BPM Provides Value To Your Case Management Needs

Today's headlines scream for the need of case management inside corporations:  security fraud, credit card transactions, lost and stolen account numbers , whistle-blowers inside companies coming forth to reveal criminal activities, biased treatment of employees - the list goes on.  Company executives are under increasing pressure to ensure that policies and procedures are in place to handle these types of situations.  With that, case management solutions have come to the market place to ensure company officials have the tools they need to properly track instances of impropriety inside the work place.  Case Management systems on the market today are designed to make certain company regulatory standards are uniformly applied across the company's enterprise (for example, ensuring the same HR regulations are administered for all employees).

Case Management systems are usually marked with the following characteristics:

• Data Security: Because of the sensitive information being collected, the case management system must be highly secure.
• Integration with DMS systems: Case management incidents normally require the generation and collection of documents. The ability to integrate with common DMS system is vital.
• Highly Accessible: In terms of new incidents, case management systems should have a number of possible user interfaces to ensure initial information can easily and readily be recorded.

With all of the benefits case management solutions provide, there are two prevalent short-comings with enterprise case management installations today:

• Larger enterprises tend to have multiple case management tools (where each tool is utilized by a different corporate official). This may be the case as each corporate officer is concerned with sharing information outside of his department or corporate policies themselves prohibit the sharing of an application across departments due to the criticality of the information itself.
• Many of today's case management tools are ones which tend to be created for specialized use in specific company departments. For example, specific case management tools exist for HR, Legal, and Financial Services (just to name a few). Here, case management tools that attempt to span the needs and requirements across different business units end up falling short, as they lack the necessary security features to ensure the critical data in the cases is visible to the correct users.

This is where Business Process Management can add value, much in the same light as BPM adding value to a company who has many existing large-scale ERP and HCM applications (where data sharing, organization, and security is most painful).  Consider the following situation with a large corporation ACME:

Here, ACME has three disparate case management systems, each with its own database and its own document management storage application.  While each case management application can service the needs of that department well, there is no way to ensure consistency across these applications.  Meaning, from an executive perspective, there is no way to ensure each of the applications is reporting information in a consistent manner.  At the highest levels, senior executives need a full, cross-departmental profile of all of their risk situations.  BPM systems are designed to leverage that challenge. 

A BPM system unifying the disparate various case management applications provides the following benefits:

• Uniformity and awareness of the states and statuses of all case incidents in each of the applications
• Ability to have a common reporting interface across all case management systems
• Ability to assess the highest concentration of risks in a company without having to request individual reports to be generated from each system

As you can see, a Business Process Management system has no limits in terms of its ability to unify applications and systems. BPM provides easier administration across systems, consistency of data, and visibility from the highest levels across all systems in a unified format. Large corporations who have invested in case management solutions should consider a flexible BPM Suite.

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus