If you go to the customer service representative, do you know how much time
is lasting for giving the customer a definitive answer on their problem? There
is no way we can improve these type of services if you are not taking measures
of the process. By doing so, then we can think about augmenting our customer
satisfaction index or reducing the amount of errors that a product has when
going out to the streets.

In this

article by Seth Godin, he makes a call to people to stop being afraid of
taking care of processes. Yes, we know this is a routinary thing, but it is a
strategic value to our business against competitors. If I’m more efficient
internally, I can handle more jobs and customers with less the cost of similar
organizations in the industry.

So, stop for while envisioning what your company will be in the next three
years and take care of those processes that customers and employees are
complaining right now.

For this to happen, tasks must be assign to users or employees inside the
organization. They must then complete it according to their criteria. For
example, in a bank application for creating a new account, the officer will
generally have a task for checking if the person opening the account is already
a customer of the bank, maybe using their social security number (going one step
further this can be automated using a web service that makes a query to the
backend system and returning true if the person is a customer). After the
officer has completed the check, then he can complete the task.

Assigning a task to a person can be made directly or indirectly. In
Procx, you can do it
any way you want. Directly means assigning a task to an employee, a user. For
example, the task described in the previous example can be assign to Jack, an
officer in our Timbuktu branch. You can even get the user from a variable (for
example a user selected in a list on a form). The disadvantage of using this way
is that if Jack is transferred to the Honolulu branch, then you must edit the
process and change the assignment to the new user.

Assigning a task indirectly means not attaching a task to a user, but instead
to a role. A role belongs to an organizational chart and is occupied by a user.
In the previous example, instead of assigning the task to Jack, you can assign
it to the loan officer located in the organizational chart of the Timbuktu
branch. When Jack gets the sad notice that he’s been transferred to Honolulu,
then the only thing to be done is change the user assigned to the loan officer
role in the organizational chart. No other changes are needed in the process and
everything continues to run smoothly.

This is why assigning tasks to roles is the preferred practice when building
workflows generally and one that is totally supported in Procx.

That is how Alan Cooper describes fudgable software in his extraordinary book
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition): “I call this ability to take actions
out of sequence or before prerequisites are satisfied fudgability“.

For solving the problem, Alan describes in his book that software should be
flexible enough to handle this out of sequence tasks in the process allowing
persons to interact with it in a more human way. It’s like letting the users
decide which is the best way to handle a request.

This flexibility in software maybe one of the most complicated task to
accomplish during construction. Generally products are locked in the way a
workflow should execute, closing any other variables and exceptions that the
final user may want to use, as Alan explains in his book. But, if we achieved
this kind of malleability in software, we are making software that acts more
like a human allowing interaction to be kindly.

This kind of flexibility in software can be achieved using
business process
management software like Procx. The process per se can be changed and
configured according to organizational needs. Exceptions can be taken in and out
of the process as management wants. A request for a purchase order can no longer
be locked in an specific workflow forever. Process analysts can draw their
processes in the workflow
product and decide under which rules it will execute.

So, the interaction of the user with the process is not embedded in the
software, it would be built in Procx allowing the process to be as flexible as
the organization and management wants. It’s a new way of automating processes.
What do you think?

The same thing happens in our businesses. There’s a workflow to be followed
for almost any function. The only difference, with our bodies for example, is
that they are not perfect. In the majority of businesses we don’t event know the
steps of processes because they are not documented, making it more difficult to
correct errors.

When you want to make processes in an organization better, you need to
correct errors, eliminate steps, maybe automate others, etc. But there’s always
some tweaking to do until you reach an acceptable level of performance. That’s
why business process management is an every day task. It’s not a project that
finished today.

From

this article: “Both BPM and SOA could be thought of as a way of thinking
about how the business and governance model should be designed and a way of
delivering the technology and applications to support that design,” Miers says.
“Both concepts involve a journey, not a destination. At their core, both employ
an iterative approach to business performance improvement.”

New processes appear every day. They come from new campaigns, new product or
services offering and also from changing directions of companies. Also actual
workflows change due to market needs.
BPM and workflow
solutions will give the flexibility businesses needs for adjusting and
creating these processes allowing them to face competition and increase their
performance in an ongoing basis.

An interesting thing I also find is the length of these forms. They always
have multiple pages and have a huge amount of fields. The majority of the time
the forms have to be filled in an office or desk or a table. Is almost
impossible to do it standing. But with the technology like Tablet PCs these
forms can be made electronic and be filled remotely (in the field). This is an
area, the insurance industry, that greatly
benefit from
BPM solutions. That’s why we have made a movie that represents a life
insurance form been automated with Procx.
A simple process was put in place for approving the form in which if the initial
insurance amount is greater than 50,000 then needs to be routed to a credit
analyst. Hope you like it.

See the movie
here.

When the person in the front desk took my order, he took out the huge form (it
looks something like a poster for some movie or concert) and he fills it out
with my order request. I couldn’t understand anything he was writing but I know
there are a bunch of fields in the form. He entered the color preference, the
paper type, the number of copies, my name, address and phone number. After
finishing, he marks every field in the form with a green highlighter (I still
don’t know why is this). Then he takes the form and puts it in sealed bag (like
a huge Ziploc) and then calls somebody in the background to handle the new
request.

First, nobody answered. He didn’t know who was free to work and who was working
with something (and nobody was paying attention to him either). Then he needed
to copy my PDF files to the machine where the printing was going to be done. He
didn’t remember the files I just told him to print so I had to go back and point
him the files I wanted. I noticed that with every printing work they have, they
create a folder with the customer name. Inside the folder they create three more
folders: Original, Process, and Final. Then he placed my files in the original
folder. I think the folders mark the workflow that needs to be followed for
printing. I suppose it goes something like this: they first open the files in
the original folder, then edit them with some program for best printing (still
haven’t figured out what they edit; documents always have this blank border and
they say it’s impossible to take it out). Then they put the edited files in the
final folder.

After copying and filling the request and everything was done, he told me the
estimated time that everything will be ready and that’s it, ready.

When I got out I started thinking (in critique mode) the whole process. I said
why they haven’t done something more automatic for handling these request and
assignment. Maybe they would only need one person in the front taking the
requests and something behind prepares the environment of work and assigns the
right person in the back.

Using a workflow application would help them great automating the manual
process. And how they can do that? I came with something simple for the problem.

First I though the best way to port the paper forms to an electronic form was
InfoPath. In InfoPath you have the ability to create sections inside the form
and digitally signed them preventing these sections to be tampered (we don’t
need anymore the plastic Ziploc bag for protecting the form). One issue
resolved.

In InfoPath you can define an attachment field that allows you to attach a file
to the form. You can attach as many files as needed and they traveled inside the
form always. Now you can take the files needed for the work and attach them to
request. They are never loss and you just have to ask for them one time. Another
issue solved.

The form is going to be electronic in first place. You can publish it to a
SharePoint site for
example and have a central repository form them, allowing searching and
indexing. This is not an issue, but maybe would be a great add on.

And now for the workflow part. A simple process can be made for handling the
request form. You would have the start activity with permissions for only the
front desk person to start the process. Security. Then a second activity for
handling the input request form.

As an improvement, we could create a web service that generates a unique number
for the request. This can be the second activity in the process. The third
activity would be to assign this number to a field in the form. Next?

The next thing we can do is actually create another web service that creates the
folders they need for processing the files. We don’t need the first folder, the
Original folder, because the original files are already attached to the form.
The web service would only need to create the other two: Process and Final. A
good improvement would be to create them directly in SharePoint and have a
central repository for them.

The most important step would be the assignment of the request to one of the
back office personnel that actually executes the job. I though the best way to
do this was to use the workload feature. I could specify the personnel available
for this and assign requests on a one by one basis or a least busy basis. Then
let the software manage the work queue. Maybe every personnel in the back office
can have like a Pocket PC and they can receive their tasks and immediately know
their new assignments.

The final step would be to send an email to the front desk person notifying that
the job was finished. An improvement here we could consider is asking the
customer for his email and place it in the form. Then we can put another
activity in the process for sending an email to the client saying that his job
is finished (customer service improvement!!).

Now the whole process is automated. Errors in the process will be far less.
Security in the form cannot
be compromised. And we guarantee that every back office personnel are receiving
their tasks in a balanced way. The next phase for this would be to make another
web service for saving the information in the form to a database table for
future statistics and analysis.

A major thing? To simply enabled Procx
to receive the form requests via email and have the form publish to the
Internet. I can fill the form myself from my house and I only have to leave to
actually pickup the final work after I have received the notification. A simple
step towards the
electronic
enterprise. An example of how the process will look like is on the right.
 

I think SharePoint is one of the must have components everybody using Windows Server 2003 should have installed. As a free piece, the WSS version allows you to share files and collaborate with peers in the organization. It has document versioning capabilities in the web site and acts as central repository for document storage.

One of the coolest thing I find about it, is the integration with Microsoft Office InfoPath. InfoPath allows you to create forms that are routinely use in the business like purchase orders, expense reimbursement and management, vacation requests, etc. in an easy to use interface. Then you can publish these forms in SharePoint and every employee will be able to see them and fill them. Then you also have a central repository of forms.

The next step in this document and form collaboration environment is to add workflow or approval processes to these documents. That’s why we have made it easy to combine Procx and SharePoint workflow. Procx has features and activities for integration with SharePoint and InfoPath giving already established users of these platforms a huge return on their investments.

See more information about Procx and SharePoint here and see the movie here.

Terry Schurter: “Business Process Management is a paradigm shift in the making. It can be a paradigm shift because it represents a fundamentally different way of looking at, organizing, operating, monitoring and managing an organization.”

An interesting article shows up how SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) implementations are related to how business processes are executed in the organization.

I think SOA is the way for developing applications in the future. The concept is very simple: to build applications, data stores or what is important to the organization, to save information about the company. The next step would be to expose services around this information already store so other applications (or maybe the same application) can extract it. This services also will provide the mechanism for insertion and deletion of information.

The great thing about developing applications this way is that those services are made conforming a standard of the industry, so any other application, regardless of the platform or technology it was built on, should be able to call this services and get the information. There won’t be those ugly cases when you couldn’t get the information because it cannot be accessed in a standard form. So imagine you opening your favorite application (Excel, InfoPath, SharePoint, etc.) and telling it to extract this kind of information that you need from store one, store 2 and store 3 and then combine it.

The study, from where the article gets the information, shows that the biggest benefit from implementing SOA is faster and more flexible reconfiguration of business processes with a 48%. This benefit can be better yet when using a BPM software implementation in conjunction. Although the survey shows that only 14% is implementing BPM.

I think that the greatest benefit of these service oriented applications is that you can take advantage on it by putting a business process management software in the middle and let it manage the resources. For example, imagine that your ERP application exposes services for letting you create an expense reimbursement or a vacation request in your human resources store, you can draw a workflow specifying the steps required by any employee in the organization to request a reimbursement and, at the same workflow, you can specify at which point you are going to call the service and what information you are going to send. That’s why Procx has the ability to call web services since the beginning.

You can manage and coordinate every process in the organization using the BPM software, and push information to your backend systems using these services and at the same time pull them out for reports and alarms, letting you have a real view and knowledge of the business.

This kind of application will let business users get to a new level of understanding of their company, implement and control business processes in a more standard way leading as always to lower costs and increase performance.

Calculating the return of investment of any anything that you do in your business is vital, that’s the easiest way you can decide if in the long run the money you are pouring in is going to be of value to the organization.

As I have said earlier, one of the biggest ROI that you can get when implementing a software in the organization comes with business process management. Automating day to day processes and approvals transforms in real benefits almost immediately. The ROI can be calculated from the lower amount of time that it takes to execute a process to the reduce costs involved.

According to an article by Terry Schurter there are five areas where you can calculate the ROI of BPM or workflow solution:

- Automation

- Compliance

- Management

- Process Optimization

- Quality

The easiest one to calculate are the process concerning automation, because this leads to reduce time running the process and increments the ROI since day one of implementation.

If you are planning on installing a BPM solution, find out first on which of these areas your process or goal falls and proceed on calculating your ROI.