kitWhat is BPM?The term BPM has evolved over time: from software tools that automate, integrate, and optimize processes to suite technology that delivers integrated process, data, and social functionality to a management system that requires process-centric skills, activities, and tools. At its core, it remains the means for aligning IT and business, whether the ultimate objective is cutting costs, improving service, supporting growth, complying with regulations or achieving a combination of the above.

BPM Just Got BetterEnterprises can now harness the power of emerging cloud, mobile and social technologies to drive high-value process improvement.

Does BPM Create Value?In the short term, BPM helps companies improve profitability by decreasing costs and increasing revenues. In the long run, BPM helps drives competitive advantage by creating agile organizations that respond quickly to change.

Leveraging Emerging Technologies to Extend Business AgilityDiscover the distinct features and benefits of Cloud, Mobile and Social BPM capabilities.

Do you need BPM?Want greater visibility into your processes? Unable to identify what’s causing bottlenecks? Find it difficult to pinpoint the assignment hand-offs in your pro-cesses? If your organization has any of these issues, BPM suites provide the logical solution.

Getting Started with BPMYou understand there’s great value in bringing a process-centric approach to your business. You know there are probably numerous areas of your business where processes improvement would cut costs and yield new competitive advantages. So how do you get started?

Visit BPMbasics.com. Understand the basics. Explore the concept. Discover the benefits.

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1. What is BPM?In music, it’s how beats are measured; in business, it’s how organizations are transformed.

BPM. Traditionally defined in music as “beats per minute,” BPM in the business world refers to Business Process Management. Similar to keeping a musical “beat,” BPM as a technology and a manage-ment philosophy identifies and optimizes the “pulse” of an organization: the myriad processes conducted on a regular basis to create value and serve customers. BPM is steadily gaining a strong following among IT and business users as a means of creating an agile, transparent business that responds quickly to change.

Why the rising popularity? More and more companies are realizing that business process management en-ables them to reach new levels of performance faster. According to a 2011 report from industry analyst firm Gartner, the BPM software market “has been one of the high points of the overall software market for sev-eral years now, demonstrating double-digit growth.”1 Gartner has further stated that BPM is not a passing fad, based on its ability to “deliver tangible value, disrupt the status quo and transform [an] organization.”2

Ask organization executives to explain BPM, however, and the answers will vary across the board. That’s because over the past few years, the term has evolved: from software to suite to system. At its core, it remains the means for aligning IT and business, whether the ultimate objective is cutting costs, improving service, supporting growth, complying with regulations, or achieving a combination of the above.

A process is simply a set of

activities and transactions that

an organization conducts on a

regular basis in order to achieve its

objectives. It can be simple (i.e. order

fulfillment) or complex (i.e. new

product development), short-running

(i.e. employee on-boarding) or long-

running (i.e. regulatory compliance),

function-specific (i.e. proposal

management) or industry-specific

(i.e. energy procurement). It can

exist within a single department

(i.e. billing), run throughout the entire

enterprise (i.e. strategic sourcing), or

extend across the whole value chain

(i.e. supply chain management).

The SoftwareIn its simplest form, BPM is software that enables you to automate, execute and monitor business processes from beginning to end by connecting people, applications and data.

By doing this, BPM technology goes beyond its predecessors: workflow management and enterprise application integration (EAI). While traditional workflow management connected people by au-tomating inefficient manual processes within a single application, it was limited because it couldn’t connect applications without exten-sive custom coding. EAI technology, on the other hand, connected these applications by routing information between them so that data was automatically synchronized throughout the organization. However, because it couldn’t automate long-running or interactive processes (which required someone to take action or make deci-sions), it failed to connect people. Connecting people and applica-tions, BPM software brings together – and transcends – these two technologies.

1 Gartner: “Market Share Analysis: Business Process Management Suite Software, Worldwide2010 “, May, 2011 2 Gartner: “Hype Cycle for Business Process Management, 2010”, July, 2010

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BPM Software

Desig

n Execute Manage

O

ptimize

At a minimum, BPM software needs to address the four core elements of process-based application development:

Design – requirements: g Simple Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to create graphical Process Models g Incorporate a Rules Engine to create required business rules g Include an intuitive designer for Forms and application interfaces

Execute – requirements: g Enterprise-level scalability g Comprehensive Web Services orchestration g Ease of integration with other enterprise systems

Manage – requirements: g Task and Queue management g Real-time reporting and status alerts g In-Flight process modification capabilities

Optimize – requirements: g Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities g Round-trip analytics and process optimization g Key Performance Indicators and SLA reporting

This set of capabilities allows an organization to actively manage the entire life-cycle of a process, which delivers immediate pay-back in point-process improvement. However, the value of BPM is dramatically extended when it is used as the basis of a continuous process improvement effort across the organization. Moving beyond limited tactical value requires a comprehensive BPM suite that can support complex, collaborative processes extending throughout the enterprise as well as across the value chain.

The SuiteAs the value of process improvement in business has become better understood, the BPM suite has emerged to deliver a comprehensive and integrated set of capabilities that enable organizations to achieve their busi-ness goals more effectively and efficiently. A more cohesive approach to BPM than stand-alone technologies, an advanced BPM suite provides all of the process management capabilities needed to achieve the optimal state of seamless, cross-functional process alignment. This allows organizations to extend BPM success within specific groups and across the entire organization.

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There are ten critical components of a BPM suite:

g Process – Simple web-based modeling using BPMN and SOA methodologies for rapid development and automation of business processes

g Rules – Automate, enforce and audit policies and practices of a dynamic rule driven process application

g Portals – Rich and easy to use portal and dashboard creation tools enable users to quickly build simple interfaces that deliver personalized content to complete work faster

g Forms – Drag and Drop forms creator makes it easy for business users to create interactive forms for users

g Analytics – Track real-time process performance, create rich reporting dashboards, identify pro-cess bottlenecks, and optimize process efficiency flow

g Mobile – Stay connected to important processes and tasks from a variety of mobile devices g Content – Integrated document and content management platform provides robust functionality to

store, secure, version, search and manage your enterprise content g Collaboration – Encourage enterprise collaboration with process-integrated threaded discussions,

message boards and targeted content to every user g Data Access – Integrate a variety of corporate data sources quickly and easily g SOA and Integration – Use standard SOA development to build a repository of re-usable services

that accelerate your BPM deployment

In addition, strong portal and personalization capabilities will give users a productive, flexible workspace for managing tasks, content, forms, documents, notifications and reminders. Applications built with BPM suites offer:

g Reduced deployment times (with no need to integrate disparate products)

g Lower maintenance costs (with simple upgrades to all components of the system at once)

g Enhanced management (with a single application and common administration across the suite)

BPM applications must be:

g User-friendly (designed for business users to minimize user training while maximizing user acceptance)

g Personalized (delivering secure, unique content to each user) g Collaborative (utilizing modern and familiar social technologies) g Scalable (expanding to meet the needs of the department, the enterprise, or the value chain) g Web-based, and increasingly, natively mobile (making them accessible to users anytime, anyplace)

By leveraging information, they allow users to make better business decisions and achieve better business outcomes. These applications don’t just manage business processes; they solve business problems.

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The SystemAt its highest level, BPM is defined as a management practice that provides for governance of an organization’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance.

This more holistic view offers a structured approach for optimizing processes and takes into account the software tools discussed above as well as an organization’s methods, policies, metrics, and management practices. BPM at this level is about becoming a process-managed organization, which requires the following disciplines (in addi-tion to Information Technology):

g Expertise & Experience – focus on process-centric skills, training, education, certification, research, business acumen and intellectual capital

g Organizational Disciplines – adoption of new or improved culture, structure, roles, responsibilities, policies, rules, incentives and procedures (often codified in a BPM Center of Excellence approach)

g Management & Control Activities – improvement of processes by defining, modeling, simulating, deploying, executing, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing

g Partnerships & Services – reliance on partners to provide services such as consulting, implementation and business process outsourcing

Because this approach to BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite) – it enables companies to respond to changing customer, market and regulatory demands more quickly, thereby enabling bet-ter, more agile performance.

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Key BPM VocabularyBPMN: Business Process Modeling Notation was developed by the Business Process Management Institute to provide a modeling notation that is understood by all process modelers, users, analysts, etc.

Business Process Model: BPMN defines a Business Process Model as a network of graphical objects or activities, with flow controls that define their order of performance.

Cloud BPM: The deployment of BPM technology in the cloud to do process modeling and execution. Infrastructure options typically include Public Cloud or Private Cloud deployments.

Mobile BPM: The ability to access BPM applications through smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. This helps extend process capabilities to mobile workers and executives.

Social BPM: Effective use of social collaboration in the context of a business process. It can also be used to quickly improve or optimize an operational business process.

For a complete glossary of BPM terms, please visit BPMbasics.com.

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2. BPM Just Got Better.

The enterprise Information Technology (IT) landscape is at the dawn of a radical change in response to a new set of business realities. The nature of work (how and where it gets done), the expectations of a new generation of workers (accustomed to an “always-on/always connected” electronic lifestyle), and emerging business models that challenge traditional concepts of IT cost and time-to-value are driving the change. In response, mobile computing, cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery and social business collaboration technologies are rapidly gaining momentum in corporate IT.

Frank Gens, chief analyst at global IT research firm IDC and author of the December 2010 report “Predictions: Welcome to the New Mainstream,” states: “In 2011, we expect to see transformative technologies make the critical transition from early adopter status to early mainstream adop-tion. We’ll see the IT industry revolving around the build-out and adoption of this next dominant platform, characterized by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics.”

This prediction is based on incontrovertible demographic data. 269.6 million mobile devices shipped in 2010 – a 55 percent increase over 2009 (source: IDC, 2010). Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013 (source: Gartner 2009). While users are going mobile, Business IT is taking to the cloud, opting for subscription-based IT services over dedicated in-house resources. In fact, by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets at all (source: Gartner 2010). Social software, with its familiar interfaces and intuitive functions, has already supplanted email as the communication and col-laboration method of choice for the rising generation of corporate workers. According to a recent survey, 48% of respondents indicated they will use social software more than email in 2011 (source: IDC Survey – 2010).

We’ll see the IT industry revolving around the build-out and adoption of this next dominant platform, characterized by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics. –Frank Gens,

Chief Analyst, IDC

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Cloud, mobile and social technologies present unique opportunities for business. Each presents unique challenges as well. These technologies are still emerging in the mainstream, making now the right time to examine them to find out how they can deliver new competitive advantages. Both business and IT need to take a step back from individual projects and develop a sense for how these new paradigms will fit within their enterprise as a whole.

In the case of mobile, increasing the productivity and connectedness of employees on the go and in the field is attractive, but the cost can be prohibitive. Designing and deploying mobilized versions of enterprise applications costs $20,000 for a “no-frills” application and can range to $150,000 for something sophisticated (source: For-rester Research, 2010). This cost is in addition to the new skill sets which may need to be acquired. Mobile app design is very different from traditional enterprise application design, particularly in the area of interface and user experience. Many traditional enterprise IT shops do not have the appropriate sensibility for mobile app develop-ment – across all the various major mobile platforms – in-house.

Cloud computing promises lowered IT costs and faster time-to-value than traditional on-premise deployments, but the cloud model is still new territory and many questions – around issues of data security, change management and other areas – persist. As Gartner states, “cloud computing has a broad long-term impact in most industries; however, intense hype makes it difficult for buyers to understand their options. All forms of cloud computing change the way that businesses consume, manage and price IT, requiring new mind-sets and relationships be-tween IT and the business.” Despite these growing pains, cloud use will only grow. The same Gartner report goes on to say, “By 2015, 50% of Global 1000 enterprises will rely on external cloud computing services for at least one of their top 10 revenue-generating processes.” (source: Gartner 2011)

Social technologies are proven facilitators of communication, and can clearly galvanize social groups in coordinat-ed actions. In raw form, however, social platforms create too much “noise and chatter” that offers little or no busi-ness value. In regards to social technologies in the enterprise, Gartner has this advice: “Social business initiatives will affect almost every activity within the enterprise. The enterprise needs to take a more strategic approach, so IT leaders involved in social projects must take steps to move their organization in that direction. Most IT lead-ers involved in social initiatives do not realize how widely these projects have spread within the enterprise. They should take steps to move the enterprise toward a strategic approach that can take better advantage of business opportunities and address enterprise-wide challenges as business gets social.” (source: Gartner 2011)

The challenge, then, is to find a low-cost, reliable and secure way to harness the obvious value propositions of these three technologies within a business context. The answer comes by integrating these technologies directly into core business processes utilizing an advanced Business Process Management (BPM) software platform. A BPM suite can provide a single platform from which enterprises can tap the power of mobile, cloud and social technologies to drive high-value process improvement across the enterprise, through the supply chain, and out to customers.

3. Does BPM create value?By decreasing costs, increasing revenue, and improving agility, BPM suites provide a solid return on investment.

Organizations across all market sectors are utilizing BPM as a technology to orchestrate and integrate end users, applications and data for defined business processes. Companies are also using BPM as a manage-ment practice to support the continuous process improvement needed to drive market advantage, and reduce cost and friction across all facets of the business. And, harnessing the latest technology waves of mobility, cloud delivery and social collaboration extends the organizational reach and bottom-line value of a BPM suite even further.

Using a BPM suite, companies are able to quickly and efficiently build process applications that address current (and future) business challenges. As a result, companies are better equipped to adapt to business environment changes. The business drivers behind BPM adoption are numerous, but common and pervasive examples include:

g Capitalizing on new growth opportunities by making better and faster decisions in seeing and responding to market changes and evolving customer demands

g New compliance and risk management scrutiny driving standards and policies enforcement g Satisfying customers on-demand by answering questions and resolving issues more quickly g Pressure for operational efficiency and cost reduction with increased performance visibility

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FINANCE SALES & MARKETING hUMAN RESOURCES PRODUCTS & SERvICES IT

g Accounts Payable & Receivable

g Billing Dispute Resolution

g Payroll & Expense Approval Processes

g Regulatory & Compliance Management

g Campaign & Event Management

g Lead Generation & Tracking

g Proposal & Contract Management

g Advertising & Merchandising

g New Product Introduction

g On-boarding

g Resource Planning

g Benefits Administra-tion

g System Provisioning

g Timesheets and Expense Management

g Approvals

g Order and vendor Management

g Product Manage-ment and Shipping

g Customer Service

g Inventory Control and Supply Chain Management

g Change and Configuration Management

g Asset Management

g Service Desk and Incident Management

g Application and Security Manage-ment

Some examples of industry leaders’ BPM results and systems integrations include:

g US Army used BPM to improve operational efficiency, saving $500M annually g Nokia Siemens Networks realized $16M in annual productivity savings g UPS saved $28M from BPM for IT Shared Services g Amazon.com saves $10M annually using BPM for financial operations

BPM also addresses many of the critical IT issues underpinning these business drivers, including:

g Managing end-to-end, customer-facing processes g Consolidating data and increasing visibility into and access to associated data and information g Increasing the flexibility and functionality of current infrastructure and data g Integrating with existing systems and leveraging emerging service oriented architectures (SOAs) g Establishing a common language for business-IT alignment

The features and functionality of a BPM suite are the basis for the overall value delivered, so let’s look at each in detail.

BPM Suite FeaturesLeading BPM suites deliver a variety of process, content, collaboration and analytics capabilities in a unified pack-age. Process management technology allows a company to streamline operations by automating, executing and monitoring business processes from beginning to end. Content management and collaborative tools enable it to leverage information by managing its documents and content and facilitating employee interaction in collaborative, knowledge-based communities. Integrated analytics help increase visibility by delivering extensive reports on key business operations and process execution to managers.

REDUCE COSTS AND INCREASE EFFICIENCy

INCREASE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

COMPLIANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT

Time

Quality

Productivity

Other

g Shorter processing cycle times

g Reduced administration time

g Fewer manual errors

g More efficient data entry

g Fewer manual errors

g More efficient data entry

g Reduced support costs

g Improved ad hoc reporting

g Faster processing time

g More responsive

g Fewer manual errors

g More visibility

g Consistent business practices

g Better exception handling

g More visibility

g Consistent business practices

g Better exception handling

g Strong customer loyalty

g Stronger brand

g Decreased time to process

g Faster report generation

g Better policy enforcement

g Controlled environment

g Reduced risk

g Better policy enforcement

g Controlled environment

g Reduced risk

g Peace of mind

g Better risk mitigation

g Greater trust

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BPM delivers proven Return-On-Investment (ROI) in these crucial areas by positively impacting time, quality, productivity, and other factors.

Using this comprehensive set of features, a company can quickly and efficiently build process applications in or-der to solve its business problems. Thus, the marketing department can use BPM technology to track strategic campaigns (including event planning, public relations, and campaign management), R&D can use it to manage the entire product redesign process (from idea inception to prototyping to product delivery), and corporate can use it to adapt to changing regulatory standards (achieving compliance while solidifying corporate governance).

Because they’re built using BPM suites, these applications will be:

g User-friendly – minimizing user training while maximizing user acceptance; g Personalized – delivering secure, unique content to each user; g Collaborative – utilizing modern and familiar social technologies; g Scalable – expanding to meet the needs of the department, the enterprise or the value chain; and g Web-based – making them accessible to users anytime, anyplace.

BPM Suite FunctionalityBy integrating existing applications, pulling relevant data, and connecting appropriate people, process applica-tions built with BPM suites tend to overcome the limitations of traditional enterprise systems, ultimately enabling a company to:

g Streamline operations. A 100% hTML-based process modeler will let business users automate, execute and monitor business processes from beginning to end, eliminating redundancy and opti-mizing resources along the way.

g Integrate systems. By connecting existing applications (like CRM and ERP), these BPM applications will route – and automatically synchronize – information throughout the organization, freeing em-ployees from having to manually change data in numerous applications, while allowing managers to call upon the most relevant content when making decisions.

g Share knowledge. Using a portal as a central access point, employees are able to control and reuse vital corporate information, such as domain expertise, intellectual capital and best practices. Us-ers can identify subject matter experts, share information in real time and build public or private knowledge communities when necessary.

g Gain visibility. Through secure, web-based reporting dashboards, managers can monitor business performance and analytical information in order to gain awareness of corporate operations, competi-tive activities and market dynamics. This allows them not only to identify business issues, but also to anticipate and correct problems before they materialize.

g Obtain feedback. With an extensive set of process performance reports, process designers can conduct detailed analysis of the successes and failures of specific processes to gain insight into future workflow design, thereby enabling the company to achieve a continuous, dynamic cycle of enterprise process improvement.

g Create accountability. Managers can delegate work, track deadlines, automate escalations and monitor performance while enforcing personnel accountability for results through reports and audit trails.

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g Drive policy. Knowledge-centric tools help capture and manage enterprise data and best practices. A sophisticated rules engine ensures that policies, practices and regulatory environments are clearly defined, centralized, automated and tracked so a company can avoid the risks and costs associated with non-compliance or deviation from best practices.

g Facilitate change. A sophisticated rules engine allows a company to adapt its processes dynamically as its business environment continues to change. The ability to make in-flight process adjustments permits managers to modify processes and reallocate resources in real time.

Business BenefitsHaving developed and deployed process applications using a BPM suite, a company is better equipped to re-spond to business change. In the short term, BPM helps improve profitability by decreasing costs and increasing revenues. In the long run, BPM helps create competitive advantage by improving organizational agility.

Decreased CostsAt first glance, BPM seems to deliver the same major benefit as traditional enterprise application technology like ERP: increased workforce productivity (as a result of streamlining business operations and automating repetitive tasks). BPM suites, however, go far beyond creating efficiency. Knowledge sharing capabilities and a collaborative portal help improve decision-making. Process performance reports help optimize workflows. Notifications and trig-gers help reduce errors and eliminate waste. And an intelligent rules engine helps enforce best practices. Thus, BPM suites not only help organizations increase workforce productivity, but they also improve product quality and reduce corporate risk. The result? Within months of deployment, these improvements will deliver substantial cost savings (see Figure 1).

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Increased RevenueIn addition to decreasing costs, BPM suites also help an organization raise its overall revenues by increasing product output, accelerating cycle time, and improving customer service. Straight-through processing helps speed delivery times. Dashboards help prioritize business activities by their influence on sales. Process performance reports help identify bottlenecks and reduce hand-offs. Centralized enterprise knowledge helps speed decision-making. And closed-loop customer feedback processes help track performance. Over time, these enhancements result in a faster time-to-market and an improved company image, which ultimately increases sales and revenues (see Figure 1C).

Improved AgilityWhile decreased costs and increased revenue are the two most immediate and tangible benefits of business process management, BPM also delivers a host of intangible benefits. In the long run, process applications built with BPM suites help organizations become more agile (see Figure 2). Intelligent rules ensure that processes adapt automatically to changes in the business environment. Collaborative tools bridge department boundar-ies while improving and speeding decision-making. And in-flight process modifications accelerate response to change by dynamically rerouting processes in real time. With these capabilities, a company is better equipped to switch gears and respond to its changing business environment – faster than its competitors!

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Agility refers to a company’s ability to respond

quickly to changes—new market regulations, new

competitive pressures, new customer expectations

and demands, new product or service opportunities

and more.

Thus, BPM not only improves profitability, but it actually helps create competitive advantage for companies. Faced with turbulent market conditions, decreasing resources and increasing demands, any company can use BPM suite technology to rapidly develop and deploy process applications that have a direct impact on the bottom line. Within a few months of implementing BPM technology, a company can make better and faster decisions about key business issues such as reallocating its people to address emerging markets, redesigning its products to fulfill customers’ needs, and refining its processes to meet government regulations. having become a process-managed organization, companies are better equipped to respond to changing market, customer, and regulatory demands. In other words, a company won’t just be better positioned to address its current business challenges; it will be better prepared to take advantage of future business opportunities.

Case Study Examples:

Business Problem With Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s expansive growth, the number of IT requests nearly doubled in eighteen months, pushing the existing system to capacity. To meet this increased demand with the system in place resulted in a costly, customized and time-consuming effort. It was clear that additional staff would be needed to account for the increase in manual data transfer, as well as additional time and money to retool older systems in ways not originally intended for use. Enterprise Rent-A-Car sought to implement a BPM infrastructure that would be efficient, respond to rapid change, and allow for future capacity planning.

BPM Solution Enterprise deployed the BPM-based Request Online system to efficiently and effectively fulfill product and service requests from the company’s more than 65,000 employees worldwide. Using BPM, Enterprise can now consolidate functionality to increase manageability of the request services system, collect process-based data for performance reporting, and utilize a common platform to accommodate rapid change and future growth.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car operates more than 878,000 rental and fleet services vehicles worldwide and has annual revenues of $9.04 billion. The company operates more than 900 offices in Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Ireland.

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Business Problem The “mish-mash” tools landscape resulting from the NSN merger fundamentally did not meet the needs of its dynamic business, and the end-to-end business could not be viewed at any stage. NSN’s infrastructure housed large enterprise systems such as ERP from SAP and other rigid and disconnected sales workflow, resource and knowledge management applications. This resulted in the inability to conduct real-time business management, limitations on Future Planning capability, inaccuracy of data, and significant overhead wasted on reporting, train-ing and data entry. NSN sought a solution to establish standardized processes, deliver end-to-end visibility, and support fast and effective decision-making to drive the business.

BPM Solution NSN deployed a sophisticated and award-winning enterprise-wide BPM program, driven through one of the most mature Center of Excellence organizations in the BPM industry. The single BPM platform provides a multitude of applications across all core elements of the global business: Sales, Delivery, Resources, Technical Support, Competency Management, Remote Delivery/Offshoring and overall Business Management. It delivers process automation, process governance and consistency across NSN’s business, from its Business Solutions & Opera-tions to its Managed Services and its Global Network Implementation Centers. NSN now has enhanced business visibility and control, supported by dedicated socio-business networking functionality (integrated collaboration within process). NSN’s BPM program delivers more than $16M in annual productivity savings.

Nokia Siemens Networks was created in 2007 through the merger of the former Networks Business Group of Nokia and the carrier-related businesses of Siemens. The vision behind the merger was to create a single organization focused on driving the increasingly converged global telecommunications market. Today, NSN is one of the world’s largest network communications companies – with 60,000 employees, a leading position in all key markets across the world, and total sales of more than €15 billion a year.

Business Problem Paper processes were the lifeblood of Archstone’s business, but with nearly 350 communities supporting more than 86,000 units, the organization suffered from form-paralysis. Lacking a central repository for forms, the time to on-board new leasing agents could take as long as three months. In addition, the turnover rate for this position is very high, yet Archstone needed to make a large investment in initial training to help each new leasing agent become self-sufficient, always with the risk that the employee might only stay for six months. Archstone needed a one-stop-shop for locating forms and improving workflow management.

BPM Solution Since implementing a BPM suite, Archstone has dramatically reduced the learning curve for new associates. The company has saved time and money, while increasing customer satisfaction, by placing the tools and resources needed to make employees successful at their fingertips; creating a centralized location where forms, processes and tasks are presented and managed; enabling agents to search and retrieve forms and processes across the enterprise using key words; and not requiring associates to fully understand processes in order to participate/initiate. The BPM suite also empowered Archstone to standardize and enforce its policies, resulting in greatly improved efficiencies through reducing multiple paper forms to one electronic process and providing the ability to track the approval chain.

As one of the largest real estate investment organizations in the country, Archstone’s portfolio is concentrated in many of the most desirable neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the San Francisco Bay Area, the New york metropolitan area, Southern California, Seattle and Boston.

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4. Levering Emerging TechnologiesOrganizations that wish to remain competitive must integrate the emerging technologies of Cloud, Mobile and Social into their BPM solutions.

Cloud BPM. A complete BPM suite should be available both on-premise and as a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Additionally, it should provide a number of pre-built Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application templates. These industry-specific or horizontal, function-specific templates will enable quick deployment to address common process challenges.

With the same functionality as traditional on-premise BPM software deployments, cloud BPM provides a powerful way to accelerate your process improvement initiatives. Users may choose to migrate from cloud to on-premise and vice-versa at any time.

Why Deploy BPM in the Cloud?The market for enterprise corporate software is moving rapidly into the cloud. Cloud Computing is a new style of delivering enterprise applications that are dynamically scalable, virtualized, and delivered as a service over the internet. Platform-as-a-Service offerings are a specific form of Cloud Computing where users utilize a platform to quickly build custom applications for an organization. Software-as-a-Service offerings provide pre-built application solutions in the cloud which can be instantly deployed for immediate results. The benefits of deploying systems through these mechanisms are compelling and include:

g Low startup costs g Fast deployment with no manual maintenance g Predictable costs during the life of an application g Fast return-on-investment

An optimal BPM suite will provide all functionality through a simple web-browser, delivering the necessary components to rapidly deploy new process-based applications and improve process efficiency. Organizations that fail to adopt Cloud Computing services will certainly be challenged to remain competitive under the ever increas-ing costs of manually maintaining their enterprise applications on-premise.

Cloud Security and ReliabilityCloud-based BPM can provide reliability and security on par with, or better than, that offered by internally man-aged environments. Cloud solutions should not compromise customer expectations around reliability and security of their systems. Like the most demanding of internally managed systems, a complete cloud BPM suite can be de-signed to meet the needs of enterprise customers with the necessary reliability and security guarantees in place. Standard requirements for a cloud BPM suite include:

g 99.5% uptime guarantee g SAS-70 Type II security audit reports g Dedicated vPN to your Enterprise Network g SAML Integration for secure authentication and single sign-on g SSL encryption of all communication between systems g hosting locations in the United States, Europe, or Asia/Pacific

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Mobile BPM Functionality

g Track Key Events – A mobile BPM suite should keep users informed of key events in their business processes. With a simple event stream view, notifications are pushed to devices, alerting users of key process events, thresh-olds or tasks. Event notifications may be aggregates from multiple systems and people, providing users with a single view into all their business operations.

g Securely Collaborate – Even on-the-go, users can en-gage in secure communications with process participants around any key event and post ad-hoc messages and status updates for others to view and comment on.

g Take Action – Users are empowered to receive and complete tasks with rich electronic forms from any mobile device. Users are also able to initiate new processes and actions to assign activities to other employees and keep business processes moving.

g Custom Branding – Native mobile BPM should also allow organizations to customize all their mobile platforms with their own branding.

Mobile BPM. Today, a mobile revolution is upon us, and now more than ever customers expect to be connected to their critical business processes while on-the-go. A modern BPM suite must offer a complete solution for enterprise mobility. If the suite provides native applications on all leading mobile devices, users are able to communicate, take action, track events, send requests, receive notifica-tions, and integrate with existing CRM, ERP and database systems even when out of the office.

Real process efficiency is achieved when all participants are armed with instant access to business pro-cesses regardless of where they might be.

Complete BPM Lifecycle in the CloudA complete BPM suite enables users to easily Design, Execute, Manage, and Optimize key business processes. A truly advanced cloud BPM suite will allow customers the freedom to migrate between their cloud and on-premise BPM deployments at any time, including all Process Models, Rules, Data, Reports, Content, Forms, Groups and Collaboration capabilities.

Platforms and DistributionAn advanced BPM suite should be natively available on leading mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, RIM BlackBerry and Google Android devices.

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Social BPM. Social technologies are powerful communication and collaboration platforms, but they must be harnessed in a business context to have business value. An effective BPM suite must provide a seamless integration of familiar social tools with BPM to drive business collaboration – social interactions that are tied to real business events and outcomes.

SecuritySecurity of mobile devices and information is a top concern for enterprises empowering mobile employees with access to confidential information. A top-tier mobile BPM suite must be designed to operate in a high-security environment for enterprise clients. Specific features for mobile security in BPM applications should include:

g Server side authentication management and account locking g Encrypted communication with servers over hTTPS g Encryption of all data stored on the local mobile device g Local Application Passcode to lock access to the BPM application g OAuth based token for authorizing each device to access servers

A BPM suite offering full native mobile capabilities will deliver the most comprehensive Business Process Manage-ment software solution on the market today.

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An advanced BPM platform leverages the collective knowledge of an enterprise to gain efficiency and improve the quality of processes through a familiar social interface that spurs adoption and easy use. The hallmarks of such a platform include:

g Key Event Monitoring to track events from people and systems in real-time, with auto-generated alerts on hazards that could impact the business; users are able to take immediate action from the feed or mobile interface

g Personalized, Filtered views that can be subscribed to across relevant application or process areas g Easy Collaboration, comments and questions on business events through real-time message posts

and ad-hoc updates to targeted groups within and outside of pre-planned business processes g The Ability to Take Action to complete tasks from directly inside the event feed (or with a truly ad-

vanced platform, from a mobile device, using optimized mobile forms to capture data and route tasks) g high Security making all information and data accessible through role-based permissions and securely

transmitted using SSL to web (and mobile) interfaces

In addition to easily integrating with external 3rd-party enterprise systems like Salesforce.com, an advanced social BPM solu-tion will also be able to incorporate social systems like Twitter or LinkedIn directly into an employee’s event view. These external social channels represent a growing and untapped source of new insights into customer sentiment, sales opportunities, support issues and more. Gartner has stated that by 2015, internet-sup-ported social processes will influence at least 80% of consumers’ discretionary spending1, leading the firm to conclude that “Either business gets social or it gets left behind”.2 Bringing this new in-formation into corporate processes in a controlled and actionable way will yield new business opportunities.

Forrester Research advises, “to thrive in an era of Social Comput-ing, companies must abandon top-down management and com-munication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.”3

This is what social BPM enables. It moves social computing into a business context, increasing the manageability of social inter-actions, and achieving more meaningful, effective and valuable collaborations across the organization and outside the four walls.

1 Gartner: “Digital Marketing: The Critical Trek for Multichannel Campaign Management,” Feb 20112 Gartner: “Business gets Social,” Oct 20103 Forrester Research: “Use Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes,” June 2010

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5. Do you need BPM?If your organization has any of the following issues, BPM suites provide the logical solution.

Do your processes involve various disparate, stove-piped IT systems in addition to human tasks?

Do your managers complain about the lack of visibility into their processes, initiatives, and projects? Is there a lack of quantitative feedback?

Do you have trouble identifying who or what is impeding your processes?

Do you have process inefficiencies due to a lack of accountability and clear ownership of responsibilities?

BPM suites enable the orchestration of both human and system tasks in a single process. This enables an organization to leverage existing legacy applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

BPM suites provide intuitive reporting dashboards that combine business activity monitoring (BAM) capabili-ties, user-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and real-time and historical process data to deliver secure, quantitative feedback to process owners.

BPM suites combine process model simulation, test-scenario tools, and robust analytics capabilities to monitor processes throughout their entire life cycles, from design to completion.

BPM suites provide secure task management capabilities and process monitoring tools that allow autho-rized users to identify who is responsible for what, how long assignments have remained unfinished, the real-time status of process tasks, and what process bottlenecks may be impeding progress.

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After an organizational goal is reached, do you have trouble looking back and figuring out exactly who did what?

BPM suites automatically generate extensive process audit trails that capture detailed information about what happened when. This audit trail is essential for managing compliance-related processes, while also allowing business managers to determine who did what in achieving business goals.

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Are you worried about employees inconsistently completing assignments throughout the organization?

BPM suites encapsulate best practices and enforce management policies using a built-in rules engine, ensuring that standard assignments are handled the same way, every time. BPM suites also offer forms management tools, which help standardize the interface through which employees complete assignments.

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5. Do you need BPM?If your organization has any of the following issues, BPM suites provide the logical solution.

Do you fear that your processes are not adapting to changing business requirements because “this is the way they have always been done”?

Do your processes cross departmental and organizational boundaries, making assignment hand-offs and ownership responsibilities less clear?

Do you lack clear, measurable metrics for gauging employee performance?

Do your processes frequently involve documents and forms as well as other structured and unstructured content?

BPM suites enable in-flight process modifications so that managers can add new work, reroute documents, and adapt underlying business rules to update processes in real-time. Using in-flight process modification tools to enhance process agility is one of the core goals of a BPM suite.

BPM suites allow users to clearly map out inter-departmental or inter-organizational relationships, using both rule-based and group-based management tools. This facilitates smoother workflow interaction and increases end-user accountability across the extended organization.

BPM suites provide real-time analytics for assessing completion time, optionally aggregated by employee, team or department. These metrics enable managers to compare and group employee performance across processes, time periods and departments.

BPM suites include integrated document and forms management capabilities so that modeling processes involving the creation, modification and approval of an organization’s enterprise content is seamless and secure.

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Assess Your Responses0-2 “YES” Responses:your current business processes are working sufficiently right now. Recommendation: Continue to monitor your organization’s performance, as BPM suite technology may be of help to you in the future.

3-5 “YES” Responses:Business process improvement would benefit your organization, but you may need to learn more before you get started. Recommendation: Explore the BPMbasics Learning Center to gain a more in-depth understanding of BPM.

6-10 “YES” Responses:You have a clear and immediate need to implement BPM suite technology within your organization. Recommendation: Contact Appian at info@appian.com to learn how a comprehensive yet easy-to-use BPM suite can help you.

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6. Getting Started with BPMOnce you’ve decided to embrace process improvement, where do you start?

The benefits of process improvement can be applied to just about any facet of an organization. But where you start can have a big effect on how successful your BPM initiatives are over time. Conceptually, the key is to “plan big, start small, and iterate.” This means select-ing a manageable initial project with low process complexity and high impact to the business, promoting your early successes, and pushing BPM best practices out to other areas of the business. The chart below illustrates how to map business process areas to assess where the “sweet spot” is for a first-time BPM deployment.

The key issues to consider here are around the level of exposure this process has for the business (processes that directly impact revenue, cost, or customers are obviously high on this axis), as well as the level of complexity of the process (including things like number of process steps, integration points, people involved and more).

Ideally, you want to start with a high exposure, low complexity process. High exposure means it will be noticed by executive management, and low complex-ity means your chances for success are very good. An initial deployment like this can usually be accomplished through the professional services offerings of your BPM vendor, and you can be up and running fairly quickly. Promoting this early success (and the best practices of that deployment) will help drive new BPM projects

across the organization. It is at this stage that you need to seriously consider development of a BPM Center of Excellence (CoE).

The creation of BPM CoEs, or Business Process Com-petency Centers (BPCC) as Gartner calls them, have a direct impact on the level of success attained through BPM initiatives. As Gartner states, “If you are making the transition from pursuing a few individual BPM proj-ects to making BPM part of the enterprise, the estab-lishment of a BPCC is critical to success. The BPCC acts as an internal consultancy and offers a “one-stop shop,” providing services to multiple BPM initiatives in order to enable the enterprise to progress with BPM efforts overall. A BPCC is a vital step in facilitating an enterprise’s BPM efforts.”1

High

Low High

Process Exposure

- Revenue

- Cost

- Customer Service

- Cycle Time

Process Complexity

# of Process Steps

# of Integration Points

# of Process Exceptions

# of Process Participants

# of Transactions

# of Organizations

1 Gartner: “BPM Survey Insights: Maturity Advances as BPM Goes Mainstream,” June 2011

BPM is more than just technology; it is a business man-agement methodology that covers how people work with people, how systems work with systems, and how the two camps work together. Re-inventing business processes, therefore, is not a single point of destina-tion; it is a journey of continuous process improvement. A BPM CoE is the guiding entity that keeps all required components of the organization in line with the BPM journey vision. An effective CoE includes a “process visionary” who understands how the processes of the firm currently drive bottom-line profitability and perfor-mance, and how they can be improved, as well as a BPM project manager, a BPM tool expert, an enterprise architect and several domain project experts, who are business people called in to provide expertise on proj-ects in their respective areas.

What is a BPM CoE?A BPM CoE is a collection of methodologies, tools and techniques used by an organization’s experienced BPM staff to improve BPM projects by achieving higher rates of return on investment and minimizing the cost of reengineered solutions. The idea is to provide a layer of process maturity over and above traditional technologi-cal process maturity. This layer ensures that process rigor is introduced into BPM project initiatives, just as it is in other areas of business. For example, process quality assurance in manufacturing orchestrates all the

resources organized around production to minimize defects, enhance production schedules, and minimize costs, among other factors.

Typically, a BPM CoE will orchestrate people and processes across two departments within an organiza-tion, Business and IT. While IT departments are almost always involved in any technological aspects of the organization, their traditional relationship with Business departments has been cyclical, on a project-by-project basis, with defined start/end cycles. This is the very na-ture of projects and sponsorship, where there is heavy engagement at the start of the project, but less so dur-ing construction and after completion. During that time, requirements always change (because the business units have constantly-changing needs), and IT usually views this in the context of projects, budgets, sched-ules, and resources constraints. It is not hard to see why conflicts arise. Usually, business units have to ac-cept continuous enhancement cycles (or enhancement packs) where a bundle of business enhancements are translated into mini projects AFTER the original project team has been disbanded, the business analysts have left the project, or the technology resources or partners are no longer available. This greatly increases the risk and cost associated with process innovation and im-provement. The diagram below provides an example of a typical technological project (BPM or otherwise).

Initiate Plan/Fund Req/Design Construct/Deploy Support/Enhance Enhance

Typical Business/IT Cycle

Figure 3 - Cyclical Nature of Business/IT relationship

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In contrast, a BPM CoE is continuous in nature. It helps avoid the crests and troughs of regular projects (regardless of methodology used), by ensuring that a governance group exists from all touch points of a business process. Ideally, a BPM CoE is made up of people representing both the business and IT, with a cross-set of skills and experience around business process analysis, process application construction, user acceptance testing, and change management. The CoE’s role is to create and enforce a plan that fol-lows best practices in using BPM systems, BPM design and construction, and BPM transition and deployment among environments (including development, staging, production, BPM training, and a BPM business support plan). Figure 4 provides an example of a BPM initiative from a BPM CoE lens.

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Why Companies Need a BPM CoEBusiness Process Management systems are now considered mainstream technology for enterprises seeking additional business benefits through techno-logical advantage. These advantages vary from cost cutting, efficiency gains, and even system replacement to replenish outdated and out-powered technologi-cal infrastructures. The process involves commitment from several departments as mentioned above, and a dynamic that is ever-changing between business and IT. Thus, companies have come to rely on process con-sultants to take on BPM initiatives of high importance to the enterprise. The project cycle is typically heavy on the professional services component, where re-sponsibilities include analysis, design, implementation, control and execution of the project. The heavy lifting to bring the BPM initiative to fruition is left to experienced and expert process consultants. While this can work, it leaves several components of successful implementa-tions to the process consultants, without much involve-ment from the enterprise. This can leave a big gap once the BPM implementation is successful and the system is in operational and maintenance mode, jeop-ardizing the ability to leverage that initial BPM success to other areas and systems in the business.

In many cases, enterprises take on the effort of change management and/or bring additional business pro-cesses online without the experience of the process consultants (perhaps relying on the typical product training their team members go through). This usu-ally leads to disappointment (depending, of course, on the maturity of the internal processes, the skills of the available staff, the sophistication of existing business systems, and project management practices and matu-rity). Accordingly, most organizations end up relying on some external process consultants anyway in order to achieve higher rates of success.

A BPM Center of Excellence addresses the need for a unified approach to BPM. Defining the complex rela-tionships between various constituents of the system on an ongoing basis helps govern the process and people competing for resources and time, while en-suring quality in bringing more BPM initiatives online. The BPM CoE is not one-size-fits-all; instead, it is an evolution of best practices and processes as they relate to what already exists in an enterprise. For example, architectural review of the infrastructure – a sched-uled meeting where business gets a chance to pitch

Figure 4 - Continuous Process Improvement

capacity increases or request impact assessment on systems – is typically conducted periodically across every major technology initiative in an enterprise. This works, but it slows down or halts (until architectural group meets again) the speed and nature of change typically available with BPM Systems. In a typical BPM CoE process, a representative of the architectural group may be present to play a buffer/filter role regarding differently-size BPM initiatives. This significantly reduces bureaucracy and accelerates Business-IT cycles.

BPM CoE FrameworkA BPM CoE framework borrows from Six Sigma continuous process improvement, and adapts it to the changing needs of business stakeholders from one business process to another. This is important because the process champions might be different during BPM initiative cycles, in that new buy-in needs to be secured and objectives defined clearly. A brief framework is outlined below:

g Assess, Adapt & Promote Success – In this phase, business needs are aligned with BPM capabilities, and success metrics are defined.

g Form Process Improvement Group – A BPM group is defined to own business processes from incep-tion to deployment, and to continue through with regular improvement cycles measured against the success metrics. This group will include process visionaries as representation of various process constituents.

g Identify BPM Projects and Improvement Opportunities – In this phase, non-BPM processes are identi-fied and selected based on business needs or candidacy of the overall success plan, and improve-ments to the non-BPM processes as well as BPM processes are discovered and analyzed.

g Agree on Business Objectives – The objectives of the business process and the particular initiative has to be clearly defined by process owner groups and agreement of all participants must be secured prior to commencing change.

g Secure Executive Sponsorship – Sponsors and champions play a crucial role after identification of a process selected for BPM initiatives or improvement. Securing buy-in, funding, and providing neces-sary support to push for success and meet measurable business metrics is essential.

g Rapidly Model and Deploy – Using a flexible and powerful BPM system, these changes can be mod-eled and simulated and initial metrics collected for in-cycle improvements. The business changes ma-terialize during this phase, with the ability of stakeholders and users to touch the system and conduct dry-runs.

g Deploy and Measure Results – The completion of BPM deployment of a business process and actual usage of the system in complete production mode. Monitoring of the metrics and systems, Business Activity Monitoring, measurement of results against objectives and success criteria, and identification of potential improvement based on actual data enters into a new BPM Improvement cycle.

A BPM CoE is essential for enterprises seeking to tap the powerful benefits of process innovation for streamlin-ing operations and improving margins. A BPM CoE brings the advantages of “tried and true” methodology and adapts them to BPM systems, while also ensuring a pan-organizational focus on the crucial elements of process change, and executive sponsorship to get a project off the ground and drive it to completion. BPM success can be achieved without a Center of Excellence, but the CoE enables faster BPM deployment cycles and minimizes costly mistakes and overhead associated with typical enterprise development efforts. The CoE framework is flex-ible and dynamic depending on the business needs and the type of organization implementing BPM. As such, a BPM CoE lends itself to best practices and continuous self-improvement through lessons learned during multiple phases of BPM project cycles over time.

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The BPMBasics Learning Center is a resource provided by Appian. visit www.BPMbasics.com to view webinars, articles and other materials outlining the functionality and applications of BPM. kit

ConclusionThis BPMKit was compiled to offer readers the opportunity to understand what BPM is, how it is evolving, the immense value it offers and the best way to get started with a process improvement initiative.

Business realities are changing. Only the most nimble and efficient organizations will succeed. Work is be-ing done in the cloud, on mobile devices and in social forums. Customers increasingly expect “anywhere, anytime” access to the companies with which they do business. The manual, opaque processes that suf-ficed in past decades are no longer viable. Businesses that wish to remain competitive must adapt to this new climate, and modern BPM suites offer the key: the power to drive process improvement, and to extend that reach at any scale to all participants, whether they’re at their desks or anywhere else in the world.

Organizations across all market sectors are transforming their business with BPM, tapping the power of emerging—and inevitable—cloud, mobile and social capabilities. In a world where “only the agile survive,” adopting a modern BPM suite will make all the difference.