Category: Upside updates

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.