The podcast, “The USAF, Six Sigma, and BPM,” discusses how the US Air Force utilized Metastorm ProVision® and Metastorm BPM® to achieve a 200% increase in automation to gain more efficiency, productivity, and control.

According to Chaney, the project began when the Department of Defense (DoD) mandated that, in order for DoD organizations to continue receiving funding, their IT investments had to include an Enterprise Architecture (EA) tool.

As part of its new EA initiative, the US Air Force wanted to identify how its IT infrastructure was supporting its business processes, and how well the processes were performing in the supported environments. To meet the goals of an existing initiative, Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century (AFSO21), which aims to streamline processes and optimize resource consumption – the US Air Force also wanted to “Lean out” its business processes to do more with less.

Listen to this podcast and read this customer success story to learn how the team used Metastorm ProVision to see and analyze its processes, and to identify time wasters and other areas of inefficiency, how it subsequently used Metastorm BPM to execute the Leaner, more agile processes across the entire enterprise, and how it utilized the power of the Metastorm Enterprise software suite to realize greater efficiency, and meet the goals of AFSO21.

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First of all, the revenue leakage problem is purely an operational issue – the drugs have already been discovered, approved, marketed and sold so most of the ‘hard part’ has been done. Unfortunately, in this space pricing is not simple. Almost all healthcare products are ultimately paid for by someone other than the end customer – the patient. This of course results in a complex web of regulations, government pricing, managed care formularies and tiers and wholesale distributors – just to name a few.

To that end, Metastorm has experience working with and developing process solutions for all of the players involved (including the United States government), and can help your organization too. Our technology has the ability to solve your organization’s revenue leakage problem, and more importantly, the fundamental issue plaguing the industry as a whole.

According to IDC, 4.4% of all pharma revenue, which equates to $11 billion annually, is lost to revenue leakage. This is a staggering figure considering that only the top 15 companies in the entire life sciences space generate that level of total revenue. Just think of what that number is relative to your company’s business!

To eliminate this unnecessary cost burden, pharma manufacturers need to automate the processes by which they communicate pricing information to their wholesaler trading partners. While many companies have an electronic data interchange (EDI) solution in place to address the issue, the IDC numbers tell a different story.

Most companies have found clever ways to use statistics to make it appear that the revenue leakage problem doesn’t exist in their organization. For example, many commercial contracting departments cite 98-99% success/accuracy rates for pricing. While those are impressive numbers, and should be commended, the flipside tells a different story – one of unnecessary profit loss in need of a solution.

Consider the same statistic another way: a 99% accuracy rate means that minimally 1% of total revenue is in dispute (i.e. chargebacks), or written off because of other operational and reconciliation issues. Any manager/director would love to lead a project that could reasonably promise to deliver 1% of existing revenue back to the bottom line. For any company with over $1 billion in total revenue, that’s a minimum return of $10,000,000 per year!

Sound too good to be true? It isn’t, and Metastorm has the experience and customer successes to prove it.

Our business process management (BPM) suite of software tools has been used by multiple companies in the space to deliver these types of results to their organizations. With Metastorm BPM you can automate these processes to submit and update pricing between a manufacturer and wholesalers, then provide both trading partners with a combined audit trail to ensure that pricing information is sent immediately, and that both parties have complete visibility (at a line item level) into every price and pricing/eligibility change.

These capabilities first ensure prices are updated prior to the contract effective date (eliminating chargebacks related to the timeliness of information), and second that when discrepancies do occur that both companies’ representatives have the same view of the same information for each transaction (minimizing the time required to resolve the issue). Both of these benefits seriously increase your bottom line by eliminating dollars going out the door unnecessarily while also providing the added benefit of reduced processing time, which frees up resources for more value-adding activities.

But don’t just take my word for it. I invite you to review our customer testimonials and other solution information to see for yourself how Metastorm has, and can solve the pharmaceutical revenue leakage problem and can improve the financial health of your organization.

Want to know more? Check out our life sciences solution page, and read this article about how Metastorm helped two major pharma’s collaborate on chargeback management. 

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Ethan Smith is the Director of Life Sciences Solutions at Metastorm where he oversees business and account development and solution creation for Metastorm’s global life sciences customers, partners and prospects.

Ethan has extensive experience in business process consulting in the life sciences industry. His areas of expertise include enterprise BPM strategies as well as the utilization of Metastorm BPM® and Metastorm ProVision® to establish Process Centers of Excellence. He has driven process initiatives across research and development, sales operations, incentive compensation, physician spend management and compliance functions. Prior to Metastorm, Ethan spent over 10 years in process consulting for the life sciences and insurance industries.

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This philosophy holds true in today’s business environment—if businesses do not adjust and evolve in response to past mistakes and poor market conditions, they will not be successful.

Good athletes also continually adjust their technique and their strategy to find ways to accelerate their game. Consider swimmer Michael Phelps and pole vaulter Sergey Bubka for example:

• After winning eight gold medals and breaking eight Olympic records in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Phelps changed his ‘perfect’ stroke technique hoping that it would increase his speed.

• Subsequent to clearing the decidedly impossible 20-foot barrier, six-time Olympic gold medalist Bubka commented that, “My jump was imperfect, my run-in was too short, and my hands were too far back at takeoff. When I manage to iron out these faults, I am sure I can improve.”

These champions saw, even in their seemingly flawless performance, areas for improvement, and evolved to keep themselves ahead of the competition.

Businesses can learn a lot from an athlete’s mindset—always reach for a greater achievement level, and never be satisfied. Performance athletes examine their technique and make changes to become more agile, fluid and conditioned, and to eliminate wasted energy. To survive and thrive, businesses need this very same mindset and approach- they must be in peak condition and run with optimal efficiency.

At some point all businesses and all athletes will face tough competitors and environments, and must be prepared to overcome these challenges. To ensure their continued success, Phelps and Bubka understood that they had to stay a step ahead of the game. Making the right technology investments is critical for businesses to gain and maintain this same competitive advantage to stay a step ahead of the game, and to succeed in today’s business environment.

Essential software tools, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) help your business run at peak performance—enabling you to continually see where you are and where you are wasting energy and resources, identify where you want to be, tweak and test potential changes, and execute your new agile, streamlined enterprise to give your business a competitive advantage no matter how rough the playing field may become.

Check out our website to learn how Metastorm Enterprise, our unique integrated product suite of BPM, BPA and EA can help your business gain a competitive advantage to beat out the competition.

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The Metastorm Enterprise Process Advantage Awards program is designed to recognize organizations that are successfully using Metastorm software to realize business objectives, achieve a measurable return on investment, and/or create strategic advantage.

Why Enter?

Winners receive a free pass to the 2011 Metastorm Global User Conference, and will be invited to participate in a thought leadership panel session to help other Metastorm customers learn valuable tips for achieving success.

Winners will also be recognized at the Metastorm Global User Conference and featured both on Metastorm’s website and in a press release that will be sent to technology and business publications.

As a recipient of a Metastorm Enterprise Process Advantage award your organization will gain recognition as a technology leader and a business improvement leader in its industry. You will also gain recognition for your innovative use of technology and your success within your own organization to help in further extending the value of EA, BPA, and BPM to other areas of the business.

So why wait? It’s easy to nominate your customer or your own organization today!

Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your success!

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Prior to working with Metastorm, one NBA team’s manual scouting system required multiple scouts to watch potential players while completing paper forms to rate their skill set. Next the forms were aggregated for each player, reviewed and ultimately used to create a list of players to be targeted during the NBA draft.

Not only inefficient, this system often led to inaccurate player data, inconsistency in rating between scouts, incomplete reports and a lack of structure when comparing players.

To solve these problems, the team’s general manager enlisted Metastorm to automate the scouting process with Metastorm BPM®—creating online player profiles and enforcing a consistent ratings scheme. Scouts are now able to better collaborate and share evaluation data in near real-time and management can pool different player ratings from multiple scouts and make evaluations based on a single, standardized score.

Metastorm’s unique process client for Microsoft Outlook improved the team’s ability to prepare for the draft – allowing scouts to run reports on top picks and automatically generate a “Player Brochure” on every player. These Player Brochures could be downloaded to a laptop or printed, so that all information on a player is organized and at hand on draft day.

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Metastorm CFO to Present at the MAVA Capital Connection ’09 Event

Chris Desautelle, CFO and executive vice president of Finance for Metastorm, will be presenting in the High Growth/Later Stage Company track at the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA) Capital Connection event, one of the nation’s premier venture and private equity conferences. The event is being held on May 26-27 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC.

For more information on the event, visit http://www.capitalconnection.org/.

Metastorm Hosts Webinar on Business Process Transformation in the Insurance Industry

Metastorm will be hosting an upcoming webinar with guest speaker TowerGroup that will focus on the top technologies that will play a significant role for insurers in 2009 and beyond – with an emphasis on enabling business process transformation and creating competitive advantage.

Organizations in the insurance industry – today more than ever – need effective process management in order to contain costs and create competitive advantage. This webinar will provide insight into what experiences insurance carriers have encountered in their progress toward successful adoption of leading technologies and provide best practices on the organizational change necessary to make their critical business initiatives a success.

Insurance Business Transformation – Top 5 Technologies for Success
Date: Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Time: 1:00pm EDT/ 10:00am PDT
Presenter: Karen Pauli, Research Director, TowerGroup
To register, visit http://www.metastorm.com/news/webinars.asp

Please let us know if you attend any of these events. We would love to hear your thoughts.

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The company was looking for a BPM solution that was stable, flexible and supported a wide range of interfaces. The company had previous experience with BPM software that ended with its server crashing several times while processing a large number of daily mission critical transactions

Since the company had already been effectively using Metastorm software, they decided to use Metastorm BPM to automate several of its processes including: sales order automation, product operations management, and invoice to payment. One process that was especially successful was the fuel supply management process.

This process monitors and transmits real-time information about fuel delivery to gas stations using a customized Metastorm BPM process application. Prior to Metastorm, all work related to fuel expedition from the warehouse and the fuel delivery to gas stations was done manually by a significant number of employees with considerable operational costs. Now using Metastorm, the process is managed through the integration of Metastorm BPM and Oracle. Gas stations can now be supplied without a person in attendance, fuel stock information is now registered automatically into its ERP system in real time, and fuel receipts can now be electronically signed by people in different geographic locations without having to send the original paper documents across the country.

As a result of this automation, the oil company has increased control over fuel delivery process and reduced manual work by more than 70%. Additionally, operational losses have been reduced by more than 5% per month to less than 2% per month, and it has decreased the number of human errors related to fuel reception recording and time spent on fuel reception procedures.

This is just one example of how the company leveraged Metastorm BPM, and it plans to expand its use of Metastorm BPM in other business units.

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