Recent posts about BPM

A recent study of the threat potential for a comprehensive set of industries called out higher education as one of the most targeted. In the past couple of years, cyberattacks have increased by 68%, and the average cost of each attack is almost $700,000. Colleges stand to lose a great deal when attacked— beyond just the theft of data and financial loss from ransom demands, they also risk reputation damage that can negatively impact student recruiting and potential for advantages such as research grants.

As we know in today’s global, data-rich economy, all organizations face cybersecurity risks. Some are manifested in attacks that go after individuals for their personal information for financial or other types of exploitation. In other cases, the security targets include intellectual property and system-wide information. Organizations that touch large numbers of stakeholders are targeted because of the variety of data and multiple access points they offer.

Higher education institutions fall into this category and have become attractive targets for attack. They serve a disparate audience of constituents, and they store and transact with sensitive data about all of their different stakeholders. Because of this, colleges and universities require a structured security roadmap that enables flexible access to data and records, but protects also students, faculty, employees, and other stakeholders within the higher education ecosystem.

The Security Risks for Higher Education

University IT departments are responsible for the 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 grants and research, much of which is sensitive in nature.

Attackers go after private, critical data through a variety of tactics, including:

• Cloud attacks: with more higher education institutions rapidly moving critical workloads to the cloud, hackers are exploiting aspects of the shared responsibility model that leave holes in workloads and cloud environments.
• Phishing: one of the most common types of attacks is phishing, which is done through sending unsolicited and unscrupulous email messages that link to fraudulent websites.
• Device security: most organizations operate with “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies that enable employees and contractors to use personal smartphones, computers, and tablets for business use. Proper security protocols are often not enforced for these devices, which can leave sensitive data vulnerable.
• Malware: malware is software that has maliciously been installed on users’ computers. Various types include ransomware, viruses, worms, and adware. As recent events have shown, these malware threats are often used as a means to steal information and to commit fraud, including extortion.
• Denial of service (DoS): in DoS attacks, individuals who normally have access to systems or networks are suddenly denied the ability to view data or systems. It includes critical, university-specific applications, email, or other digital points of access.

Developing an Effective Security Framework

 University IT security programs require a framework for continuous monitoring and response, one which manages threats to stakeholder data and intellectual property. This would not simply be a monitoring tool that sends alerts when certain security controls are breached. Rather, a foundation of vigilant approach must be embedded into processes and the way that schools conduct their operations.

The risks are ever-present and increasing in regularity. Education IT departments must apply a methodology that enables security regulations to be adapted to meet both the changing needs of their school, and to combat the increasing complexity of cyber-attacks.

Higher education IT departments are using business process management and workflow solutions like Process Director to understand their threat landscape and implement plans and policies that automate attack prevention. To begin the process, colleges and universities have to initiate a strategy that takes into account the data risks of the different populations they serve, as well as the processes employed across all different IT applications in use. While most schools have some set of loosely-defined guidelines, this first step demands mapping a comprehensive plan to a process-driven framework.

Necessary Steps for Higher Education Data Security

This security plan should be developed, implemented, and managed with an approach that takes into account the following elements:

Collaborate and plan effectively: awareness of stakeholder needs in higher education can be tricky; the requirements to operate effectively as a student is much different than how one functions as a faculty member. Consideration for these differences is critical because higher education comprises such a diverse set of needs and user types. Even within academic departments, there are vast differences in how workflow tools and process management is applied. Learning the work, goals, use cases, and language of different teams, and then tapping into their processes and methods, will give IT teams the right perspective into how to secure them.

Understand business patterns: the most effective way to understand security risk is to have an automated way to detect behavioral anomalies within workloads and processes. IT teams should develop a scenario of regular business and data patterns and establish them as baselines. They need to also meet with department leaders to gain an understanding of concern areas or vulnerability areas where behavioral anomalies tend to occur. These can be accounted for when building processes, and will lead to better visibility into what is considered as acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Automate processes: in the course of business transformation efforts, college IT departments should seek ways to give departmental managers flexibility and ownership of their processes. In doing so, they should establish policies that encourage repeatability and automation. Processes should emphasize self-service wherever possible, and facilitate straight-through processing of standard requests and account provisioning.

Integrate tools with processes for better outcomes: colleges have already invested a great deal in their technology stack. It’s imperative that IT teams understand the tools, data, and communication channels that are used across all technology efforts, and then recognize where security vulnerabilities could happen within each of them. Reducing overall ‘application spaghetti’ is an excellent first step toward consistency of process. This can start by collecting the security protocols required of each system, and then finding a way to apply them appropriately to the processes they touch, or whether the systems themselves should be eliminated altogether in favor of a self-build low-code application.

Implementing a security approach to higher education management does not happen overnight. IT teams have to be thoughtful about what they want to achieve, and operate with awareness of stakeholder needs and the intricacies of the technology stack. Additionally, while digital transformation efforts to move workloads into the cloud and use BYOD policies are delivering greater flexibility, they are also opening new threat vectors. With a process-focused approach, colleges and universities can improve their security posture and help to ensure the safety of critical data.

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

- Jason English, Analyst, Intellyx

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

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

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

DPA for Stakeholder Engagement 

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

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

Does Digital Process Automation Just Mean Agile and Innovative BPM?

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

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

DPA and BPM combined in Process Director

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

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

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

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

How Does BPM Help Operational Excellence?

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

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

Better outcomes through BPM and Operational Excellence

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

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

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

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

BPM Adoption and Usage

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

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

Collaboration is Key to Operational Excellence

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

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

Transparency Provides Clarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Higher Education BPM Examples

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

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

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

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

Technical School BPM Example

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

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

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

Higher Education Electronic Forms (eForms) Example

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

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

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

Higher Education Digital Transformation

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

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.

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

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

What is the Right Type of BPM Security

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

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

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

How to Ensure BPM Security

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

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

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

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

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

Starting Your Journey To BPM Purchase Success

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

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

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

Gathering requirements

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

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

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

Evaluating BPM vendors

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

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

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

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

Getting buy-in

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

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

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

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

Preparing for launch

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

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

Identifying “improvement”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bpmPaaS Drives Transformation

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

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

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

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

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.

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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BP Logix is a BPM Vendor Listed on the 2018 Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for iBPMS

Gartner recognizes leaders in intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS) and has named BP Logix to the list of 2018 Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites making it the fourth year in a row.

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About Gartner

Gartner is an American research and advisory firm that aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for iBPMS report evaluates BPM software vendors once a year and defines their intelligent BPM platforms as “platforms which compress the observation-to-action-to-outcome cycle, and help business transformation leaders, business process directors and solution architects establish a fluid capability to handle big change.”

Gartner does not endorse any BPM vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those BPM vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMS) research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About BP Logix

BP Logix is BPM vendor that unites IT and business users enabling them to deploy sophisticated, form-based, workflow-driven enterprise apps in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost of traditional development. Our award-winning BPM software and workflow automation software powers workflow-driven solutions that cross organizational boundaries, embracing the C-suite, operations, sales, customers and prospects.

Customers including Barclay Damon, the City of West Allis, IDEX, Leo Burnett USA, Memphis Light, Gas and Water, MultiPlan and University of Central Florida rely on Process Director innovations such as its mobile BPM capabilities and its broad integration with SharePoint, MS Dynamics and MS Office integration, and other enterprise applications and data bases. Process Director low code / no code BPM applications enables customers to build award-winning applications that deliver clear and measurable improvements in productivity, compliance, and customer engagement.

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Process Director sets the pace for your BPM and digital transformation. Schedule 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.

On the long journey toward purchasing a BPM solution, leveraging BPM examples can be instrumental in not only deciding on a vendor, but also best practices for those first few applications. Here we offer you the resources to do just that: BPM video testimonials, customer case studies, links to pages around function as well as digital transformation do-overs. 

BP Logix offers both on-premise and cloud BPM solutions of our flagship product, providing customers with the advanced digital process automation capabilities they need to manage their business processes.  Some of the leading organizations in various industries that entrust BP Logix with their business process management (BPM) needs. Browse our BPM examples below and learn how Process Director BPM software can solve real world industry problems.

BPM Examples By Industry

Advertising 

From cost estimating new projects to automating approvals, Process Director BPM software helps advertising and marketing firms streamline their review process, improve engagements with customers, and avoid duplicating data entry.

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Education 

Whether addressing student admission requirements, purchasing issues, course certifications or research grants, BP Logix digital process automation solutions aids educators in the distribution, monitoring and process management of information.

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Energy and Utilities 

Engineered to deliver a collaborative working platform while eliminating regulatory compliance headaches, Process Director workflow solutions helps pipeline companies, utility providers and distribution organizations manage, monitor and continuously improve internal business activities.

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Financial Services

In a time of regulation, consolidation and reporting, BP Logix solutions empower financial services companies to more readily demonstrate compliance, automate SEC filings and quickly report on end-of-the-month activities.

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Manufacturing

Bringing automation to order processing, quality assurance, engineering change control and Sarbane-Oxley/ISO compliance, BP Logix BPM software enables manufacturers to avoid redundancy, increase the spend of decision-making and eliminate waste.

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Healthcare

In these BPM examples learn how healthcare organizations are able to improve efficiencies while reducing operational costs by standardizing their business operations and workflow processes.

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Public Sector

With business processes that span departments, roles and systems, the need for public sector BPM solution for government has become increasingly important. Maintaining efficiency and speed along with greater integration and near real-time responses creates a leaner, more productive organization.

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BPM Examples By Function

Accounts Payable

These BPM examples demonstrate how with Process Director, you can automate the entire approval process surrounding accounts payable handling-while maintaining real-time visibility into the approval process at every step along the way.

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Application Integration

To ensure that your business operations are optimized, Process Director provides built-in BPM application and workflow application integration with many third-party and in-house applications and databases.

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Expense Management

Process Director is a BPM solution that includes approval software— providing expense management solutions that allow you to automate, track and report on all of your organization’s review and approval processes.

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Human Resources

When it comes to expense management, it seems like everything you do requires some type of review and approval. Routing paperwork to the right people in the right order-without losing anything along the way- can be a difficult challenge. These BPM examples showcase how Process Director BPM software provides expense management solutions enabling you to automate, track and report on all of your organization’s review and approval processes.

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Mobile Inspection

Even though it runs in your browser, Process Director BPM software takes full advantage of your mobile device’s unique features. Snap a photo to attach to a workflow, or record your GPS location information at the click of a button. 

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Governance Risk and Compliance

In today' unpredictable and highly competitive business environment, with its changing regulatory requirements, a holistic approach to governance, risk and compliance (GRC) just makes sense. With these BPM examples learn how Process Director business process management solutions can help your organization be efficient, effective and compliant.

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Clearly, no one can predict the future — however there is a significant difference between a ‘guess’ and an informed estimate. In our case, we derive our workflow and BPM trends by combining our knowledge of products, technology, workflow and BPM trends we’ve seen with the continuous feedback we receive from our customers, analysts and other influencers to develop what we believe to be an informed estimate.

Our customers in various industries, you see, are a fairly vocal bunch. Because we partner closely with them, we learn about their vision and the direction(s) they are pursuing. We also learn about what they consider to be hard priorities and daily realities. That combination of information and factors brings us to propose (and share) our view of key potential workflow and BPM trends in 2019 for business and IT managers:

Championing Simplicity: We are all aware of the vast number of digital workflow tools available to modern employees. As technology drives more of our lives, it also exerts a greater influence on almost every decision and action we take. This is neither good nor bad. The reality, however, is that the sheer number of options we have for applications, tools, processes and devices can become stressful and difficult to manage. We believe that one of the workflow and BPM trends in 2019 will be that BPM companies will take measures to reduce technology options and, instead, rely more heavily on processes, checklists and repeatable methods to create desired behaviors.  Organizations will use processes that are easy to build and change as-needed, updated when necessary, and managed by the business users themselves, reducing the reliance on IT. Business managers will seek solutions that allow employees to be productive on-the-fly and make an impact in real-time to company operations.

A Prediction about Predicting: Time can be both the greatest asset and, potentially, biggest enemy, of any business. Failing to meet a schedule or not delivering on expectations can be disastrous. Having insight into your organization’s operations and rhythm, then applying that information to ‘predict and prepare’ is one of the most important advantages a company can have. We believe the BPM trends in 2019 we are going to see is that more organizations will be insisting on using analytics to provide insights. They will anticipate and predict outcomes based on both historical references and current operations. These companies are going to plan and allocate resources more effectively, becoming more agile and efficient.

The Value of Collaboration: ‘Mobile’ is a BPM trend that has clearly changed the nature of how we work. It has given employers who offer the ability for employees to work remotely a huge advantage— and has accelerated the time it takes to complete approvals and, often, tasks as well. With technology providing a foundation for productivity and communication, companies can utilize the best talent irrespective of where employees choose to live and work. Remote workers, however, have not always been able to take advantage of real-time interfaces — and this has been a challenge to that strategy. We predict that some of the workflow and BPM trends in 2019 we will see will be that companies will ‘implement collaboration’ at a greater level driven by workflows that keep employees engaged with one and other more easily (“collaboratively”) resulting in increased productivity. These capabilities will come in the form of process-driven tools that encourage workers to distribute, share and create together.

A Different Kind of Workforce: The job market is hot and all indicators suggest it will remain so in 2019. As with any cycle, however, there is a shift happening that will have waterfall effects regarding how people work in the coming years. More millennials will be hired in 2019 than at any other time; in fact, for the first time in a while, the Gen X’ers will become a secondary group. We expect millennial workers to be dedicated and passionate. Moreover they have grown up with technology and expect there to be very little difference between the technology they use for social purposes and that in their work environment. Employers who will win the war for talent will do so partly by providing recognizable interfaces and technology infrastructure that this younger generation will be comfortable using.

The Shrinking IT Department: As more applications run in the cloud and use more consumer-oriented interfaces, there is less reliance on IT departments to deploy, maintain and manage apps and support users. While IT is, and will always be, a critical element of every enterprise, the infrastructure that was used in companies in the 90s is very different from what we use today. We believe the will probably see less direct hires in IT, but more hiring among LOB managers who have an understanding of IT basics. The key will be ensuring that employees can address most of their own issues using tools with interfaces and dashboards that enhance decision-making.

We would love to know more about your BPM trends and plans for 2019— and how we can help you achieve them. In that spirit, we invite you to meet with us so we can share information about how workflow and BPM can help your organization in the New Year.

About BP Logix

BP Logix is a BPM vendor that offers Process Director, an innovative business process management engine combining the power of BPM software with the flexibility of rapid application development—with no programming. Electronic forms, workflow automation software and BPM case management solutions are just the beginning of digital app development. Process Director combines the easiest and most efficient workflow engine in the industry with a rich set of tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.

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The new Process Director 5.0 is transforming the above-stated predictions into reality by utilizing BPM and AI and BPM and IoT to enhance predictive analysis, create dynamic business rules and facilitate collaboration within cases. Schedule a private demonstration and learn what Process Director will do in assisting your organization with its digital transformation goals.

Deciding on a BPM and Workflow Vendor

The review and validation process for any new product is always challenging. You are given a lot of attention from potential BPM vendors, but more often than not, they just want to tell you about their product (and are not very good listeners.) Sure, it is fun to be courted, but the attention wanes quickly when you realize that some of the BPM vendors aren't being honest with you, or you discover, after a big investment of time, that their product simply cannot deliver what you need.

Because of our due diligence in our search for BPM vendors, we made it very clear what we wanted in a workflow solution and how it should work with our existing infrastructure. We went to great lengths explaining to multiple BPM vendors our company culture and how technology is used: We let them know our IT department is already over-worked and not able to respond to change requests as quickly as they or we would like, that our sales team operates mostly in the field and requires mobile and cloud capabilities, and that our users are getting younger and more accustomed to consumer-like user interfaces.

The result: We chose a BPM vendor with a workflow automation software solution that provides functionality that no other product could deliver, get an experienced vendor who listens more than talks, a company that is already over-delivering and wants to partner with us to ensure that our feedback and experience are considered as they add additional functionality into next versions of the product.

That last part is really important to us. More than price or any other factor, knowing that the vendor will be involved and available to us after the PO is signed is so important! I can’t say we have been burned too badly in the past (as we are cautious), but we’ve heard lots of war stories about BPM vendors selling a product, upselling services, and then upselling further when later versions are introduced. That is part of their model, and I understand that. But the vendor we chose is already proactively addressing our implementation —and our comfort level about the kind of people they are speaks volumes. Our executives and I, myself, have a great deal of trust in them.

There were four elements that made this the right choice for us in terms of product fit within our organization and how we anticipate it growing. Some BPM vendors had one or two of these, but none had all four — and none had the flexibility to adapt to our changing needs. We fell in love with these aspects of the solution:

The time continuum: Falling behind, or being unaware of when activities are happening, and not properly setting expectations can lead to potentially disastrous consequences. And that’s precisely the problem we are trying to solve: getting better insights and a deeper understanding of what we can do — and how long it will take. After validating and reviewing multiple BPM vendors in 2019 and their solutions we chose one that can look at the dimension of time within our environment. Their BPM technology includes a workflow engine that provides early notice of potential delays and the ability to subsequently intervene to correct the course we are on. This advanced BPMN software solution also provides workflows and processes represented as "what if" scenarios, which gives us the ability to anticipate the impact of hypothetical situations. These cannot be represented, or acted upon, through ‘typical’ BPMN flowcharts.

No coding needed: When meeting with various BPM vendors in 2019 I stressed that we needed a workflow tool for process owners, not programmers. Understanding the impact of an action is very different from knowing how to use REST APIs to pull data from different repositories. Previously we relied heavily on IT to make changes to our processes: build requirements, code the changes, test them, and then roll them out. With IT drowning in requests and application backlog, that paradigm no longer works. We want our people to make changes they determine are necessary to the processes directly. The solution we chose is FOR and ABOUT the people who are involved in the processes. The process itself is not necessarily the goal; outcomes are. Having a BPM tool with rapid application development capabilities that can be used by our team will keep them engaged and ensure that processes are operating efficiently. Our solution provides an intuitive graphical user interface that makes building, deploying and managing processes easier. The result will be greater time-to-value from our processes and business operations.

Deployment options: I explained to multiple BPM vendors how I am looking to move most of our applications to the cloud to minimize spending, simplify our infrastructure and reduce the IT workload. Our new solution can be implemented and used on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both. This gives me the flexibility to determine what works best for us. In some ways, I feel that getting a sign-off for this BPM and workflow solution is, by itself, a huge step for our organization. At the same time, this might be ‘just the right time’ to initiate my cloud plans. From what I have seen, the tool is optimized for the cloud, can extend business processes more broadly across our enterprise and into third parties (like customers, partners and suppliers). This flexibility and functionality will serve us well as we grow.

Extensibility and enterprise application integration capabilities: Our organization is becoming more complex. That said, we do not want it to also become more complicated. We rely on internal data from our enterprise applications as well as from third-party repositories. Without those, we would not have a complete picture of what our company is doing or how we can address problems that arise. After meeting with various BPM vendors in 2019 we chose a solution that has APIs, workflows, forms and business rules, offers, hooks and callouts that support scripted interactions. We will also be able to access data through extensive web services and APIs because the solution adheres to WSDL and works with REST-enabled applications. With BPM application and workflow application integration and document imaging integration built-in, I’m confident that we will not only be able to meet our needs now, but also as we grow, change and adapt.

Now, with our list of BPM vendors narrowed down to just one in 2019, our decision is made and we are moving forward. There will be a lot of organizing and planning that need to happen, but we are closer to our goals already — and I am incredibly excited to request a demo and move to the next phase.

Why Utilize Workflow Management Software?

Every efficient organization wants to do more with fewer resources. Technology can be an enabler of these goals, but only if the tools used are accompanied with an effective foundation of processes that support business goals. And as organizations seek to go faster in today's hyper competitive and increasingly connected world, they are relying on processes to enable change, create sustainable growth, and help them adapt to changing business and technology conditions. Enter workflow management software.

When organizations apply process to their operations, they not only can improve how work gets done, but it also provides continuous insight into where improvement can be made. Ultimately, efficient workflow management software leads to cost reduction, worker productivity optimization, better engagement with customers, and even higher profit margins. Without process and workflow management discipline, human, physical, and intellectual assets cannot be effectively deployed to meet business goals. And if goals aren’t met, there’s no chance for an organization to grow and establish a repeatable, sustainable model for continued growth.

Much of this is because both as methodology and practice, business process management (BPM) and workflow management have been designed to bridge the efforts of IT and business units. Both are proven, effective methodologies for disparate teams to collaborate in order to achieve better business outcomes through the use of technology.

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

Process Director: A Different Kind of Workflow Management Software

Process Director's workflow management software is equipped with powerful features that provides organizations with the ability to manage, automate and report on their critical business processes. Workflow software is foundational component of “lean BPM”, and is integral in achieving not only automated, but also fully optimized, processes.

Managed through a browser, Process Director requires no programming expertise, thus enabling business or IT users to easily create and modify workflows according to their business needs and processes. Workflow software definitions enable organizations to capture and manage their business processes according to their own policies and procedures.

In summary, Process Director is a workflow management software that enables businesses to model their review and approval procedures, automate the process, monitor the results, and satisfy their business process management needs.

The Power of Low-Code Electronic Forms

Your digital applications deserve a great user interface. Developing a flexible and responsive UI on your own used to demand lots of time, lots of programmers, and lots of money.

Not anymore.

Process Director empowers you to create beautiful reports, dynamic smart forms and electronic forms, and rich graphical dashboards—no code required. IT organizations are slashing their development backlog by utilizing Process Director’s fast, cost-effective workflow management software for building powerful user interface elements. Business units benefit from the ability to develop mock-ups or even fully-functional dynamic e-forms using their own “citizen developers”, thereby fusing the business’s intimate knowledge of the customer and the desired customer experience with IT’s strength in building essential rules, logic, and governance features, all backed by modern workflow tools.

Process Timeline™

Process Timeline is a workflow engine with workflow automation technology that provides an easy way to compose, manage, and modify your business process. Key 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, Process Timeline is unmatched by any other iBPMS software solutions or any other workflow management software available.

Extensible Workflow Management Software

Process Director offers these workflow management software capabilities to enable you to extend your applications with custom features:

• A broad range of web services and REST APIs that can control virtually every Process Director action or access data, reports, or metadata
• A comprehensive C#/ASP.NET software developer kit to create scripts, extensions, or custom tasks (available via the Process Director SDK)

Process Director workflow management software also enables you to insert custom logic at virtually any point in the life of a workflow. And you can do so without worry: we have a great track record of backward compatibility for SDK specifications, and that’s a tradition we plan on continuing.

Document Workflow Management Software

Process Director offers a document workflow management system that empowers you to rapidly create filtered searches and tabular reports with a few keystrokes. Whether you want to review task lists, browse document folders, or search for a specific item, Process Director Knowledge Views within its workflow management software are easy to configure and even easier to use. And Knowledge Views aren’t only for display: you can export the results, automatically trigger processes, or even use the data to drive decision making in running forms, processes, or rules. If you’re looking for brilliant graphical reports, turn to Process Director’s Advanced Reporting component to produce colorful, real-time charts and graphs, suitable for interaction, email, or printing.

Web Based & Mobile Friendly Digital Transformation

The applications you create with Process Director are web apps: all you and your users need is a browser to view reports, submit requests, manage processes, etc. Any browser: all recent-release browsers on all major platforms (including iOS and Android) are supported. Your knowledge workers aren’t tied to their desks, and your applications shouldn’t be, either. Navigate Process Director’s responsive UI, create mobile-friendly interfaces for your own applications, and take advantage of native mobile BPM capabilities such as geolocation and photos—no app store download required. Just boarded a flight without WiFi? No problem: you can even take action via email. The tools that Process Director workflow management software offers enables you to do your work wherever you are, whenever you’re ready.

Application Integration and Workflow Management Software

Process Director-driven workflow applications don’t live in a vacuum. Most businesses today rely on a plethora of applications, information, and services, both within and beyond your datacenter. As an intelligent BPM platform, Process Director BPM and workflow automation software ties these disparate workflow and BPM applications together, making it easy for you to access, combine, and update information, whatever the source.

Learn the Benefits of BPM and Workflow with Process Director BPM Software

BP Logix Process Director provides many workflow advantages and BPM advantages as it empowers IT professionals by providing a BPM software solution that encompasses the benefits of BPM such as workflow automation, business process automation, document management, electronic forms and business rules to make lifecycle management and collaboration efficient and effortless.

Request a free BPM software demonstration to learn more about the advantages of BPM and advantages of workflow automation.

The Benefits of BPM Software from an iBPMS with Integrated Workflow and Business Rules

Process Director is an iBPMS that offers many workflow advantages and BPM advantages as it provides users with an intuitive, web-based rapid application development software that enables users to create and maintain Smart Forms of any complexity without requiring software development or IT resources. The integrated business rules engine provides a powerful graphic interface to define rules and conditions that control the behavior of the forms - and to easily route forms online in accordance with defined business processes, addressing any business function that involves completing or routing a form. Seamless integration with Process Director’s workflow engine, presenting users with familiar forms, pre-populating the forms, automatically kicking off the review and approval cycle, instantaneously track and auditing all tasks are some of the workflow advantages and BPM advantages of this integrated approach.

Process Director also incorporates a business rules engine that empowers users to rapidly implement more complex business processes. Business rules are reusable objects that can be embedded within your workflow processes to conditionally control how they should run and behave in various conditions. Business rules can be defined either as simple conditions or sophisticated interrelated rule sets. Process Director is an "out-of-the-box" product that is easy to install and administer.

Benefits of BPM Software: Streamlined Workflow Management

• Speeds Internal Routing Processes: Reduces paper handling and manual routing; eliminates errors and reduces the lifecycle of document, content and forms processing.
• Automates Business Processes: One of the workflow advantages of Process Director is that the workflow engine automates business processes by giving business users easy-to-use workflow tools. It allows existing processes to be mapped into powerful, predefined workflows. A graphical workflow builder and workflow reporter give users control over their workflows.
• Shortens Projects: Time-to-market is critical for all organizations. Workflow automation software and tracking accelerate the approval of internal projects. All members of a group or team can simultaneously perform tasks as part of the workflow process. Automatic email notifications alert members when a task is assigned to them—or if they are in jeopardy of missing a due date.
• Eliminates Errors and Miscommunications: Ensures process consistency, eliminating errors and problems due to lost or mishandled requests. Pre-defined workflow definitions guarantee that the same process is followed for each project or request. The products provide efficient tracking, management and reporting on all running processes.

Benefit of BPM Software: Electronic Forms

• Reduce Costly Paper Handling and Manual Routing: Paper-based forms are costly to print, store, distribute, mail, and process. Automation of form processing ensures there is no disconnect between a form and the business process required for that form.
• Tracking, Auditing, and Process Awareness: Instant access to current and prior activity, including completed forms and processes, ensures that authorized users have immediate access to the information they need. Having visibility into a form's complete lifecycle reduces cost, improves quality, and ensures access to vital business information.
• Accelerate the Delivery of Form-Based Information: The BP Logix workflow software automatically routes completed forms to appropriate users for review/approval. The routing provides automated email notifications and personalized task lists for users who must review or approve a form. Users can complete tasks directly from within an email, even when offline.
• Reduce Errors and Improve Accuracy: Pre-populating form fields from external sources and form segment isolation enable users to input only the data required of them. This results in fewer areas to complete, reducing errors and ensuring greater accuracy.
• Expedite Collection of Quality Information: Presenting users with electronic forms that appear similar to their paper-based predecessor eases the transition to the form completion process and improves the quality of information collected. Integrated form help, field pre-population and instant validation improve the end user experience and reduce expensive support calls.

Benefits of BPM Software: Document Workflow Management System

• Maintain Document Integrity and Security: BP Logix Server stores documents securely on the server, giving authorized users access to the most current version of each document. By assigning roles and granting permission, you can ensure secure access to all documents stored on the server.
• Locate Documents Faster: Integrated document workflow management system features provide users with rapid access to documents based on their classification. Advanced search, indexing and categorization allow documents to be located quickly and easily so users can make timely business decisions.
• Reduce Software and Training Costs: The Process Director interface is 100% web-based; native authoring applications are not required to review or approve documents. Documents are viewed inside your browser making the interface easy to use. No additional training is required.
• Maintain Regulatory Compliance: Mitigate the risks associated with electronic information management and regulatory compliance. Comprehensive security management, access control, and auditing features enable your organization to maintain compliance with various regulatory mandates (Sarbanes-Oxley, FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA).
• Eliminate Errors and Miscommunication: Efficiently communicate and collaborate on documents. Eliminate the "print/markup/fax" approach to document and content review, replacing it with easy-to-create graphical annotations. And you can foster real collaboration with members of your team or workgroup.

Benefits of BPM Software: A Dynamic Business Rules Engine

• Increase Accuracy of Data and Processes: The rules engine allows your business policies to be defined and automated.
• Ensure Consistency of Regulations: Reusable rules can be used by various objects to ensure that a policy is consistent across multiple processes.
• Only be Alerted of Events You Deem Important: You define the rules that determine when you should be notified or alerted to events.
• Allow Decision-Making Rules to be Easily Understood: With the graphical rules interface, your rules are easy to read and report on so you know how your processes are configured to behave.

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Schedule a 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.

Just Because You’re Away From the Office Doesn’t Mean You’re Out of the Loop.

Mobile BPM and mobile workflow solutions can undoubtedly give an organization more options as to how the company conducts its business. Processes and workflows require people to make decisions and add information at different points along the way. A process that is making use of all available data will need the input of people who may not necessarily be on-premise, or operating from the same type of device.

Process Director BPM Software is Web-Based and Mobile Friendly

Process Director has always been the mobile BPM 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 moved beyond antiquated workflow tools toward Process Director to automate and improve their critical internal business 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 mobile technologies to extend their business processes not only more broadly across their own enterprises, but also outward to their customers, partners, and suppliers. Process Director provides the BPM software and workflow software capabilities and features to make this strategic expansion possible.

Process Director mobile BPM and mobile workflow solutions 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 in business processes you have designed for them.
• Extend the cloud into your work environment by integrating popular cloud services within your workflows.

Process Director empowers users with mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, and smart phones to participate fully in your organization’s workflow processes.

Using your mobile device, you can:

• Review, complete, and submit forms
• View dashboards and reports
• Attach photos or record GPS data to forms
• Complete tasks via email while offline

Mobile BPM and Mobile Workflow Solutions For Field Service and Inspections

For management: Real-time visibility and transparency

• Configurable, rules-driven workflow, Corrective/Preventative Actions (CAPA)
• Real-time geolocation tracking
• Configurable UI/UX: reports, forms, charts, and more.
• Easy information sharing
• Robust data and user security
• Real time integration with enterprise applications (e.g. ERP, CRM).
• Mobile-ready
• Offline information capture
• Custom searches, fully accessible history

For field staff: Fast and easy data capture, wherever you are

• Intuitive user interface, whether using tablet, smart phone, or desktop
• Broad mobile data collection, including photos, video, location
• Automated rules-driven distribution of collected data
• Maps integration for easy route planning
• Offline data collection, routed automatically when back online
• Capture live customer signatures
• Email integration for alerts, notices, updated instructions, etc.

Mobile BPM Example: Field Service and Inspections at the City of West Allis

The City of West Allis (Wisconsin), uses Process Director and its mobile BPM and mobile workflow solutions to manage a variety of processes that can best be accomplished by employees in the field. Building inspections are among the most time-consuming processes that City employees must regularly manage.

Jim Jandovitz, the Director of Information Technology and Communications, fully knows the value of the field service management software solutions that Process Director provides. He said, “If we only saved five minutes per inspection we would be saving tens of thousands of dollars per year. With building inspections alone we can anticipate saving almost 3,000 hours or 1.78 positions. And, as people retire we won’t be filling those positions which is an additional cost saving.”

Learn more about how the City of West Allis is accomplishing financial savings and efficiency improvement with field service and inspections. Read the Customer Story.

Mobile Devices

Process Director mobile BPM and mobile workflow solutions support most mobile devices, including Apple and Android smart phones and tablets, and Mac and Windows laptops. eForms are responsive and will automatically adjust themselves to match smaller form factor devices like smart phones; additionally, you can directly manipulate the way your form is presented on various devices for a fully customized experience. There's no need to download yet another app: Process Director mobile BPM solutions works with the browser your mobile device already has.

Even though it runs in your browser, Process Director can takes full advantage of your mobile device's unique features. Snap a photo to attach to a workflow, or record your GPS location information at the click of a button. Process Director's mobile workflow management features are perfect for:

• Audits
• Inspections
• Clinical Patient Visits
• Field Service Work
• and more...

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Business process management (BPM) is the practice of refining business processes that will increase process efficiency and profitability using modeling, business process automation, measurement and optimization of business workflows.

Why is Business Process Management Important To Your Organization?

As business managers, we're expected to embrace − and manage − change in such a way that our businesses grow (and do so with the least amount of disruption.) Business process management (BPM) can play an important role here. And this is especially true in IT, as often the most noticeable changes are the result of changes in software technology which, in turn, bring about improvements in the way people work.

IT departments are faced with both managing change and improving productivity. When information flow is manual and paper-based, IT has an opportunity to accomplish both goals.  There are many processes that are a part of the changes management wants to embrace that lend themselves to improving production and increasing productivity. Among them are:

• Onboarding/offboarding and transferring employees
• Ensuring access to applications and resources
• Providing a secure approval process for processing requests
• Coordinating requests across departments, facilities, vendors, and suppliers
• Ordering and supplying software, hardware and equipment
• Obsoleting or disposing of assets
• Maintaining and accessing information for audits

The solution to these challenges resides with automating change control. Business process management software provides a consistent method for routing and tracking the flow of IT requests and information.

What is Business Process Management Software?

BPM software is software that enables organizations to improve process efficiency by monitoring, optimizing and automating their business process with data and analytics.

What Are the Benefits of BPM Software?

When you look at how business process management software and workflow software have helped companies achieve business process improvement, you may start to get eager to start reaping the benefits of BPM software and everything that comes with it such as improved process efficiency and productivity. Considering that companies are reporting a 75% reduction in data entry, and are 50% faster in making decisions is exciting.

How BP Logix Can Help

Process Director combines the easiest and most efficient business process management and digital process automation software in the industry with a rich set of workflow tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.

Check out these BPM examples by industry to see how our customers in every sector are successfully using Process Director to prepare and deliver transparent, end-to-end digital applications offering engaging customer experience, robust business process governance, regulatory compliance and smooth, efficient operations.

What is iBPMS?

The evolution of BPM technology, like most technology, has happened quickly. Within the industry, we have seen great strides and early adopters have come along on that journey to see truly revolutionary advances. As more enterprises look to streamline business processes and build leaner, more efficient business models, so must BPM technology become more effective. Therefore, Gartner has recently introduced the concept of intelligent BPM (iBPMS).

Gartner defines iBPMS as platforms  with "capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including "what if") and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management."

BP Logix’s Process Director has been named to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMS) for several years in a row.

What is BPMN?

In the year 2000, the Business Process Management Initiative, a group of individuals intent on promoting the concept of BPM, gathered together and created the ‘Business Process Model and Notation’, or BPMN. This tome, now over 500 pages, has been managed by the Object Management Group since 2004 and serves as the authority for Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) today.

Business Process Modeling (BPMN) vs Process Timeline

• Continuous critical path analysis
• Predictive triggers
• Earliest possible notice of potential future delay
• High efficiency
• Intrinsic parallel behavior

Common Deployment Options

Mobile BPM – The ability to manage workflows and business process with mobile devices

Cloud BPM– Cloud based BPM solutions are now established ways of delivering and working with software and applications. Going this route saves on infrastructure investment.

Social – A strategic BPM tool that focuses on customer engagement, customer service and customer retention within your workflows connected to social media channels.

On-Premise – Allows organizations to keep all of their workflow systems in-house.

Choosing The Right BPM Software Vendor

Choosing the right business process management software vendor takes a lot of time and research. To help you with that process we came up with four elements organizations may want to consider in relation to selecting the right product and fit within your organization.

An Award-Winning Solution

BP Logix and Process Director have won BPM awards for innovation and excellence from many prestigious organizations, both domestically and abroad. Our most valued recognitions, however, come from our customers who have achieved goals beyond those they had originally imagined through their partnership with us.

Process Director BPM software offers:

• Unsurpassed ease of use
• Rapid time-to-value
• No programming

Schedule A Demo

BP Logix makes innovative and intelligent BPM software that drives digital transformation in organizations across North America and around the globe. Process Director, the company’s award-winning solution, is a powerful—yet easy to use—high-productivity, rapid application development platform for building, deploying, and enhancing digital applications. Contact us to talk to one of our software experts and schedule a demo today.