First, I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays!  After a long and successful 2008, we all deserved some time away to spend with family and friends.  As I participated (mostly watched as I am a “danger” in the kitchen) in the preparation of holiday meals by all members of my family, I came back to the idea of what would be the ideal way to develop a robust, fully automated business process in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite.  I am a terrible cook, but other members of my family are incredible cooks.  I am a great preparation chef, where prep work for a meal is something other members of my family dislike to do.  The idea of necessary tasks designated to the people who can best perform them parallels the necessity of roles and tasks when deciding to automate a business process.  The following is what I would consider an ideal “recipe” for building a business process.  Note the following definitions for “Roles”:

• Business Analyst:  Those who have a background in understand and defining business processes
•  Business Process Champions:  Those who are have lead positions in the execution of a company’s business process
• Process Executors:  Persons who perform the day-to-day work of executing the business processes for a company
• IT:  The person or persons most knowledgeable of a company’s hardware and software technologies
• BPM Administrators:  The person or persons who are the designated leads in managing a company’s BPMS application
• Executives:  The team of people who are responsible for understanding the bottom line KPIS for a company

It is important to note here that the role of building processes in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite is spread equally among IT and the business process owners (Analysts and Champions).  While IT plays a critical role in the building and integration of the business processes, the actual inception and livelihood of the processes are most defined with relationships with the people who are part of the day-to-day business processes themselves.  Having said that, without IT’s involvement in the integration and desired visibility of business processes with external systems and application, the collection of sensitive and vital business level data in web forms and application UIs will not be shared across your entire systems applications landscape.

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

You just completed mapping out your company’s business processes (which is no small feat in itself, as process discovery can be a huge project).  You now wish to automate these processes for all the obvious reasons such as online data capturing through web forms, mitigating the human error often part of manual process execution, automatic task escalations, etc.  Process Automation is another big step to ensure your company’s business processes are as efficient and effective as possible.  But process automation is not the end-all in your business process initiative (BPI); rather it is just one piece of the puzzle.

An argument can be made that your current business process is not streamlined and efficient as it needs to be.  In fact, a very good argument can be made here, as many times, people consider the steps taken in the business process as “just the way we have always done it”.  Additionally, if your business process was discovered through just employees interviews, as opposed to utilizing automated process discovery technologies, you will probably find that what your employees THINK they do to perform their tasks is quite different from what ACTUALLY is done.

Consider the case that you use a workflow tool, which is geared specifically to automate and manage business processes, to automate one of your company’s business processes.  Because you did not model your business process or even test your automated business process in a sandbox environment, all of the great work you have done to get to the process automation stage is at serious risk.  You have now automated an inefficient, untested, and unproven process.  Meaning, the bottlenecks in your business processes are now much more of a problem than they ever were before (as your process users will start complaining about missing tasks, emails being lost, and not having any idea who is the person(s) holding up the process).  It will be quickly evident that you should have chosen a business process management suite (BPMS) rather than simple workflow.

In a BPMS, you not only have the ability to automate and manage your business processes, but you also can leverage two other vital concepts:  modeling and optimization.

Modeling will allow you to test your process in a sandbox environment first (before the automation stage).  By modeling your process, you will be able to determine bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and high resource usage situations in your process.  Identifying and resolving these situations in your process first, and then proceeding with process automation, ensures all the work you have performed to get your process to the automation stage will result in success.

Process optimization is vital as your business changes.  Your business will change, and as a result, the way your business processes function will change.  By leveraging a robust process optimization strategy, you will be able to proactively update and change your automated business processes.  Moreover, using an agile process optimization strategy, you will be able to change your business processes more often and more quickly. 

By using process modeling and process optimization features as part of your BPI, you will not have to spend all of your time managing your automated business processes themselves, but rather focus on what you really need to focus on:  the business itself!

 
Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

Last week we had three informative webinars on Microsoft SharePoint.  On the webinars, we explained and demonstrated not only how Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite integrates with MS SharePoint, but also how we have incorporated MS SharePoint natively into Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite (and vice versa).

By leveraging MS SharePoint as part of business processes themselves, you will have the power to manage your MS SharePoint team sites, which users have visibility into those sites, and which documents are uploaded to the site’s document repositories.  But MS SharePoint is more than just a DMS; it is also an application portal.  Ultimus Client, Ultimus Report, and Ultimus iBAM can be included in MS SharePoint sites as part of your custom application portal page.  As MS SharePoint continues to grow in both the BPM and ECM spaces, Ultimus will continue to mature its integrations with it.

For those of you who missed the Webinar, you can find the Ultimus SharePoint White Paper, the Recorded Webinars and the Q&A from the Webinars all HERE.

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

Ultimus held its first “Jump Start” training course last week.  This course provided additional in-depth training supplementing our e-learning platform for Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite.  Attendees included both Ultimus partners and customers (who had skills sets ranging from executive management, business analyst, and system architects).

Topics covered in this event included:

• Strategies for optimum business process development
• How to integrate Ultimus business processes with popular third party applications like Microsoft SharePoint
• Utilizing Ultimus’ EIK interfaces to customize Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite
• Ways to include tools from Ultimus into other development applications

As Tyler Jensen noted in his blog, Ultimus offers numerous ways to expand and tailor Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite to meet his company’s needs.  He observed “the freedom to customize [Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite] using our .NET dev skills without requiring coding skills to design and modify and manage processes”

Building on this success, Ultimus will offer jump start sessions approximately every 6-8 weeks.  Everyone who uses Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite (from modeling, to automation, to management, and optimization) will value attending an Ultimus Jump Start training session.  More information regarding courses and offerings can be found on the Ultimus Support Customer Portal.

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

Thinking Green in the BPM space

It happens to all companies, valued employees leave the company and panic sets in.  The impact of people leaving touches every aspect of your business:  customer knowledge, IT expertise, software application usage, ability to handle emergency situations, etc. 

This same concern also relates to your BPM initiative.  To ensure the value in your BPMS investment is preserved when your Process Experts leave the company (and I say “when”, as it will happen eventually), you need to institute process knowledge recording and process knowledge transfer best practices.  Ironically, one of the reasons why you may have chosen to automate your processes is to minimize the dependence on your individual contributors from the manual reliance of ensuring process efficiency.  But without instituting some vital best practices relating to your BPMS, it is the key person / persons in your BPM Center of Excellence team whom you will miss dearly.  Ask yourself these questions today to determine how well your BPMS implementation can handle personnel change:

One of my responsibilities is to talk to as many customers, partners, and BPM industry experts as possible. I normally have a wide range of conversations relating to BPM, workflow, and business processes in general.  With BPM maturing as a technology (growing from workflow), I am often engaged in discussions relating to BPM product innovation, comparison of Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite with other products in the space, and product vision.  While these conversations are certainly important, I also make it a point to remind myself to not take myself so seriously all the time.  Meaning, while BPM is as popular and ubiquitous as it has ever been, there is a large percentage of the customer base who are not specifically interested in advanced BPM subjects such as Ultimus version 8’s SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and market differentiating 3D XML data model.  Rather, many customers have identified basic problems with their basic manual processes in their work environment.  If a BPM product cannot address the simple problems in intuitive and an easy-to-understand format and is mainly geared for “BPM experts”, then we as an industry are abandoning a signification portion of today’s new customers.

My concerns for the masses of customers who are beginning their BPM initiatives or have yet to start enjoying the benefits of BPM are confirmed with a recent article by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) that hit the wire:  http://soa-talk.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/11/19/bpm-adoption-hits-56-in-latest-survey/.   In this post, I see that AIIM, a global community for users and suppliers of enterprise content management, is reporting that:

• BPM is already implemented in 56% of IT organizations
• The remaining 44% are planning BPM initiatives in the next 12 months
• AIIM further classifies that the majority of customers interviewed identified back office operation for their primary BPM projects, followed by IT, HR, and Customer Service needs.

These findings match what I am seeing in the BPM space.  Today’s customers are identifying basic BPM needs for some of their most basic business processes.  While Round Trip Optimization is a very important process optimization strategy, how does this relate to today’s new BPM customer who is identifying they have HR process needs like Employee Roll On or Vacation Request Management.  While established customers will indeed eventually start focusing more on process optimization as they get a process or two up and running, my argument is RTO (Round Trip Optimization) is often not a major factor in new BPM sales.  I think it is vital in these types of cases to realize that while we (BPM vendors) eat and drink BPM daily, companies just beginning to think about BPM have basic needs.  

One final thought…..As workflow matured to BPM approximately 6-8 years ago, if it has taken this long for 56% of the customers to adopt BPM, and if the other 44% will begin their adoption in the next 12 months, all BPM vendors stand to be VERY busy and stand to generate GREAT revenues in 2009.

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

BPMS marketing in the past introduced BPM as the necessary enterprise application for your existing IT landscape.  While today’s BPMS is perfectly constructed to have the robustness and structure to serve in that role, this is not the only way a BPMS can provide value to you.  In fact, an argument can be made that a deterrent for BPM adoption for some companies is that total upheaval and reorganization of your company’s IT landscape is not needed. 

Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite currently serves as the software application backbone for many customers across the world today.  Because of Ultimus BPM Server’s SOA construction, the ability to easily integrate with other systems and applications, and the ability to scale to support high volume needs, Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite is positioned as the cornerstone of companies’ IT landscapes.

Having said this, it is important to note that BPM can provide value to you in other ways.  A BPMS does not always have to be the enterprise application upon which all other systems rely.  Take for example:

• You currently have an ERP application that serves as your cornerstone application but exceptions in your business processes cause major disruptions in your day-to-day operations
• Integration across your existing applications is not a current problem.  You have constructed your existing applications to successfully and efficiently integrate with one another (and they are sufficiently serving most of your IT needs)
• Your company is small and/or your IT department is small and is not prepared to start a new endeavor where you uproot and reorganize your IT landscape.  But you have an identified need to unify your company’s business data and streamline operations

All of these situations merit you considering a BPMS as an application that can serve to augment your existing IT systems.  By utilizing a BPMS for exception handling, you will continue to take advantage of your existing systems, but you will have the added capabilities of ensuring disruptions and exceptions to normal operation systems are handled in an organized manner. 

In fact, you very well might be overlooking how exceptions are currently handled today.  Upon close inspection of this, you might be surprised to see how much time and effort are needed to handle these types of situations.  Consider the following unhandled exception situations:

• New Orders are received and the Ship To Address information is incorrect
• Customer information collected through the order process does not align with customer information in your Finance application
• Placed orders are being received with a discount amount that is not adherent with agreed upon company policies

It is these types of situations where your existing day-to-day operations fail and your employees spend too much time and effort focusing on correcting the exceptions.  Moreover, because exceptions are not accounted for, your employees are spending inordinate time determining who / which department is responsible for managing the exception.  A BPMS is ideal here to handle these types of situations.  By implementing a BPMS to handle exception situations in your existing applications, you can be assured that your employees are focused on spending their time in handling the majority of incoming orders that are contributing to your company’s revenues and profits. 

If your existing BPMS is not flexible enough to work in the ways you need it to, then how much actual value does it provide to you as your business needs change?

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

Trying financial times are here.  I do not have to build or explain the argument here.  You can just read the news:

• “A week after Circuit City began a downward spiral that began with massive store closings and layoffs and ended with a filing for bankruptcy protection competitor electronics retailer Best Buy sharply cut its 2009 outlook in the face of the “the most difficult climate” it has ever seen.  - The Wired Blog  
• “We expect to see further increases in jobless claims and higher unemployment,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist for Canto Fitzgerald. “We’re expecting unemployment to rise into the first quarter.” -Fox Business News   
• Technology stocks showed few signs of positive momentum Friday after Sun Microsystems Inc. announced plans to lay off as many as 6,000 workers in a cost-cutting move to help deal with the slowing economy.  -MarketWatch  
•  The government programs have gotten credit back on track from the month-long derailment sparked by Lehman’s collapse. And while some analysts argue that the credit “crisis” is over, the credit “crunch” is still very much alive and will be a slow process to correct.     - CNN   

These stories tell of staff reduction, streamlined work forces, reduction in business costs, and businesses looking inward (for increased efficiencies) rather than outward (for new IT acquisitions). Specifically, it is vital today to ensure you are effectively and efficiently utilizing what you have.  Conversely, if you are experiencing internal inefficiencies with what you have, what is the best acquisition can you make to overcome these challenges and ensure you will have a greater return on investment on your business activities going forward? 

At the core of all of these stories are business processes.  Business processes are the most granular aspect of day-to-day processing in the business realm.  Regardless if times are profitable or challenging, the effectiveness of your business is incrementally measured on the business processes themselves.  Executives from the companies in each of the stories above are now requiring heightened levels of visibility and reporting accuracies.  Leveraging existing business process management installations (or investing in new and focused installations) makes perfect sense in these difficult economic times.

Consider the case that you have already invested in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite.  Now is the ideal time to evaluate the effectiveness of these processes, how much visibility you have to your data and KPIs, and how efficiently the people who are involved in your processes are working.  By ensuring your processes are efficient, effective, and the data is visible in them (for reporting, dashboards, etc.), you will have an exact measure of how well your business is performing as a whole.  Moreover, with all this in place, you can understand what the impact to your day-to-day operations will be when your business undergoes economic, financial, and possibly structural changes.

Conversely, consider the case you have not yet invested in Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite (or any business process management system).  As a CIO or IT Director, you might be asking yourself these questions right now:

• Are my company’s employees spending the appropriate amount of time to perform their daily work?
•  Are my existing software applications working together seamlessly or are we spending time and effort re-entering and reconfirming data across these systems?
• Do I even know my true key performance indicators vital to measuring my business?

While times may be tight, can you afford to not know the answers to these questions?  The answer is exactly where business process management makes sense.  By implementing a quality BPMS, you are going to invest in a enterprise software application that will enable you to streamline your work force, ensure everyone is working as efficiently as possible, and ultimately save your business money.  In fact, your return on investment will happen sooner than you believe it to be (as the direct and indirect money you will be saving with an efficient process multiplies as you invest more into the BPMS).

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus

There have been some recent announcements from some of the largest technologies providers about new business process management offerings.  While it is exciting to see that BPM is being recognized as a valued software offering by the largest of software vendors, I am careful to read the fine details of what is being “offered”.  Large software application providers have the convenience of associating their numerous and often disparate applications together as a single enterprise offering.  What this means to the customer is that there is some work to connect the separate applications as a single and cohesive software solution.  There are some positives and some concerns with building an enterprise in this way:

     Positive:  You can mix and match applications (or pieces of those applications) to build your enterprise BPM application as you wish

   Concern:  In order for the applications to collectively serve as an enterprise application, you have to specifically manage the data transfer between these applications

    Positive:  You are probably using some of these applications for other uses (and as such, you are already familiar with how they work individually)

   Concern:  While each individual application works well on its own, its fit with other applications could be described as “forcing a square peg in a round hole”

    Positive:  The large software vendors are constantly releasing new features and functions

   Concern:  As each individual application has its own release schedule, you must ensure the new application versions are compatible with one another (and do not “break” your pieced together enterprise application)

On the contrary, utilizing a BPMS that is organically grown as a comprehensive and singular BPMS overcomes the concerns listed above.  By investing in a BPMS that is not a collection of individual applications, you can ensure that:

• the data you collection in one module is accurately represented in the other BPMS modules
• each module in the BPMS is designed and tested to work seamlessly together with one another
• you will not need to constantly manage application updates to just one part of the BPMS (each new version of the BPMS is offered as an update to the entire BPMS itself)

One point not discussed thus far is the mixing individual applications with a collection of custom code and/or workflow engine APIs.  Collectively, a workflow offering could be developing by utilizing this concert of technologies.  But remember that each line of code you develop on your own is not just an investment, but also can be considered a liability (in that special care must be made to ensure your custom code continues to compile and execute as your BPM needs change).  Moreover, if you choose to develop your own custom code to serve your enterprise application needs, then you must ensure that you have the proper change management, code security, and code management policies in place (to ensure inadvertent or improper changes to your code do not adversely affect your live BPM implementations).

With all this in mind, why not leave the work of developing and offering a BPMS to a pure play BPM vendor and put your time and money where it should be….on your business.

Chris Adams
VP of Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus