology that records every action taken by every process participant (human or automated), ensuring total accountability
• Includes BPM technology that points you directly at those activities within your process that are consuming the most time, so you can quickly focus your process improvement efforts where they will have the most impact
• Drill down to review historical information about any activity, or to see how different actors have performed within a given task
• Reset analytics at any time to get a fresh perspective

Schedule a Free Software Demonstration

Schedule a free demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how this unique business process management software platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

Our roots are in the software industry however we are involved in our communities, work in philanthropic and non-profit organizations, and write books. We are grateful to be a part of a BPM company that thrives on challenge and rewards creativity and innovation.

As evidenced by multiple awards for business, BPM software, business process automation software and process excellence, we are a BPM company that is also recognized as a key partner to customers across industries and geographies.

We hope that knowing more about us and our business process management software – and what we do for our customers – will be the reason to check us out further. And we invite you to start that conversation.

More About Us

BPM Awards - View our BPM awards. We are proud to be recognized for our successful customer implementations and technological achievements.

Press Releases - Our central area for all our press releases and the latest information regarding us and our products.

Media Coverage - Learn more about the latest industry news, media coverage and announcements from us.

BPM Success Stories - Learn more about our customer and their success stories.

BPM Examples - View use cases for specific industry verticals.

Tell Us Your Story

BP Logix is a BPM company that helps companies change the way they operate through business process management (BPM). We know process, and we have discovered that it is not merely the movement of a decision, document or action along a workflow. Rather, process is an always-changing and flexible way of thinking about, and applying, a better way of doing things. What things? The things that are important to you.

Successful BPM implementation with our BPM software comes from us knowing your story and recognizing how we can help you meet your goals. That knowledge allows us to partner with you so we can collaborate to change the fundamentals of your business.

You know what you want to achieve. Tell us your story so we can help you get there.

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Schedule a free demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how this unique business process management software platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

Process Director’s BPM capabilities continue to evolve over time as BPM technology advances and as organizations needs change making it an award winning business process management software that offers faster-time-to-value, greater flexibility and deeper insight into your business processes that any other BPM software.

According to BPM.com, “by simultaneously supporting both timeline and critical-path awareness, Process Director is able to blend business process management with project management with a flexible process architecture that supports both procedural automation and in-flight adaptation”.

Notable BPM Capabilities

• Low code development modeling favoring configuring over compiling, along with the ability to combine both traditional sequence and control flow with time-based dependencies within the definition of workflows.
• Cloud and on-premise deployment options using the same codebase.
• Integration and leverage of Microsoft infrastructure and environments including SharePoint, as well as persona-based workspaces and rich UI creation using a browser-based form designer.
• User-centric alerts and notifications that enable actionable, closed-loop communication with process participants about status and events, including predicted impact on pending deadlines and dependencies.
• Rich graphical reporting and report-writing capabilities allowing for building executive dashboards and defining KPIs.
• Integration with social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar platforms, enabling direct-to-customer process interaction, as well as event-listeners for launching processes in response to social network events.
• Includes a business rule driven data virtualization layer and lightweight ETL capability with a function called “Business Values.” These provide a straightforward method to create reusable access points for business data, but also allows for the definition of access controls.
• Goal-driven actions that can be defined at either global, system-wide levels or down to the activity, which drive priority, state and context, and/or trigger activities and responses. They can launch specific actions, change the behavior of in-flight processes, or be linked with event listeners that serve as the “nerve endings” of the case to receive and respond to external events

Process Director Updates

Click the links below to get more details on how Process Director’s BPM capabilities have evolved with each BPM software update.

• 2018: Version 5.0 - Enhanced AI & Machine Learning Capabilities, IoT Integration
• 2017: Version 4.5 - Data Virtualization Analyzer, Modernized UI, Application Event Journaling
• 2015: Version 4.0 - Configurable Goals, Data Virtualization, Advanced Dashboards, Case Management
• 2014: Version 3.0 - Enhanced Mobile & Cloud Capabilities, Social Network Integration
• 2012: Version 2.5 - Process Intelligence, Advanced Reporting, Records Management
• 2010: Version 2.0 - Process Timeline, Predictive BPM Capabilities

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Process Director sets the pace for your BPM and digital transformation. Request a free demonstration of Process Director and discover for yourself how this unique BPM platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our business process management software have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.