From my experience working with our customers, the companies who have embraced BPM practices as essential to their management approach have had far greater success than those who have leveraged BPM to solve a few problem processes.

How AmerisourceBergen Transformed Their Business with BPM

For example, at last month’s User Summit, our customer AmerisourceBergen showed us just how far their “BPM way of thinking” has transformed their business. Their first BPM initiative was to implement an automated, collaborative Contract & Chargeback process which was not supported by their SAP application. The Contract & Chargeback process is used to manage the established pricing and terms for each of AmerisourceBergen’s manufactures and then controls compliance with pricing terms and payment of rebates from the manufacturer if the company is forced to sell at a lower price to compete- a multi-billion dollar exercise for the company. The project was a huge success and delivered a high return on investment through lower headcount, fewer and faster dispute resolution, and more accurate pricing information.  AmerisourceBergen identified many additional processes for BPM and expanded its use of Metastorm BPM to support an enterprise-wide business transformation initiative. More specifically, the company created six new processes in Metastorm BPM that extend and augment SAP’s capabilities around managing and automating high volume, highly-specialized supplier credit processes. Today AmerisourceBergen has over 3,000 users and almost 300 processes automated in Metastorm BPM. They have also established a Process Center of Excellence (COE) consisting of key business and IT people to access new processes for automation, build business cases for BPM and oversee BPM projects. 

Rather than taking the one project at a time approach, AmerisourceBergen and other cutting edge BPM adopters have seen a significant pay-off from adopting an enterprise-wide, business transformation approach to BPM. By building a Process Center of Excellence, your organization can bring together both IT and business people and resources to start thinking about how to deploy BPM across your entire organization. 

If you’re interested in learning how to extend your BPM implementation beyond a few projects, or have any thoughts on this subject, feel free to leave a comment below!

Related posts:

1. AmerisourceBergen Recognized for Business Process Improvement Initiatives Metastorm customers are continuing to receive tons of recognition for...
2. Pharmaceutical company recognized for process excellence Today we are proud to announce that, AmerisourceBergen – one...
3. Extending Our Leadership We’ve got some great news! Last week, IDC MarketScape announced...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

While many corporations have enabled millions of their customers to access a portion of their business operations through mobile apps, millions of their employees don’t have mobile access to the processes that support and drive those customer interactions.

At our recent User Summit, the talk of the show was Steve Russell’s mobile and social BPM demo.  If you want to see it for yourself, click here. (Better yet, if you’d like to see the mobile capabilities in person, invite a Sales Engineer in for a visit, we’d be happy to show it off.)

After that demo, I had the opportunity to hear firsthand how several customers intended to deploy mobile processes and the unique benefits those capabilities would bring to their environment. Here are five ways those customers thought mobile access to their BPM processes would drive value:

1. Real-time reporting of inventory – A customer in distribution intends to add mobile process access to their inventory reporting in order to gain instant visibility, ensure PCI compliance, and deliver superior customer service.
2. Access to information when a laptop or workstation is unavailable – A customer from the manufacturing industry has workers who frequently must perform essential maintenance tasks on large machinery far from any work station. Currently, the workers complete their work from memory and then go back to the work station to record their actions, risking error and noncompliance—mobile access to the maintenance process will eliminate costly fines.
3. Expedite new matter intake – Law firms are constantly challenged with keeping new matter intake processes moving forward with lawyers frequently out of the office. With mobile access to their new matter intake process, law firms can gain a competitive advantage by eliminating the bottlenecks and getting new clients onboard faster.
4. Accurate incident management – By equipping employees with access to the incident management processes via mobile devices, an engineering firm expects to increase their reporting accuracy and speed response times.
5. Consistent user experience – Several customers said that they already had developed a mobile application for other areas of their business and were eager to hook the HTML 5-based mobile capabilities into those existing mobile interfaces to deliver a seamless experience for their users. The result? Happy employees and happy customers.

So, how will you benefit from mobile BPM? The possibilities are endless.

Related posts:

1. Mobile BPM: Connecting People to Process Wherever They Are In an increasingly more mobile society, work is not completed...
2. The Buzz from our User Summit: Live Demo of Social & Mobile BPM At our annual User Summit (Nov 7 – 9) in...
3. Well on our way to 2019 I just viewed a new video from Microsoft about their...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• interacting with dynamic process forms on an iPhone
• managing case complex work from an iPad, and
• monitoring internal social networks to provide real-time guidance for in-flight business processes.

The presentation not only provided cool insight into the future of our business process technologies, but got attendees thinking about more scenarios where process and case management could be applied.   Attendees were interested in extending BPM to a new set of mobile and field workers and customers (e.g., “How do we integrate our existing customer-facing mobile apps with mobile BPM apps”). They were curious to learn more about how teams could use social network feeds to guide process outcomes or improve customer service (e.g., “how can our insurance agents provide better service on the ground following a natural disaster”).  I received several questions about how knowledge workers accessing existing process apps on PCs on or off-premise, might instead move to tablet based solutions (e.g., “all of our attorneys have iPads – I want to learn more about moving our existing process app to the tablet”). Our latest product introductions and a few near-term roadmap deliverables provided new answers and insight to answering these and other questions.

If you would like to learn more about our social BPM offerings visit our Mobile BPM solution page download one of our recent Social BPM webinars or ask your contact us and we can bring a similar demonstration to your site.

Is Social BPM a Fad?  Matt Ridely Would Argue “No”
I just watched a TED video of British author Matt Ridley, “When Ideas have Sex.”While it is not a video about Social BPM, it does discuss the value of how communities socialize ideas to innovate. This video really helped cement in my mind the benefits we are achieving through our Social BPM capabilities. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED talk, “what is relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating… because of the connections people are making and the ability of ideas to mate as never before… we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.” I have heard some people refer to Social BPM as a fad, but based on the knowledge shared by Mr. Ridley, one can better understand how companies are and will be using Social BPM capabilities to drive further innovation and differentiation.

To see Mr. Ridley’s complete TED talk, go here.

How Social Technologies are Improving Case Management
As I explained in a recent presentation (Gartner ITxpo: An Introduction to Adaptive Case Management), the idea of using technology to share information is not new. Email exchanges have gone on for decades. Services like LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter are uses by hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. The power of social BPM is in accelerating the efficiency and exchange of ideas. In the context of adaptive case management (ACM), the Social BPM capabilities we provide  simply enables users to get more work done in a single context-rich environment, rather than shifting between multiple tools and communication devices to get their work done. When applied into the ACM environment the exchange of ideas –“in the context of my work” – through these social technologies advances innovation and competitive differentiation for organizations. 

If you have a couple of minutes, be sure to check out the entertaining presentation on Case Management found through the link above. Questions or comments? Feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets.

Related posts:

1. From Social Stigma to Social Synergy It is remarkable how quickly social technologies have become the...
2. Mobile BPM: Connecting People to Process Wherever They Are In an increasingly more mobile society, work is not completed...
3. 7 Reasons You Want to Attend the OpenText BPM User Summit! For the past nine years Metastorm has hosted its Global...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I had my process and case management hat on when I watched the video. I noticed how people we actively collaborating on projects including some process oriented work. I noticed how they were working from a single “workspace” that surfaced itself on many different devices and/or objects. They were working, collaborating, and communicating from their workspace.  Notice in the office scene, there is not a single phone on the desk – just a light, desk, chair and “workspace.” 

As we look toward the future, I see case and process management solutions fitting easily into this kind of environment. Our persona-based and smart business workspaces are already unifying work and communication environments for knowledge workers today. Our mobile business process management (BPM) solutions are already enabling them to get work done from anywhere.  As I watched the video and related it to my knowledge of our BPM solutions, I thought “we are well on our way.”

Curious to learn more about BPM without boundaries?  Check out our new mobile solutions, here. If you would like to continue this converstaion, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets

Related posts:

1. The New iWorker Meets Adaptive Case Management IT organizations are faced with a growing set of user...
2. Mobile BPM: Connecting People to Process Wherever They Are In an increasingly more mobile society, work is not completed...
3. Work Smarter – Introducing Metastorm Smart Business Workspace In our recent blog post about the Future of Social...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

According to the Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010 the of the major drivers for BPM adoption among financial services and insurance companies are

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to ensure consistent process execution across divisional or geographic barriers (54%)

In the same survey, the biggest drivers from BPM software adoption among public sector and healthcare organizations was the

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to support compliance efforts (59%)

Regardless of the industry, one fact remains clear – more and more companies are adopting BPM to not just improve day-to-day productivity of workers, but to fully understand and optimize their organizational practices.

For those of you who are new to BPM or are still deciding the right project for deployment, taking the lessons learned from previous organizations is a great place to start.

Choose your first project carefully
Gaining executive buy-in is one of the most challenging first-steps of your BPM adoption. It’s important to do your homework prior to developing your adoption strategy. Take a look at some of the considerations other organizations have developed for their BPM projects see what you can leverage as you begin your own journey toward BPM adoption. For companies with an appetite for change, you should consider selecting a high-visibility, mission-critical process. For others, selecting a troublesome but less mission-critical process is an excellent first project to demonstrate the success and ROI of BPM before the more mission-critical processes are tackled.

Think of BPM as a way to drive change
While it is important to ensure and promote the success of your initial BPM projects, organizations who have achieved the greatest results in their BPM deployments have thought of BPM as a way to drive business change throughout their organizations. If you think about and promote BPM as a way to improve a few key processes or automate a function that cuts out 15% of costs, you aren’t going to get the full value of your investment. From the day-one of your deployment think of BPM as a platform that can transform the way you do business, better respond to business opportunities and a mechanism to support continuous process improvement.

Establish clear metrics to define success
As I said earlier, executive sponsorship is critical. One of the best ways to illustrate the value of BPM is to set clear metrics that define the success of your implementation. By measuring each of your BPM projects, you can communicate and demonstrate the value of BPM to other departments who have yet to automate their specific business processes using BPM.

Develop a meaningful way to access projects value
With multiple projects running independently from each other, it is important to develop a way for users to understand and access the relative value of each of your company’s projects. When you step back from individual projects and get a holistic view of the full-scale of your organizations implementation, you will most likely find that what you thought were multiple BPM applications might actually be better solved by automating a single “big process” with variations for each group or department based on a few unique business rules. This view enables you to deliver more capability, to more users in an even shorter time period. It also drives operational excellence in more areas by leveraging best practices across a larger footprint in the company.

There are thousands of organizations who have transformed the way they do business by leveraging BPM. To learn more about how some organizations have solved complex business problems and achieve significant ROI, check out this success story page. If you have questions about how to start your first BPM initiative, feel free to leave a comment below!

Related posts:

1. Thoughts from Gartner BPM Summit Gartner Business Process Management Summit is in full swing and...
2. Who Drives an Enterprise Architecture Initiative?
   Part 3 Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects are often thought to be initiated...
3. Must See Guide to Forrester Business Process Forum 2011 The Forrester Business Process Forum in Boston, Mass. is just three...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

To take this even further, in a recent report Gartner predicted that “by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smart phones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.”[1]

So where does that take business improvement applications?

It’s clear that accessibility to information is critical. People have become accustomed to getting the information that they need as they need it. Business users are increasingly demanding the same access to the work that they participate in. Whether they spend most of their time in the field, in the office, or find themselves working both in and out of the office, they need to be able to continue the flow of work through the enterprise. However, many critical business applications today have been designed to require process participants being chained to their desks. With mobile usage so prevalent, it is only natural to extend the availability of the business applications you have grown to depend on daily to your smart phone. More importantly, with integrated support for mobile access, businesses can now rethink the very ways that they interact with customers, partners and employees.

OpenText Metastorm is pleased to announce the release of OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM – allowing you to engage customers, partners and employees in completely new ways! The product release extends the Metastorm BPM solution by empowering you to fully participate or initiate business processes from the Metastorm BPM suite via smart phones or iPad.

OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM gives you:

• The ability to deliver process improvements beyond the back-office and into more strategic client-facing and field scenarios.
• An improved customer experience made possible by consistent processes regardless of the way a customer wants to communicate with you.
• The option to define rules outlining how to perform a process via mobile device versus a personal computer to improve the mobile user’s experience.
• Instant mobile access for user’s on-the-move, helping to continue the flow of work regardless of location – eliminating unwanted bottlenecks.
• Out-of-the-box, multi-platform support for Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone users with no additional development effort for each platform.

The OpenText BPM Mobile capability is available to all OpenText customers on active maintenance for Metastorm BPM. More information about this release, including the solution sheet is available on our OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM solution page. If you have questions feel free to contact us directly or leave a comment below.   

________________

[1] Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance, by Brian Gammage, Daryl C. Plummer, Ed Thompson, Leslie Fiering, Hung LeHong, Frances Karamozis, Claudio Da Rold, Kimberly Collins, William Clark, Nick Jones, Charles Smulders, Mike Escherich, Martin Reynolds, Monica Basso, December 2009

Related posts:

1. Connecting Strategy with Execution Like clockwork, every January we look back on the past...
2. Extending Our Leadership We’ve got some great news! Last week, IDC MarketScape announced...
3. It’s the People, Stupid! I have been working with clients on complex projects for...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Time is money and customer service is critical, so we’ve pulled together three quick tips to help you on-board your customers more efficiently and effectively. Now you can save money, improve overall customer and employee satisfaction, and gain a strategic advantage over your competitors.

#1 – Select a flexible business process management suite
Out of the box solutions for your new client on-boarding process aren’t going to give you the competitive edge that you need. Business process management allows you to build a customizable new client on-boarding process that is agile enough to allow you to evolve and change the process over time. For example, OpenText BPM integrates into your existing systems, giving you the ability to

• mask the complexity of underlying legacy systems
• create an aggregated view of client information across multiple systems and departments
• streamline and manage the best process for your success
• monitor inbound workflow with ease, providing you complete visibility into the status of a new customer’s progress
• improve customer service

#2- Get the right people together and collaborate
Process improvement will only be as good as the people, knowledge and skills that are brought to the table to implement the transformation. You need to capture the current on-boarding process and understand the people, process, systems and technologies that it involves. The best approach is to identify key stakeholders and understand the bottlenecks and why they occur before you start to remodel your process. From there you can analyze and determine the best approach for improving and automating your new process.

#3 – Monitor and report on your process
You will never know how much you have improved without setting a way to monitor and report on your process. Having visibility into your process is critical to your ability to control and manage your progress. You no longer have to worry about reporting on several regulatory mandates, including Know Your Customer (KYC), because BPM allows you to capture both your human-centric and system-centric processes. With these tools you not only have a holistic picture of how your organization’s on-boarding process is executed, but see down to the granular level details about a specific process, system or technology involved. A BPM suite with dashboard capabilities takes monitoring and reporting to a whole new level, giving you complete 24-7 visibility into every aspect of you process.

New client on-boarding doesn’t need to be headache
Long, unnecessary processes will hinder your organizations ability to on-board customers quickly – resulting in lost business to competitors. Investing in a robust, flexible BPM suite allows will help you automate and streamline key processes and dramatically improve your organization, resulting in increased ROI, higher productivity, better turnaround and more profitability.  

Do you have tips for improving new client on-boarding? Post a comment and share them.

Related posts:

1. BPM for new client matter intake Reviewing and processing new clients or new business from existing...
2. Three Big Topics in Financial Services In the wake of this historic, global economic downturn there...
3. BPM and CRM: utility company uses Metastorm software to improve customer service A major utilities company in Arizona faced a challenge to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Time to Change Our Process Approach
Craig led with a challenge that our traditional approaches to process improvement are failing. It’s time to change our process approach. Prior approaches have become irrelevant because of the ascendance of “untamed” business processes. Those processes that form in the seams and shadows of organizations between packaged applications. Firms struggle to effectively deal with these and provide the necessary and expected customer experience. For example: 

• Customer on-boarding – takes the customer down the tunnel that reflects the internal systems and we need to flip the focus to the customer view
• Insurance claims processes – departmental silos are slowing claims resolution, raising liability risks, and giving customers bad experiences that can drive them to competitive alternatives (for my take on this area, check out How ACM Helped Fix My Car)
• Invoice processing – packaged applications and ERP systems don’t deal well with resolving exceptions with the customer in mind, and coordinating invoices with purchase orders, deal sheets and other critical supporting documents is a problem

The issue for IT and business leaders alike is to turn around the previous lost decade (1998 to 2009) consumed by rigid and often brittle packaged apps in silos, where 75 percent of IT budgets went to maintenance.

Analyst Advice: Invest in Dynamic Case Management Solutions
Craig’s advice on how best to deal with these untamed process issues is investment in dynamic case management solutions. Case Management will help to close the gap between processes that control and processes that engage, and will move us from our current environment to a more dynamic customer centric environment:

In effect, this is a movement toward a solution and support transformation where IT vanishes into the business. And, the resulting solution environment needs to simplify the complexity that businesses are facing.

Operational Excellence Expert Says Some of Most Difficult Problems Arise in the Complex Handoffs Between Systems, Activities, and People
With his focus on how businesses can gain high-velocity operational excellence, Steven J. Spear dove-tailed perfectly with Craig’s observations and advice for process improvement programs and approaches. Mr. Spear sees that some of our most difficult problems arise in the complex interrelationships and handoffs between systems, activities, and people – much like the untamed and less structured processes that Craig describes. Because of that it is hard to track what is connected to what and then hard to determine “the why” when it fails. To address this we must focus on ways to ensure that people have context and can see the complexity in which they are embedded and for which they are responsible, and at the same time simplifying that complexity for them.   

New ways of working – including knowledge sharing – are driving results for high-velocity companies and Mr. Spear provides some great examples in his book. One example right from our own Global 360 (now OpenText) customer community is Citi who presented their case management application at the Forrester conference. While I don’t have a recording of their Forrester presentation session to share, you can learn more about the Citi case study at How Citigroup Delivers Exceptional Customer Service with Case Management. I think it is a great illustration of how case management can play a key role in driving operational results.

_______________________________________
About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360 (now OpenText). Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://www.DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Must See Guide to Forrester Business Process Forum 2011 The Forrester Business Process Forum in Boston, Mass. is just three...
2. Forrester Ranks Top Business Process Management Suites Yesterday Metastorm announced that it has been recognized as a...
3. The Dynamic Side of BPM One goal of business process management (BPM) is to automate...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The New World of Customer Engagement: Maximizing Long-Term Value
In this keynote address, Mike Gualteri, Principal Analyst for Forrester and Derek Miers, Principal Analyst for Forrester, will discuss what it takes to transform your customer service operations. You will learn how to build a program that not only engages your customers but delivers more value to your business. Attend this session to understand how you can be the catalyst to drive your entire organization to design the best customer experience possible.

Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
Do you know how you’re dealing with the rising impact of knowledge workers and globalization in your process improvement goals? Tim Burns, Director Enterprise Workflow Solutions, Securities and Fund Services for Citigroup Fund Services Canada and Steve Russell,CTO  for OpenText Global 360, will share the best practices for delivering exceptional customer-centric service with dynamic case management.

Servicing Customers in a Dynamic World
It’s no secret that customers expect around the clock support. However, a customer’s need varies from situation to situation. In this session hosted by Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst for Forrester and Connie Moore, Vice President, Research Director for Forrester, you will discover how dynamic case management can improve your customer experience. Hear first hand case studies that bring together business process management, social networking tools, analytics and mobility to redesign the experience individual customers have with your company.

Untamed Business Processes: The Barrier to 21^st-Century High-Velocity Companies
Business process improvement programs must adapt to the ever changing expectations of customers and employees. In this session, Craig Le Clair and Steven J. Spear, Author, Senior Lecturer and Senior Fellow for MIT, will discuss how over time, packaged, industry-specific systems prevented companies from achieving maximum success. The session will review how critical untamed processes will affect your organization and what you can do about them.

The Impact of Social Computing on Customer Experience Design
Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst for Forrester will explain the deep value that social networking tools have on improving customer engagement and driving better business decisions. Finally understand how you can use social platforms to reach your customers and connect back with back-end applications and mission-critical processes such as recruiting, customer service, advertising and supply chain. Learn how to empower customers and partners to build social applications that tap into your end-to-end processes and engage your internal network to drive the best possible business outcomes.

Change Management: Your Key for Sustaining Breakthrough Process Transformation
Change is inevitable and one of the most difficult problems when driving enterprise-wide transformations is getting the team onboard. In this session a panel of experts — including Tom Coleman, Chief Information and Process Officer for Sloan Valve Company, Margie Rodino, Vice President, Global Human Resources for Sloan Valve Company, Claire Schooley, Senior Analyst for Forrester, Ronald Sharpe, Change Management Lead for Cabela’s, and Wade Wallinger, GM Value Change Optimization for Chevron – will discuss best practices for managing ongoing organizational change. You will learn what approaches, methodologies and techniques you should use to help your employees through the transformation process. Discover where change management fits within your organization, who should drive the initiatives, and the key roles needed to on the change management team.

There’s so much to learn this week at Forrester’s Business Process Forum. Visit the Forrester conference website today to check out all of the other great sessions you should attend at the conference! 

Be sure to stop by Metastorm’s booth (Booth #19) and Global 360’s booth (Booth #21) to view a product demonstration or speak to a representative. Don’t forget to follow the event on Twitter with the hash tag #BPF11.

Related posts:

1. Forrester Ranks Top Business Process Management Suites Yesterday Metastorm announced that it has been recognized as a...
2. Must See Guide for Gartner BPM Summit As one of the largest BPM conferences in the world,...
3. Metastorm Teams with Forrester to Shed Light on EA & BPM Disconnect Are BPM and EA aligned in your organization?  On September...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

KMWorld recognizes OpenText Metastorm for demonstrating clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that service a full spectrum of constituencies, especially customers, while seamlessly integrating into enterprise-wide environments. This year there were over 800 products assessed by KMWorld’s judging panel, which included editorial colleagues, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users.

We believe this award continues to symbolize our deep commitment to developing industry-leading EA, BPA and BPM software and solutions that transform the way organizations do business. We are honored to again be listed as a Trend-Setting Product of 2011. Stay tuned – we have some great product announcements around the corner!

Want to learn more about the OpenText Metastorm business transformation platform? Check out our solution page, full of white papers, case studies and solution sheets, or get a free trial of Metastorm ProVision or Metastorm M3!

Related posts:

1. Metastorm Enterprise recognized in KMWorld Magazine Today Metastorm announced that KMWorld Magazine has named the Metastorm...
2. Insights from OpenText: What Metastorm Brings to the Company OpenText announced Friday the completion of the Metastorm acquisition. We...
3. Knowledge Management (and beyond!) with Metastorm Metastorm was recently named to KMWorld Magazine‘s “100 Companies that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The fact is – many companies are taking advantage of the downturn to rationalize operations and asking employees to do more with less. However, as I read through the story, I couldn’t help but think… in this economy people are working harder and longer, but are they working smarter?

And we’re not done yet. With an uncertain economic forecast at the forefront of their minds, executives today have the tendency to look for ways to further reduce their spending by cutting people, travel, budgets, events and anything deemed as non-essential. However, from my experience, many of the organizations are cutting without a plan. Doing more with less requires a more disciplined approach to executing your business plan. Doing more with less requires a smarter approach to deliver results.

We are fortunate today that business systems are beginning to incorporate the technologies that help improve the way work is done in an organization. By discovering best practices and automating business processes accordingly, companies can do more with less without shifting the full burden to their knowledge workers. Today, there are solutions that can help you dramatically improve process efficiency and employee productivity across your organization.

Business process management (BPM) software gives your organization the power and knowledge to work better, smarter and faster.

Increase your efficiency
Instead of cutting resources and offloading more work onto your employees, you can use BPM to understand and automate key processes – resulting in greater efficiency, fewer resources and reduced overhead.

Foster collaboration with knowledge workers across your enterprise
Finding a BPM tool with meaningful social networking capabilities gives knowledge workers the resources to collaborate on projects and access the right information, content and resources, effortlessly. With features – such as user profiles that highlight availability, skill sets and roles – managers can allocate work to the appropriate person, with the right skills and work load. This helps reduce stress on the knowledge worker and ensure projects are completed in a timely, efficient manner.

Establish greater visibility
For most organizations, it isn’t until they have delivered an initial BPM project that they can truly see their organization’s capabilities and where they can continue to make improvements. Once your processes are deployed through BPM you have the ability to understand the interrelationships within your processes to identify the right redundancies, discover process gaps and uncover underutilized systems. Instead of cutting resources you can make smart decisions that positively impact performance, profitability and customer experience, while promoting employee satisfaction.

With the final word on this economic downturn still unknown, it isn’t likely that companies will begin immediately adding back the positions lost. But, companies can do more to support the business in achieving more with fewer staff and without shifting the entire burden on their employees. Working smarter requires action and initiative on the part of companies to find better practices and enable employees with tools that are more on par with the technology solutions they use in their personal life. You’re just a call away to find out how.

Related posts:

1. Work Smarter – Introducing Metastorm Smart Business Workspace In our recent blog post about the Future of Social...
2. Oil & Gas Companies Under Pressure Oil companies [are] essentially spending twice as much to undertake...
3. Responding to the Recession As unemployment rates continue to rise and the speculation surrounding...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Now, more than ever, consumers have become highly critical and skeptical of financial services firms. People want assurance and move visibility into the operations, fees and services offered to them. To gain back customer trust and loyalty – while driving greater profitability, growth and agility – you need to focus on how your organization will address three key areas.

Three BIG topics in financial services you need to pay attention to, right now:

The Compliance Challenge
In the world of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II code, MiFID, etc., you need a solid platform in place that supports current regulations – but more importantly, creates an environment in which adaptability is a fundamental component. New, stricter regulations are knocking on the door. To avoid a significant drain on resources, money, and time, it’s critical that you invest in a tool that enables you to achieve compliance on a long-term basis without having to significantly alter your operational systems. Business process management (BPM) can help financial services companies define, automate and standardize processes to be both auditable and consistent. By leveraging the existing underlying systems, and providing a more agile platform that is integrated with them but enables control and automation across systems and departments, you are able to implement changes in a fraction of the time you could with legacy systems. Most regulatory mandates require you to provide a wealth of information and audit trails. With BPM, you can track, monitor, and report on critical processes to not only comply with federal regulations, but better improve current processes to drive enterprise-wide efficiency and profitability.

Better Customer Experience
No new customer wants to spend weeks (and even months) getting their account started. The fact of the matter is, in many financial service companies customers go through a long, rigorous process to open their account – all of which is caused by ineffective, poorly structured new client on-boarding processes. One of our customers, Cornerstone Tax Advisors, had an extensive, paper-based on-boarding process, and as a result the time between the first client interaction and the conclusion of the contract ranged from 11-20 months! However, by using Metastorm BPM, the company was able to control and monitor in-bound workflow with ease, visualize its operational positions, and easily design, model, and change its new client on-boarding processes – radically improving the customer experience, and allowing the company to bring on new clients better and faster.

Smart Consolidation
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant amount of consolidation within the financial services industry. The reason for this is simple – companies want to expand their portfolio, gain more market share, increase their customer base and achieve higher profitability. Unfortunately, almost half of the companies that undergo a merger or acquisition do not achieve the original goals. This is largely due to not having clear objectives – that take into account the organizational structure – to meet the strategic goals of the acquisition. An enterprise architecture tool can help you understand the people, processes, systems and technologies within both companies. Taking it a step further, with an enterprise architecture tool you can analyze, model and simulate the optimal way for these processes to merge together – producing the best business structure possible for your organization.

As the world recovers from the economic crisis it is imperative that you have all the resources to make well-informed business decisions. You need to know what capabilities and assets you have and the best way to manage and utilize them to remain a viable competitor in this ever-changing marketplace. To find out more information about Metastorm’s financial services solutions, visit our financial services solution page.

Related posts:

1. Financial compliance at the process level In the new presidential administration, it is intended that new...
2. Financial services organization discusses SOA and data integration Despite the state of the economy, SOA projects are moving...
3. Takeaways from the Elite User Conference At the Elite User Conference — both on the exhibit hall...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Five reasons you should start using BPM for regulatory submissions

1.  Reduce cycle times and increase efficiency
There’s no need for the last-minute rush to get documents completed and submitted on time. In fact, you would be surprised by how many companies have very little understanding of how their documents are produced, reviewed and approved before they are submitted. BPM helps companies capture, analyze, understand and optimize critical submission process data, letting you get the job done faster and more efficiently, while ensuring you are meeting all submission deadlines.

2.  Complete process visibility
With BPM, you can know exactly where you are in your process at anytime. You can pinpoint the exact process you wanted automated, understand what it does and the interrelationships of the people, systems and technologies it involves, and optimize the process in a way that gives you the best advantage. Leveraging these capabilities users are able to initiate next steps, track deadlines and set up alerts to signal when specific users must take action based on clinical data becoming available. In addition, BPM processes can be easily updated and improved without requiring revalidation of other systems (e.g., Document Management, CTMS).  

3.  Better manage resources and roles
Social BPM capabilities allow you to define your users and what skills, training, certifications, and capabilities they have to ensure the right task is being assigned to the best person to complete it in the shortest amount of elapsed time. Work can be routed to the most appropriate employee, keeping in mind their current workload, to ensure projects don’t pile up and deadlines are met whether they are down the hall or across the globe.

4.  Establish universal metrics and standards
Real-time, personalized dashboards give you the ability to monitor and track the entire document creation, compilation and submission process. From planning, document writing, scientific review, QA and approval and issuing – you know who needs to complete and approve a task at any specific time. You can also generate customizable reports on different processes, establish performance metrics and see how you’ve improved your regulatory submission processes.

5.  Global accessibility
Web-based BPM suites give you the ability to access a wealth of information anywhere, eliminating geographical barriers. Work can be assigned to different users by adding a role attribute for users’ locations – ensuring people with enough hours in their work day and the right skill set can complete a task. Globalizing your customer operations not only helps you gain access to everything you need anywhere in the world, but also cuts down on operational costs. This feature gives companies the ability to truly leverage their global workforces to gain strategic advantage by effectively creating more working hours in a day.

A great BPM suite has the power to cut costs, increase productivity and transform the way your business operates. Stay tuned as we continue to discuss BPM’s influence within the pharmaceutical industry and how the combination of BPM and enterprise content management (ECM) can improve the way you get submissions done.

Related posts:

1. ME2009: BPM for clinical submission activities The Metastorm Global User Conference features session tracks in a...
2. Life Sciences corporations and BPM With healthcare efficiency in the spotlight, one pharmaceutical company that’s...
3. BPM & BOTOX: How Allergan Battled Compliance Burdens Last September, as you probably remember, Allergan reached a $600M...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Personal Productivity Redefined!
Metastorm Smart Business Workspace serves as the interface for the Metastorm Business Transformation Platform and gives you a completely personalized user experience with the ability to quickly connect with other users across your enterprise. You can find and immediately connect with others based on a user’s skill set, education or certification, and responsibilities. Metastorm Smart Business Workspace lets you find the right people for the right projects, helping you resolve issues or handle exceptions with better outcomes and in less time.

Not just Social BPM, its Smarter BPM.
Easily understand, align and support your organizational goals using the new and improved features in Metastorm BPM Version 9.1. Some of these key features include more dynamic applications for improved usability, higher productivity and full-scale global deployment that allow you to design process improvements in a more strategic way. Dynamically route work based on user skill set, experience and work load to ensure the most efficient and effective work allocation strategy. Instant chat and playback capabilities help you quickly (and easily) collaborate on projects and understand the evolution of an idea or resolution of an issue. By involving all the right people in an environment designed for both business users and IT, you can access and leverage untapped knowledge to truly understand where you are and where you want to go. 

Immediate insight into your business operations!
The new Metastorm Business Performance Intelligence (BPI) dashboards facilitate meaningful data analysis and informed decision-making by offering you an easy-to-use, web-based interface that helps you quickly build reports and analyze data from other systems and technologies. Any business user has the ability to create their unique dashboard on the fly, without any knowledge of coding. The Metastorm BPI dashboards can be deployed in a variety of environments, including Metastorm Smart Business Workspace, and can be directly integrated into Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office. You can customize your alerts and exception management with the click of a button, giving you the ability to make immediate decisions based on real-time performance information or historical trends in your business. 

With these new features organizations can truly bring together the people, knowledge, content and systems to establish complete visibility, eliminate bottlenecks, and facilitate information-based decisions, faster. For more information about these product releases, I encourage you to check out the Metastorm BPM, Metastorm Smart Business Workspace and Metastorm Business Performance Intelligence solution sheets or reach out to a representative.

Related posts:

1. Work Smarter – Introducing Metastorm Smart Business Workspace In our recent blog post about the Future of Social...
2. Extending Our Leadership We’ve got some great news! Last week, IDC MarketScape announced...
3. From Social Stigma to Social Synergy It is remarkable how quickly social technologies have become the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In the past year or so the social term and its capabilities has been attached to BPM. Industry analysts, practitioners, vendors and experts have all contributed to the discussion of what Social BPM is and what it means. Elise Golding, Carol Rozwell and Jim Sinur wrote a very nice research brief¹ on Social BPM and defined two implementations of Social BPM—Social BPM design and Social BPM iteration. I would argue that a third implementation of Social BPM involves social process participation, absent any explicit effort to design or iterate the process.  

The first and second implementations of Social BPM involve pursuing process design and ongoing improvement. Social technologies provide a more collaborative and lighter weight way to engage a broad range of people in discovering, documenting, and designing improved processes.    

For example, a major problem in organizations is that many processes are neither well documented nor understood. In a typical process improvement effort a business analyst must bring together a team who they believe knows about the process. Only after dozens of meetings and several documents passed back and forth through multiple cycles, can the team then validate what the process is and start to figure out why. Now, after spending much time, effort and money, the team can finally begin to design improvements in the new process. 

By closely tying social capabilities to process design with Social BPM, businesses are able to engage process owners, process participants and other stakeholders across the organization in real-time during the requirements and process definition stages of your project. Errors can be immediately identified and input from a broad range of users incorporated. Social BPM enables you to quickly and efficiently access previously untapped knowledge for the most informed and accurate process improvement. A combination of socially oriented technologies can come together with process modeling to accomplish this, including context sensitive chat, screensharing and use of the Cloud. 

My discussion about Social BPM doesn’t end here. Stay tuned as I explore additional implementations of Social BPM, its future and how it can (and will) help transform business.

_________________________
¹Gartner, Inc., “Social BPM: Design by Doing” by Elise Olding, Carol Rozwell and Jim Sinur, May 4, 2010.

Related posts:

1. The Future of Social BPM Over the years organizational development processes have evolved to meet...
2. Metastorm Raises the Bar on Social BPM There continues to be a great deal of buzz around...
3. Extending Our Leadership We’ve got some great news! Last week, IDC MarketScape announced...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.