Simplifying the complexities of enterprise collaboration with ECM and BPM

Handling content in a digital age & the impact of a robust enterprise content management has never been side-lined and with an agile business process management coupled in, the impact is for everyone to witness. Invensys Skelta as a part of the partner co-marketing initiative recently teamed with an OEM partner – Solgenia SPA to promote Solgenia Freedoc to a larger audience in the form of a web event.

Solgenia Freedoc is the answer to a collaborative environment where people can store, share and exchange structured and unstructured business information securely - in a single repository. Users are empowered to manage information, streamline workflows and maximize productivity extending social collaboration using file sync and sharing capabilities for a true real-time social collaboration also for the mobile workforce.

The partner driven webinar which will run for 40 minutes on the 10^th of December at 2 PM GMT will introduce Freedoc, components of Freedoc which includes special focus on using Social Space with or without Social Network, Integration with Microsoft Office, Freedoc Mobile and Freedoc in Cloud. You may register for the webinar here.

One of the core components of the Freedoc is the business workflow to design and implement business processes and internal workflows, enabling a systemic approach to improve business processes through the integration of IT and management methodologies.

A must attend session for enterprises before the start of the holiday season. For those, whose schedules are already blocked, do leave in a comment for this post and I shall ensure that the link to access the recording is made available to you.

Register today. 

BPM in manufacturing … what’s the enterprise level opportunity?

The generic and flexible nature of a BPM solution makes it a good fit for almost any sector. The current business climate and global pressure to improve safety, compliance, quality, productivity and cost are forcing companies to evaluate and improve their operations.

In this regard the Manufacturing sector is no different.

BPM and workflow software help support business critical outcomes providing a range of enablers for customers in the manufacturing space.  Pre-configured scenarios and solutions, built on a strong BPM platform allow workflow enabling of manufacturing solutions. Embedded workflows are a natural extension of application & technical integration allowing participation in and with enterprise and other collaborative workflow processes.

But is there a BPM opportunity specific to Manufacturing?

With rising energy costs, ageing infrastructure, obligation to shareholders and a highly competitive environment within the Manufacturing sector, enterprise integration and operational efficiency have taken on fresh relevance as the key factors to organizational success.  BPM can address, with measurable results, operational and business challenges at the Enterprise level in Manufacturing.

While at the plant level workflow software integrates with a range of plant systems and streamlines execution, automating manufacturing specific processes such as change management, SLA management, Design review processes & compliance management lend several business efficiencies at the enterprise level.  

For BPM to work end to end, it needs to be embedded into manufacturing systems, filling the gaps and completing the chain from enterprise to plant floor. BPM’s process modeling, managing, analyzing and optimization capabilities ensure continuous improvement for:

1. Corrective and preventive action (CAPA)
2. Driving lean manufacturing                                                            
3. Turning best practices into standard operating procedures      
4. Increased plant productivity                                                           
5. Accelerated project delivery                                                                                    
6. Real time interoperability between enterprise applications                  

In our next post, a detailed analysis of BPM as an enterprise application in manufacturing. 

Have a great week!

The Proof is in the Pudding?

Following up on my post last week on what goes into the making of a BPM project, let’s talk a little more about Proof of Concepts (POCs). To truly gain traction from Discovery to Automation and to zero in on the right BPM software, a POC showing your vendor’s competency on a number of issues is essential. It’s simple really – Don’t Invest till you Test!

When it comes to evaluating a POC, there are the usual suspects

-         - Time to delivery from start to finish

-         - Sustainability (does the vendor have the bandwidth and skill to support optimization over a long time period)

-        -  Human reaction to change

-        -  Ability of the product to react to change

But apart from these the most critical test of concept is the scope of the POC. A scope bound POC which is a sub set of the actual BPM project offers enormous clarity to the process owner.  More importantly, as a BPM customer you should be cognizant of your exact BPM requirement before evaluating vendors ... the idea is to map the software to your needs rather than spend time and money on a POC to reinforce its inherent strengths.

A BPM customer should drive the outcome of a POC and test for compatibility with existing IT environments among other things. Introduce scenarios that test vendor agility and response to process change – indication of a strong services team means that you gain from the vendor’s BPM project experience when it comes to building a new application around the product.  For a BPM vendor of course, a well defined POC directly translates to cost efficiencies and in depth understanding of the client’s requirement.


Invest more technical resources in rolling out a POC and you have yourself a sustainable BPM customer who views you more as a BPM partner and less as a software vendor.

Composite Applications in Today’s BPM World

The demand for enterprise applications is definitely on the rise, and a business, in this day and age, can easily find a software package to address almost any aspect of the business. Solutions for facets like CRM, ERP, SCM, MRP, etc. are quite easy to come by, with a plethora of vendors trying to fill the existent marketplace. However, just as businesses strive to create their place under the sun, the same also applies to vendors of business solutions, and this has given rise to the integration of these solutions under a single umbrella.

The idea behind running composite applications is to move the focus from individual application development, to integrating them into a single unit instead. These applications also work in addressing the gaps between existing applications and creating solutions specific to specific tasks, allowing the business process to follow the steps laid by the solution as opposed to having users work as mediators in between different processes.

The Changing Facade

Solutions created using Business Process Management platforms differ from the solutions developed not so long ago, as BPM solutions deliver ‘process’ models and metadata mapping instead of delivering database instantiations and database models, as in the case of conventional solutions. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) components now run completely independently, and human interaction/decision making is now a part of the entire automation process as well. This gives the end user the ability to configure/assemble components as required while also streamlining them with one’s existing web based services. Besides, by uniting the human workflow aspect with automation process, the overall workflow can be managed in a more effective manner.

One very important aspect of composite applications is that they generally do not aim at 100% functionality. This is simply because they come with a range of executable components which can then be sequenced as per the end user’s preferences. Instead of complete functionality, such solutions aim at dynamic assembly, flexibility, integration, and extensibility.

What to Expect

With more and more businesses making the required infrastructural changes, one can expect the ability of a BPM solution to enable composite applications to be one of the key components in a BPM implementation. You should also know that composite applications go beyond the realm of SOA, and various large businesses have already gone ahead and deployed various service enabled applications aimed at leveraging SOA in different forms. This also makes it important for such solutions to look at incorporating the various services/components that are being clubbed together.

The benefits are manifold; BPM enabled solutions can help streamline the business process, it can help bridge the business/IT gap, the integration capabilities help leverage on existing IT investments, it can help reduce operational costs, it can diminish business risks, it would be easy to implement; it would be a hastened process, and it would also allow both vertical and horizontal scalability. As a customer, before any BPM implementation, I would definitely ask the question… Does this BPM platform help me create applications rapidly and integrate easily with existing systems?