A good accounts package or ERP system should give you a good view of the historical performance of your business but does it let you know what’s really going on behind the scenes, right now?

John Blackham, managing director of XSOL, says that basing business decisions on your profit or loss in the last financial period is a bit like trying to steer a car while looking through the rear-view mirror.

“From the company management point of view, looking at past results doesn’t help much. By the time you see it’s gone wrong it’s already too late to do anything about it. What you need are measurements of how a company is interacting with the market and its customers right now. You need to know whether you are keeping customers or losing customers, which products are selling and which ones aren’t.”

One of the best ways of shedding light on the inner workings of a business – or in IT terms getting ‘visibility,’ Blackham says, is through business process management (BPM). “BPM can help managers to understand what they are dealing with under the hood. A lot of CEOs don’t. They just assume that the managers beneath them do.”

BPM can do much more than provide visibility. Roughly defined, BPM is a technique that involves mapping basic business functions and breaking them down into distinct processes, then automating and integrating those processes where needed so that they run smoothly based on business rules. The idea is that will allow managers to manage exceptions, rather than getting involved each time the process runs.

Blackham says all XSOL BPM projects begin with a readiness programme which is designed to set out goals and objectives and assess where the company is in relation to them. “It shows the gap between where they are now and where they want to be. It’s not rocket science, it’s common sense put into a systematic process.”

Aaron Cornelius, managing director of eCom, a company which has been involved with BPM for 11 years, says the most successful implementations align strategy, people, processes and systems across the business.

In order to set out the right framework for BPM, eCom starts out by asking questions.

“First we have to understand your business...” eCom’s web site states. “We do that by coming to you and asking a lot (and we do mean a lot) of questions about your business systems, procedures, policies and processes.”

This consultation is followed by a measurement phase as eCom takes heed of the old quote: “If you don’t measure it, it will not improve; if you don’t monitor it, it will get worse.”

Cornelius says that every project should be substantiated by measuring both tangible costs such as system and people costs and intangibles such as lost goodwill, customer satisfaction and so on.

Cornelius refutes any suggestion that this is navel gazing for its own sake. The ‘beef’ comes in the next two phases; process improvement and where applicable, process outsourcing.

This is where the benefits start to accrue. eCom’s successful projects have included a client which reduced one department’s staff from 18 to eight people through one process initiative, while another achieved a 70% reduction in its call centre staff.

While BPM can raise efficiency and worker productivity according to Cornelius these initiatives have not resulted in an ‘overheated’ working atmosphere or placed undue stress on employees in areas where there is already high staff turnover.

In the call centre case for example, much of the efficiency was achieved by providing staff with the information they needed to answer queries then and there, rather than having to refer callers to someone else or call them back. This alone reduces a lot of the stress of call centre work and also increases job satisfaction, Cornelius says.

eCom’s takes a ‘transitional’ approach to most of its projects which progressively applies BPM across the organisation. In BPM terms the processes which are the ‘low hanging fruit’ in an organisation are typically those which involve a high degree of “paper dependency.” However, Cornelius says that hard copy still has its uses.

“Paper itself is not the problem, it’s the processes which surround that paper which are the problem.”

Rod Hall, managing director of Tranzsoft, says one of the key benefits of BPM is that it can maximise your investment in existing applications.

Tranzsoft’s principal BPM tool Flowbiz, has been deployed in many e-procurement applications as well as handling the integration between applications.

According to Tranzsoft Flowbiz provides a true workflow automation solution that automatically pushes the workload across the network or across an intranet/internet to whoever is required to action or authorise the next task.

By focusing on the process, Hall says, a company can tap into existing data, which can extend the scope and life of legacy applications, and also go a long way towards overcoming the ‘information silo’ effect of running disparate systems. Flowbiz may create data, extract data from internal or external sources, update databases, alert other users of something happening, schedule or reschedule other tasks, or wait for other conditions to be met before advancing.

Hall says this helps a business to run effectively, because Flowbiz relies on events or dates to trigger tasks and not human intervention. This means the automated process management tool is ideal for managing service level agreements because it can generate audit trails giving online access to completed work and work in progress so nothing ‘falls through the cracks’. “Managers can at any point in time look at who is working on what, see exactly how far through the process they are and how long it is taking.”

Hayden McCall, group product manager of The ECN Group, says that a problem with many electronic document workflow products is that they don’t extend beyond the enterprise. However ECN’s product Viibe, was designed to allow organisations to collaborate on internal processes, as well as with suppliers, service providers and customers. This makes it ideal for working with subcontractors for example, and one of ECN’s clients is the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) which uses Viibe to manage the process through which health providers apply for access to its online e-Claims system.

Another advantage of Viibe says McCall is that it integrates very well with existing ERP systems. Adapters are available in and out of the commonly used ERP applications, and Viibe can talk directly to databases or custom-built applications as it is packaged with Microsoft’s BizTalk suite, which provides extensibility into legacy or partner systems.

Craig Paterson, business solutions manager at Fujitsu says his company’s BPM product Smarter Workflows is more of a toolkit to apply methodologies than an application. “It helps to manage the interaction between different people and information flows – interactions that can frequently get out of hand,” says Paterson.

One of Fujitsu’s clients, food company Cedenco, provides a good example of how Smarter Workflows can manage a large number of open-ended issues and their operational interdependencies. In Cedenco’s case Smarter Workflows needed to access information from the factory floor, such as production lot numbers, and ERP system information. What’s more a range of internal divisions and people had to be canvassed, necessitating the inclusion of task management features, such as assignment of responsibilities, delegation, criteria setting, automated notification, reminders and reporting.

With Smarter Workflows, Cedenco has effectively joined many sets of hands to manage tasks in a truly collaborative fashion. The upshot sees shorter issue resolution cycle times and resulting improvements in customer responsiveness.

One company which is taking a very software-centric approach to BPM is Mavim, a Netherlands-based software company which set up shop in New Zealand earlier this year. New Zealand chief executive Robin Van de Breggen says Mavim has around 800 users worldwide and a basic licence starts at $6,000. Van de Breggen says Mavim offers some powerful features but the company has focussed on ease of use with its product.

Anyone who is familiar with Microsoft Word will be get along with Mavim’s visual interface and the package integrates directly with Microsoft Visio.

However van de Breggen says that some consultancy work is necessary to make effective use of the package. “You still need to have someone somewhere in the organisation who is going to do this work,” he says.

While larger organisations are already likely to employ dedicated business analysts, Mavim is working with local universities to develop a network of consultants who will be able to handle this for smaller organisations.

For more information visit
BPM / Doc. Mgmt / Portals Research Pavilion

January 2007

By Michael Foreman

BPM: FOUR TYPES OF PROCESSES

INTEGRATION INTENSIVE

PEOPLE INTENSIVE

DECISION INTENSIVE

DOCUMENT INTENSIVE

Strong focus on automating processes that integrate systems and applications with limited human interaction

Strong focus on automating people intensive activities like servicing customers, managing sales, supporting field force workers

Strong focus on processes that require employees to make business critical decisions based on business rules

Strong focus on processes that involve extensive use of scanned images for back office processes

EXAMPLE PROCESSES

Order fulfilment, supply chain integration, straight through processing involving database and applications

Order to cash, employee onboarding, non-paper based claims processing

Lending Origination, underwriting, inventory management

Paper based claims processing, accounts payable, contract management

REQUIRED FEATURES

Integration tools, transaction management process modeling, strong SOA support, Development tools

Task list/workflow portal, Strong UI, Organisational management, integration with packaged apps eg ERP

Business Rules Engine (integrated on third party), tools for analysing business data captured from the processes

Robust native support for document imaging, document management and records management, task list/portal for workflow, event management for changes to documents