When you get right down to it, automating business processes is only the first step. To really capture the value of a Business Process Management (BPM) solution, organizations need to use them for continuous process improvement-not simply automating a process initially, but continuing to refine that process over time in response to changing business conditions or requirements.
This week Lombardi Software, an Austin, Texas-based company, announced the release of Teamworks 4, its core BPM product suite. Available immediately, TeamWorks 4 provides improved business process monitoring and reporting, improved integration with and tracking of external data, executive scoreboards, and global calendaring functionality.
Specifically, TeamWorks 4 includes the following enhancements:
– Global Calendaring. What do you do when you’re rolling out an automated process to users around the globe and need them to be able to respond to deadlines defined around their local calendar, working customs, and time? Teamworks 4 includes global calendaring capabilities that enable process designers to create individual calendars for each process, task, or user. In addition, by using them, process designers can signify time constraints in business vernacular-such as specifying that a task needs to be completed in 3 business days.
– External Data Tracking. As organizations move to automate business processes across departments and areas of responsibility, integrating external data into process decision points becomes more critical. TeamWorks 4 now has the ability to track external data and not only use it during decision points in a process, but also in reports, where it can be correlated with existing process data. In other words, process behaviors can be driven off of these links to external systems so that if another system alters the external value that’s being tracked, the TeamWorks process will automatically receive that updated value. In addition, process data in a TeamWorks process is available via SQL, and doesn’t require a specialized interface for reporting or querying.
– Executive Scoreboards. By combining the ability to track internal process data and external business data, Lombardi has created a series of executive dashboards in Teamworks 4 that puts process and business data into context for business managers, and allows the managers to monitor processes for critical business events.
Exposed Process Values. One important capability for business process management solutions is the ability to be able to change selected process values (or decision points) dynamically, at run-time. TeamWorks 4 supports this functionality through Exposed Process Values, which enable business managers to make real-time changes to process variables or reports without having to recompile or interrupt existing processes.
Most BPM vendors are continuing to extend and broaden their reporting and process monitoring capabilities. Lombardi’s TeamWorks 4 release complements this move toward BAM by allowing process designers to include dynamic process values that can easily change processes or reports, as well as automated management of external data tracking that allows processes to respond to changes in data kept in other systems.
