Posts by DavidKelly

Throughout the last few months of 2003 and even shortly after ringing in the New Year, Upside Research was speaking with numerous vendors in the BPM space as well as a number of global organizations currently implementing BPM. Through the conversations, a pattern began to emerge, and it centers on who really cares about BPM in the organization, and who is increasingly taking ownership of BPM projects.
Traditionally, BPM has been an IT-driven sale, involving an enterprise IT Architect who understood the “big picture” and could envision how BPM can do what EAI failed to do: unify disparate business processes running on separate, often isolated systems. Business managers were added to a BPM project for the process design and business flow components, but had less to do with evaluating the features and functions in the solution.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a subtle shift in the market. Several vendors are starting to see business-unit initiated inquiries into BPM solutions. In addition, business analysts are attending more BPM-related conferences, signaling a trend that business wants more involvement in BPM, and may view BPM as a potential solution to their process-related problems.
Upside Uptake
The shift is subtle, and many deals are still being driven (and will continue to be driven) by IT, but Upside Research believes this is significant because it signals that many of the messages the BPM community has been espousing may be falling on listening ears within the boardroom. For example, corporate governance initiatives such as Sarbanes-Oxley are part of the catalyst behind this intensified interest in BPM by business managers. They have several fairly challenging problems to solve in the short term, and therefore are exploring BPM solutions as a way to fix to their woes.
Upside Research expects this shift to continue through 2004, and urges BPM vendors to solidify their business-benefits messages surrounding their BPM solution. Leading with a strong business message and having all of the requisite feature/function information to provide the decision-makers in IT is a sound strategy for addressing the shifting target audience in BPM.

Time is everything in the business world today. Customers want information and product faster than ever, and with the global nature of business, they often require around-the-clock service. 3Com, a leading provider of voice and data networking products, services and solutions for enterprises, is no exception. The company has a globally diverse staff with locations worldwide and many of its business processes, such as placing orders, have been moved to web-based applications in recent years to accommodate the 24×7 nature of 3Com’s business.
But that didn’t necessarily mean that everything worked smoothly. In fact, 3Com was finding that one of its critical processes, obtaining a special price quote (SPQ), was taking upwards of four days to complete using its existing
custom-build Lotus Notes application. For a sales staff trying to close deals,
and to customer that wanted to do deals in real-time, this time frame was
clearly unacceptable. Since all special price quotes require rigorous and timely
approval, 3Com needed to develop an integrated process for handling special
price quotes (SPQs) that would expedite the process and enable the company to meet its customers’ needs in a timely manner. As a result, 3Com turned to a
business process management (BPM) solution that would provide the workflow and application integration necessary to automate parts of the SPQ process, and offer real-time access to back-office inventory systems.
The company chose Savvion’s BusinessManager to handle the end-to-end process, and after six months was able to get the new SPQ process up and running. The resulting system connected a Siebel sales force automation application through to a back-end SAP system, providing the company with an end-to-end process that saved time and reduced human errors. As a result of the BPM project at 3Com, the standard time for processing a SPQ request was significantly reduced from up to four days to as fast as several hours. This dramatically reduced lag time and made 3Com more competitive in the market. In addition, the end-to-end nature of the process, which integrated several back-office systems, reduced time previously spent manually entering information. 3Com uses the tool today to process all special price orders-in fact, orders are often put through the same day the request is received.
The Upside Uptake
Much of the talk about BPM of late has led to a typical hype surrounding this
emerging technology. Many companies think they are doing BPM, but are often only doing a part of BPM, such as application integration or multi-step workflow.
3Com, however, has done it all with its SPQ project. The company is one of the
early adopters of true BPM technology that blends business-level processes with workflow, end-to-end processing, and application integrations. In 2002, 3Com broke ground in the emerging BPM space with its end-to-end SPQ process powered by Savvion. Working with a global business environment was challenging and rewarding for 3Com, and the company’s experiences, best practices, and lessons learned can be used by other companies that are considering BPM projects.
The tangible business benefits of significantly reducing the time to process a
SPQ will impact the bottom line at 3Com as more orders are completed and
approved. Upside Research sees 3Com’s experience with Savvion and its SPQ system as an exemplary best practice for understanding how best to execute a business process by adding automation, workflow, and application integration. When the IT department receives feedback around the world, in foreign languages, that the application is a success, it knows that it has done something right.

Almost by definition, Business Process Management (BPM) products will be used by business users. Of course, BPM products require sophisticated backend connectivity capabilities (you actually have to coordinate systems, transactions, and data exchanges, after all), but as the BPM market matures, more and more emphasis is being placed on the ability of BPM products to more easily enable business power users to participate in and guide the development of process-driven integration solutions. For example, Sybase’s recently launched Integration Orchestrator is an integration product based on the Eclipse framework that provides multiple development “perspectives” that enable both process-focused business users and technology-focused integration developers to collaborate on an integration application.
With the release of Intalio|n3 2.5, BPM provider Intalio is upping the ante for business user involvement in both the user interface and the business rules area. While some BPM products support only rudimentary development of visual interfaces or require developers to use external HTML editors to do sophisticated page layout and design, Intalio|n3 2.5 includes a new WYSIWYG Page Designer that lets business users define page layouts and build forms without low-level coding. Running in a standard Web browser, the Page Designer provides a wide array of user interface (UI) components, including data tables, navigation elements, and buttons that can be used to assemble a UI. Developers (or business users) can then use Intalio’s Designer and Director tools to bind the UI to processes and backend systems and then deploy it to the appropriate process servers.
But BPM is not just about interfaces. It’s also about the rules that drive the decisions within a business process. Upside Research believes that being able to easily modify those decision criteria or business rules, and being able to distribute (or assign) the management of such rules to the appropriate people, is a critical part of a successful BPM solution. To this end, as part of the 2.5 release, Intalio has also announced a new partnership with business rules engine vendor Corticon. With the Corticon business rules engine and Intalio n|3 2.5, complex business rules can be externally stored in a rulesbase for easy and fast modification. Now, instead of having to code all decisions and business logic either within an Intalio process, or as part of individual, external programs/components invoked by an Intalio process, organizations can centralize the rules for complex process control flow into a rules repository.
In addition to these business user-focused enhancements, Intalio has also announced a partnership with Web Services vendor Systinet and its Web Application and Services Platform (WASP) product. Intalio customers can now use WASP to provide Web Services interfaces for all Intalio components.
The Upside Uptake
Upside Research believes that Intalio is on the right track with its Intalio|n3 2.5 release. As BPM products extend further into the business realm from their integration-focused origins, business-focused functionality is increasingly important. While organizations can certainly use 3rd-party interface design tools when creating a process-driven integration solution (and many BPM solutions require this), Intalio’s visually rich Page Designer provides a compelling and more seamless alternative. And while this functionality won’t matter much for back-office system-to-system integration processes, Upside Research believes that the broadest application of BPM will be in solutions that require some human interaction, and thus require a robust business-capable interface.
As important as the process component (the P) in BPM is, the management component (the M) is equally important. Management requires decisions. And decisions require business rules. Upside Research believes that robust, dynamic, enterprise-scale BPM solutions will require sophisticated business rules functionality, including the ability to easily store, search, modify, and distribute the business rules associated with a business process. Intalio’s new partnership with Corticon highlights our belief about the evolution of BPM solutions and provides them with a competitive offering in this area. Upside Research suggests that any organization considering a BPM solution as a strategic investment or as a component of their infrastructure should make sure to evaluate potential BPM solutions on their business rules capabilities.

Adhering to new regulations or emerging industry standards, even though necessary, can be downright painful for some organizations. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is one of the new compliance regulations that many companies are just starting to apply to their high-risk financial processes. For example, in the area of revenue recognition, many retailers are challenged by the reporting requirements for vendor allowances, and as a result have had to restate revenues, a costly and potentially damaging procedure. Sarbanes-Oxley is designed to clarify corporate governance and financial disclosure issues as well as evaluations of internal controls and procedures for financial reporting. These issues can have a direct impact on an organization’s business processes, and as a result, a number of BPM vendors are moving to add components and applications on top of their BPM systems to enable process automation for the emerging industry standards compliance.
One of the early movers in this market is Fuego. Fuego saw the power of applying BPM to financial controls and has developed a package that provides companies with the tools to achieve additional control and auditing capabilities over their financial processes. Working with several of its retail customers and consultant Deloitte & Touche, Fuego determined that by automating certain financial controls, companies are better able to enforce certain standards and regulations, which eases documentation and reporting compliance to section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Fuego’s Supervisory Control Application™ (SCA) for Vendor Allowances assists companies in proactively automating, managing, and controlling vendor allowances or other accounting processes for retailers. Using templates built on top of Fuego’s BPMS, SCA for Vendor Allowances provides 80% of the work out-of-box for companies to create processes that establish controls over accounting for vendor allowances, including reporting and auditing the entire control process. Once a process is automated, when changes are made to that process, version control enables organizations to capture at any moment what process is being used and provides an audit trail throughout. The SCA integrates with any software an organization uses including ERP, merchandising, deal systems and financial applications, and similar applications. Beyond compliance to section 404 of the Act, Fuego’s application also enables compliance to section 409, an equal-if not more important than section 404- provision that deals with real-time issuer disclosures. Section 409 can be used to make companies prove what they’ve said about their accounting and reporting processes are actually what is being practiced and what is actually implemented. Fuego is working on other similar compliance and reporting applications as well.
Fuego’s SCA for Vendor Allowance is being piloted at several customer sites and generally is expected to take 30-45 days to implement, utilizing a cross-functional team that involves accounting, IT, auditing partners, Fuego consulting, and partners such as Deloitte & Touche. Fuego offers the application as a limited-scope license of its BPMS platform. Pricing starts at $100,000 for software and services. SCA for Vendor Allowance works with a company’s other back-office applications, and is complementary to ERP and business intelligence solutions.
The Upside Uptake
Upside Research believes the ramifications of Sarbanes-Oxley are important to the BPM industry and potential BPM purchasers because it helps crystallize the value of process management and process automation in relation to the definition of auditable, actionable business process information. While Fuego is not the only BPM vendor leveraging the Sarbanes-Oxley opportunity, Upside Research believes their Sarbanes-Oxley solution is important because, unlike many other BPM solutions, it extends beyond simply documenting accounting processes and practices. It provides proactive enforcement and execution of an organization’s defined accounting controls, and audits them every step of the way. The bigger, long-term issue for many companies will be in ensuring that what you define as your process is actually in practice and proving it when or if you get audited. With a Fuego BPM solution, organizations can help address the requirements of section 409 by being able to provide a complete audit trail of process instances and verifying that the process was not only defined but also followed. Fuego’s solution provides important reactive and proactive process management and auditing capabilities that anyone looking for Sarbanes-Oxley solutions should evaluate

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.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a multi-faceted technology that impacts a variety of roles within an organization. Developers, IT Architects, Analysts, Business Users, and Process Managers all are involved and impacted by the automation of a business process. The challenge for BPM vendors is to find a way to meet each individual role’s needs within their BPM platform, which can be a tall order to fill.
Last week Metastorm announced a new version of its flagship BPM suite, e-Work 6.0. Scheduled to ship August 18th, e-Work 6.0 has a series of enhancements across the board that seek to make the lives of developers, business managers, and business users easier. Specifically, e-Work 6.0 includes the following enhancements:
– For Developers: Metastorm has created Form Segments and Map Segments, which enable developers to save a certain portion of a form or process map that is used repeatedly. The segments support universal updates, so only one instance needs to be updated. This greatly enhances productivity and consistency. In addition, Metastorm created e-Work Libraries, which enable developers to store a collection of Form Segments or process Map Segments they use repeatedly and assign that library to a specific process.
– For Business Managers: Metastorm has added out-of-box reporting capabilities that enable managers to track the business activities in a process. Metastorm has always collected all process and business data in a relational database, and with the new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) companies can now track business-level and process-level metrics without having to use external reporting packages.
– For Business Users: Metastorm has enhanced the features of its e-Work client, adding new usability features such as Most Recently Used forms lists and opening extra windows for certain functions to enable users to more easily complete tasks.
– For IT Managers: Metastorm is increasing the productivity of the e-Work v6 Engine, increasing the hourly transaction capacity by 50% and doubling the number of users handled per hour. In addition, it has created an Open Authentication model, which enables companies to configure how they want to handle authentication, facilitating single sign-on and the ability to sign in through complementary applications.
Version 6 of e-Work aims to make all users’ lives a little bit easier and a lot more productive. Initial customer feedback has been positive, and many of the enhancements are a result of customer requests. The BAM reporting and e-Work Library functionality will be an important factor for some companies, as well as advancing the range of ways that BPM vendors are delivering business reporting and monitoring.