Business process management can not only help automate everyday
tasks, but any change to the infrastructure of the system can be
done without IT's involvement. Sally Whittle reports
Travel advisory company iJet is growing fast, and chief technology
office Greg Meyer is not going to let technology slow it down. The
firm specialises in providing intelligence to large organisations
and financial institutions on political, economic and geographic
hazards all over the world - from car bombings in Baghdad to yellow
fever outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Our entire business rests on getting critical information to
people in minutes," Meyer says. "The business can only survive if
our intelligence is reliable, objective and fast." To help achieve
these goals, iJet has deployed Fujitsu Software's Interstage
business process management (BPM) technology to help manage and
automate the process of getting intelligence from the company's
2,500 stringers (correspondents) to 400 customers, which include
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The process begins with an e-mail from a stringer on the ground.
This report is then edited by a team in London before being passed
to external agencies for approval. Agencies might include anyone
from doctors and lawyers to financiers or geology experts. Next,
the source of the intelligence is verified and advice is produced
for anyone affected by the report. "If we are advising people on
how to react to the symptoms of a new disease, or to avoid a
neighbourhood where a car bomb has just exploded, we had better be
sure we have got it right," Meyer says.
There more than 60 steps involved in the process and this
originally took up to four hours to complete - by which time
stories might already have appeared on news wires, dramatically
reducing the value of iJet's service. Using BPM to automatically
move alerts through the approval process has drastically reduced
this. Urgent notices can now be sent out within five minutes of the
initial report. "When people log on to their computers, they see a
list of work that is colour coded for priority," says Meyer. "They
do not need to know anything about the underlying software."
The need for fast and accurate processes applies to virtually any
business. In an ideal world, businesses would be able to automate
all their routine processes and change them at a moment's notice in
response to circumstances. In reality, many companies are stuck
with inefficient processes because changing the underlying computer
systems is too complex, says Chris Phillips, European marketing
director at BPM supplier Tibco. "In many cases, processes are
hardwired into your ERP system or your financial system and you
cannot get in there to make the changes you want without a lot of
effort."
BPM software seeks to address this by abstracting business
processes and describing them at a higher level. A BPM tool will
act like a sergeant major in your IT infrastructure, prompting
people and applications to perform certain actions in the right
order and at the right time. If you want to change a process,
simply instruct the BPM system to issue prompts in a different
order or manner.
The concept of BPM is not new. It has its roots in workflow
technology, but suppliers of integration software, document
management and enterprise applications are also converging on the
market, says Ian Charlesworth, senior research analyst at Butler
Group. "There are probably 200 suppliers claiming to offer BPM
technology and the market is becoming massively over-hyped," he
says.
Defining BPM can therefore be tricky. Workflow suppliers will
naturally focus on how BPM can automate processes, and integration
suppliers will concentrate on BPM's ability to communicate with
multiple underlying systems. What all BPM tools share is the
ability to model a business process, to execute and monitor
processes, and to provide a development environment with connectors
to link into enterprise applications.
The initial value of BPM is how it can improve processes through
automation, says Charlesworth. However, in the longer term, BPM's
most significant benefit is allowing companies to respond more
quickly to changing business needs without he need for involvement
from the IT department. "Speeding up change management could be an
enormous benefit for organisations, and that is where the real
return on investment will come from," Charlesworth says.
MSB Recruitment recouped its £100,000 investment in BPM technology
in less than one year by freeing up sales staff from administrative
tasks. It deployed Metastorm BPM software in 2002 to help automate
the process of taking orders from new clients. "Originally, the
process included printing out forms, getting the right people to
approve the placement and then making sure someone was billed or
paid the right amount - and it could take hours," says Robert
Marston, MSB's infrastructure manager. "That was the time we wanted
the salesman to be out selling."
Using BPM software, MSB was able to create a model of the order
approval process, streamline it and then automate it. Today, it
takes just three minutes to process an order and only 30 seconds of
the salesperson's time.
However, modelling a process to automate is not always
straightforward. MSB spent three months and £50,000 working with
consultants to define its core business processes and identify
those that could be improved through automation. The consultants
visited every department and asked staff to outline their
processes. Their responses were used to compile a single master
document of the entire process. "That did not really work," says
Marston. Staff often forgot vital steps in a process or could not
agree on standardised ways of working.
Eventually, MSB rolled out the BPM software one step at a time so
that it was easier to identify the next step in the process. This
approach worked well and MSB has now extended its use of BPM
software to cover 26 other processes in the business.
Another challenge for IT departments is knowing which of the many
BPM suppliers best meet the needs of their business. Start-ups such
as Fuego focus strongly on BPM, but integration suppliers such as
Tibco and Webmethods are beginning to market their offerings. Even
enterprise application suppliers such as SAP and Siebel are
introducing workflow and BPM into their products.
The best advice is to carefully consider a potential supplier's
history, says David McCoy, research director at analyst firm
Gartner. It may be that the process you are looking to manage is
largely manual, in which case a workflow supplier may have the best
technology. However, if your process involves linking together data
from multiple platforms, you may be better off choosing a product
from an integration specialist.
Often, your choice of supplier will be affected by your existing IT
systems, says McCoy. "The problem is that some suppliers think it
is their god-given right to have process management in their
products, but they are not doing anything in a standardised way,"
he says. Gartner predicts that many companies will have eight or
more different process management tools within a couple of years.
When the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency rolled out BPM
technology to improve its handling of licence applications, the
existing IT infrastructure was an important factor in choosing a
supplier. The agency had recently replaced a 14-year-old IBM
imaging system with a document management application from Tower
Software, and it needed a BPM tool that could handle the data
within scanned images.
The agency was also keen to invest in technology that would comply
with XML and web services standards, says Anita Evans, project and
programme improvement manager at the DVLA. "We did not want to have
to replace anything two years down the line," she says.
Emerging standards for BPM technology, include Business Process
Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), an XML-based
language for modelling a business process which is backed by
Microsoft and IBM. Alternatives include Business Process Modelling
Language (BPML) and EBXML (Electronic Business Extensible Markup
Language).
The emergence of web services has dramatically increased the growth
of BPM technology as chief information officers attempt to control
costs and improve efficiency. However, the benefits of BPM can
sometimes be a little more unexpected. The BPM technology at the
DVLA has reduced the time taken to process a driver's licence
application from weeks to hours.
However, the agency did not quite achieve the anticipated reduction
in call volume at its customer service centre. "We anticipated that
the average time taken to handle calls would be shorter because we
would have information at our fingertips," says Evans. "But
actually, people are less frustrated with us on the phone and take
the opportunity to ask more questions, so call length goes up. But
I think that is a good thing."