Posted on Wed, Sep 30, 2009 @ 10:37 AM
Last Thursday, I conducted part 1 of a 2 part webcast workshop series on the importance of process modeling. Each time Ultimus holds a webcast workshop, we provide a poll to our attendees. The poll for this workshop was:
- Yes, we currently model our business processes before our automation initiative
- No, we choose to not model our processes first (for varying reasons)
- I do not know what Process Modeling is
I was excited to see that 66% of our workshop attendees were actively including process modeling into their continuous process improvement (CPI) initiatives. While I would love to see 100% of the attendees modeling their processes, compared to 2-3 years ago, 66% is a vast improvement. Although process modeling is a vital part of any CPI, the fact remains that I continue to see companies skip modeling efforts for reasons such as:
Ultimus is committed to helping customers include modeling into their process lifecycles, even when the
customer may not have the time and resources available today for this. Ultimus webcast workshops provide customers not only introductory information on Ultimus Adaptive
BPM Suite features and functions, but also on how to get started ASAP using the features. This information, coupled with process templates,
Ultimus' eLearning platform, Ultimus' Center of Excellence consultation and guidance in Process Modeling, allows customers to work with Ultimus hand-in-hand to jump start their use of process modeling.
Have you downloaded Ultimus Process Designer and explored how to quickly and easily map, document, and model your processes?
Related Links:
Getting Started with Process Modeling
Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements
Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes
Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus
Posted on Wed, Sep 30, 2009 @ 10:03 AM
With all of the controversy and criticism spanning the networks and filling the newspapers, one thing is certain: It's time for healthcare to go Lean.
As outlined by President Obama's Healthcare Reform plan, the 5,700 hospitals that operate in the United States must cut an average of $2.6 million annually over the next 10 years. An overwhelming task to say the least, but for an industry that is flooded with inefficiencies, it is a revolution that would benefit all parties involved. Many people fear change and reform; however, many hospital executives are welcoming the demands to meet lean standards of operation, confident that it will bring about improved patient care and reduced costs.
Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Illinois, for example, was considering an $80 million maternity ward expansion project; however upon the implementation of Lean principles the hospital discovered that signing discharge papers was the bottleneck in the process, keeping patients waiting for hours to be approved to go home. Not only is this costly to the patient (as some would spend an extra day), but it is also costly to the hospital in terms of available beds and the ability to accept and treat new patients. Delnor was able to side-step the expansion project by simply hiring an additional nurse and designating her to handle discharge papers. Nonetheless, it makes you wonder- where else in daily operations are hospitals (and, in effect, patients) wasting money?
Other hospitals have been accused of wasting $10+ billion in unused medical supplies due to over- ordering items and letting them expire. Simpler Consulting CEO, Marc Hafer, in an interview with USA Today, estimated that "90% of the time and cost in hospital care is wasted and $19 billion could be saved each year if all hospitals were to get serious" about reform. For hospitals this means:
- implementing just-in-time inventory purchasing
- following lean principles and business disciplines
- eliminating unnecessary steps, tests, and procedures
This is where
Business Process Management (BPM) Software makes sense.
BPM Software is a solution for hospitals looking to reduce costs and achieve operational efficiency. Using a full circle approach, BPM allows you to improve your organization's operations by: Modeling, Automating, Managing, and Optimizing your business processes.
Through this 4 step approach, MAMO (Model, Automate, Manage, and Optimize), your organization has the ability to:
- Map out your current business process to identify bottlenecks and workflow inefficiencies
- Test your process in a virtual environment simulation to ensure efficiency prior to automation
- Automate your workflow including electronic forms, email notifications, and process alerts
- Manage the process and usual events, patients scheduling, industry changes, etc.
- Continuously optimize and refine the process to ensure your organization is always operating at Lean levels of operation.
Moreover,
BPM Software is more than just a process improvement tool; it is a platform upon which to support, run, and integrate your existing software applications into a single, easy-to-use interface. This being said, is your healthcare organization prepared to meet the changes being demanded? Is your hospital throwing away millions of dollars on wasted medical supplies and process bottlenecks? Has your healthcare organization looked into
Business Process Management Software?
Related Posts:
Getting Started with Process Management
Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Process Improvements
Lean Healthcare?
Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus
Posted on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 @ 09:00 AM
SAP, at a very high level, consists of enterprise applications which began as a means for interacting with customers and employees through various types of business systems in order to complete necessary operational functions. SAP applications use a common corporate database to provide the ability for businesses to manage their:
- Finance and accounting initiatives
- Daily operations
- Supply chain and production materials
- Human resources
- Plants and Facilities
A
BPM Software Suite, on the other hand, is an enterprise process automation tool. It helps organizations map out everyday processes to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, control costs, make day-to-day processes as efficient as possible, and ensure the effectiveness of the people involved in the processes. A key difference between
BPM and SAP is the amount of time and resources required to implement each system. With SAP, implementation is very costly in terms of money, time to implement, and resources required. A high quality BPM Suite, however, overcomes these pitfalls by uses drag-and-drop process implementation functionality and provides a rapid, easy deployment model.
At this point, you may ask yourself- If SAP can provide my company with a single corporate database that spans and services all of my functional business areas, then why would I need BPM Software? Additionally, since many enterprise applications, like SAP, have started incorporating a process management capability as a core function, their customers are naturally inclined to assume that the enterprise application can handle their BPM requirements. However, this mentality quickly becomes problematic when your efforts are no long fulfilled by SAP.
The best example and understanding of the need for SAP and BPM integration is reflected by the hierarchy of transportation. Some modes of transportation, such as airplanes and trains, are fast, efficient, mass transits of goods or people from point A to point B. However, an airplane or a train will not take you directly to your house. Rather, you need a second mode of transportation that is more flexible, personal, agile, and less costly, such as a car. Organizations use both modes of transportation depending on their need. Thus, one type of system cannot be used economically to handle all possible requirements.
BPM provides the means of extending and supporting deployments of SAP and other enterprise applications. BPM, therefore, fills in the gaps between enterprise applications by complementing their functionality and enabling processes that extend outside each application and extends to employees, customers, and partners. In this role, Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite leverages four key capabilities:
- Shortest-time-to-value for deploying BPM processes through rapid automation
- Enabling rapid adaptation of processes to change, exceptions, human factors and need for collaboration in knowledge worker processes.
- Facilitating rapid integration with SAP and other enterprise applications
- Seamlessly extending business processes to the information worker desktops through tight integration with Microsoft Office, e-mail and portals.
Enterprise applications like SAP provide significant business value and perform critical functions inside an organization. However, they cannot be expected to do everything, just like a multi-million dollar modern airplane cannot be expected to drop you off at your home like a car. Organizations must plan to have multiple business process systems to handle the various types of processes that they have to manage and improve.
For more information about Business Process Management and SAP integration, click here.
Related Posts:
Business Processes Should Not be Driven by IT Initiatives
Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements
Building Your Ultimus V8 Process Library Quickly: Reusable Process Libraries
Avoid Investing in Workflow in Non-Workflow Applications
Don't Stop Short With Workflow... Go To The Next Level With BPM
Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus
Posted on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 @ 01:25 PM
I was recently reading a blog from Jim Sinur of Garnter, The Secret is Out: The Business is Building Processes and Applications. It got me thinking on this topic...
Are you having problems with accessing your emails or the internet? Is your new laptop not working like you think it should? Do you need to be granted access to your Accounting or Orders Management application? IT to the rescue! Do you need to formalize and automate a new business process inside your company? Think twice about asking for IT's help so quickly.
In many ways, we have all relied (and continue to rely) on IT to govern and control everything vital to our company's operations such as information systems, business data, and internal HR information, among many other things. Historically, IT governance provides the value of ensuring systems are safe, data is organized, and all company employees can have access to critical applications. Moreover, in a classical sense, critical business applications required the expertise of IT (as these applications were not "business user" friendly). The trade off -and there is a trade off- is that the business line champions have to guarantee IT has enough information to ensure the systems serve the true business needs of the company.
Today's business process development options obviate the need for business line champions to rely on IT in the following ways:
- Business Process modeling applications from pure-play BPM vendors are easily installed on client machines without the need for underlying databases
- Some BPM modelers are available in the cloud now requiring no installation locally
- Common applications on client machines today, like MS Visio and MS SharePoint, have basic mapping and workflow components
The benefits of empowering the business line champions to drive BPM projects are numerous, including:
Once the process is agreed upon by the business teams, and the process is ready to be automated, IT does have a vital and integral part in the development process. For example, IT plays a role in process integration with secure third-party applications, data management oversight, and ensuring the processes leverage underlying directories. In these ways, IT serves as a checkpoint for the work performed by the business line champions to ensure the business processes are consistent with the security and operational policies the company has agreed upon. If you consider business process development as two separate efforts, the above depiction can now be represented as:
As you can see above, not only are business processes being developed now by the business line champions (for all of the above stated benefits), but also IT's work load is lightened. Is your company in a position today to allow for business line champions to take a vested and vital part of your business process development?
Related Blogs:
"Recipe" For Ideal Business Process Development: You Need Multiple Cooks in the Kitchen
Getting Started with Process Modeling
Rethink The Ways You Update Your Process Participants
Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes
Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus
Posted on Thu, Sep 10, 2009 @ 01:13 PM
Implementing a BPM Software system or even a workflow automation application across an enterprise can be a challenging task. Many people find themselves wondering... "Where do I begin?" As with any system-wide application it is important to first define what the process is and what it is intended to do. The next step is to actually draw or map out the process.
To effectively map out a business process it is important to involve all of the process participants and fully understand how each one contributes to the workflow. This sets the groundwork for your process automation efforts as it allows you to:
- Learn and understand the importance of each step in the process
- Raise flags where changes may be needed due to excessive work build up
- Identify tasks with extensive lag time
- Question potential bottlenecks, steps, and the number of participants
Many project leaders do not fully comprehend all of the tasks, activities, and possible outcomes that are involved in a complete business process at first glance. For example, a surgery or outpatient scheduling process has multiple possible outcomes, as shown in the process template below.
In the process template you can see that depending on the results early on at the general patient and x-ray scheduling steps, one of five outcomes is possible. At any of these five outcomes a new process can be initiated based on patient results and needs. Moreover, at various other steps early on in the process, other workflow processes can be referenced and triggered. Without modeling this process, a project manager would have difficulty in fully automating it as potential results, outcomes, and tasks may have been left out.
Process modeling can arguably be one of most important steps in your BPM project as it will determine the overall effectiveness of your implementation. A process that is modeled incorrectly and not properly tested in a virtual environment will produce inefficient results that can be costly to your organization. Virtual environment testing, a capability that is unique to BPM suites, not only helps to identify these missing steps, but also allows you to run simulations to determine the most efficient flow of work possible. This ensures that your organization is operating at optimum levels.
The capital acquisition approval process template below was mapped out as the process existed in company A. The process was then tested to identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement. Based on the simulation results and cost analysis, the organization determined that hiring two additional customer account managers would significantly reduce the processing time in capital acquisition approvals.
Thus, using the features and modeling capabilities of the BPM Software, Company A was able to generate visibility into their finance and accounting processes to determine the most efficient workflow. That being said, it is important to research and model your business processes fully as a starting point for your process improvement initiatives.
Related Links:
BPM Implementation: Why Training is so Important
Business Processes: Recognizing You Need Business Process Improvements
Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes
To view more process templates, click here.
Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus
Posted on Fri, Sep 04, 2009 @ 12:52 PM
It is amazing how fast technology is changing (do I sound like an old man when I say this?). It was not that long ago that people on the road needed internet cafes in order to catch up on emails. Now, it is inevitable that I see people reading emails and texting while driving on the road (and I am not condoning that by the way). Do internet cafes even exist anymore?
And now it seems that emails are starting to be today's dinosaur in many ways. When I tell myself "I need to send them an email", for me, it is usually a formal work related communication or a touch point with my parents. Social Technologies are all the buzz in the latest articles. Everyone is arguing on how to marry formal business operations with informal social collaboration tools, and I think this argument is very appropriate for BPM.
I travel a lot, and like all of you, it seems every time I get a free second, I find myself heads down with my iPhone checking for updates. On my iPhone, I have the following apps:
- FaceBook
- Twitter
- Email
- Chat programs like MSN
- Countless others that I'm still learning
I am constantly checking for the latest information in each of these apps. It would be good to include them all in some master mash up app, where I could get all of the latest information from one source...but that is another story. So when I think about business process activity, I think updates from business processes make sense to be included in all of these forums (not just email alerts). I also think about how much business process activity can be in information subscription formats, rather than classic "push" formats. Consider the following:
-
A new b
usiness process is now live. People in your company are made aware of the new live process through an email sent from the process champion. Inevitably, there will be a discussion (or formal company meeting) on how well the process is serving your company. Why not create a FaceBook page for the process and let people "friend" the process. This way, the process champion can capture formal and informal comments about the process from people when they wish to make those comments (and not just through a boring company meeting)?
- For this new business process, rather than just email alerts going out to people when certain activities happen, think again about this Facebook page for the process. If people in your company add that process as a "friend", then when new activities happen in the business process, updates to the Facebook page are posted automatically. In this way, you expand a "1 to 1" communication forum with the process into a "1 to Many".
- A high percentage of business processes have human involvement (process participants). These people have their information (job function, email address, etc) recorded either in Active Directory, LDAP, or the BPM Suite itself. Why not record people's Twitter account information also? And then allow people to designate their preferred electronic communication vehicle? In this way, rather than having to check emails for process updates, I see updates through Twitter.
With all of this excitement about social technologies, admittedly, fully leveraging them into our day-to-day operations will take some "rethinking" by us all. Social Technology sites are easy targets for spamming and arguably not ready to serve as communication backbones. But social technologies and social collaboration is a new evolution and will inevitably be an integral part of business processes. Has your company adopted social technologies into your day-to-day operations yet?
Related Blogs:
Ultimus Enhances BPM Suite with Twitter Updates for Your Business Process
The Age of Social Networking
Mitigate Risk by Modeling Your Business Processes
Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus
