Monthly Archives: September 2005

Implementing the process in software

As I wrote on my latest article, business processes are governed by three pillars: People, Policies and Technology. I will show you now how these pillars come together in SkyXoft Procx.

Beginning first with the process, Procx let’s you define it like any usual business user would do it, using diagrams, pools, decisions, tasks, etc. Each of this activity has properties that can be modified easily using wizards type forms. This makes it very easy for non-technical users to define processes, change them and publishing.

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It’s letting finally the business user to take control of technology and adjust it as it is needed for his company and the changing of every day requirements.

The People

How would a business user think of modeling people in the company? Right. Organizational charts. In Procx, you define people the same way.

 

By doing this, you can modify users assign to processes without having to change the process. You define the managers and reporters in a flexible way so Procx know who he is the manager of a user and send him scaling messages as define in the process.

 

 

 

 

 

When you defined a task, you are actually assigning it to an employee of the organization; this is taken from the role expressed in the pool. This can be a role (from the organizational chart) or level (president, vicepresident, manager, director, etc.). Procx knows who the manager is and who his reports from the organizational chart are.

Finally the user receive the task (and an email if specified) using the Procx WorkList where he can approve (or complete) or reject the task by his consideration.

The Policies

How a business user would define policies in a process? Also right. Using decision boxes.

 

Procx has rule evaluator integrated so you can express complex rules and conditions using formulas and fields coming from forms and third party applications (using web services). You can make combinations of almost any field and rule to enforce policies in your organization, the natural way.

Technology

Procx is a software that can be downloaded from the SkyXoft web site and easily installed and, as you can see, easily and painlessly configure.

Finally is using technology to drive the business. Modeling your business using actual processes and at the same time, incrementing the operating performance of the company. With Procx, you will have a positive ROI since the first day of implementation, in any scenario and in any industry type.

The three pillars of a process

When we speak about the word process, the majority of us know what we are talking about. But must of the time, I would say most of the time, we underestimate the meaning of the word. This happen very often because of the commonality of talking about processes. Well, this is another blog site that talks about process, but we’ll try to talk about it in a different way. We’ll talk about it in how you can use processes in your business for increasing the operating performance, without waiting or paying those consultants to make the job.

I have always liked the analogy between processes and nature. If we observed, the process of nature are perfect. Only imagine the nine months of pregnancy of a human being. The amount of processes that goes on during this tome is high and taking account of the precision in which everyone happens makes it more incredible.

But this can only happen with thousands of years of evolution and refinement. It’s because of that in business there still to much to do with our processes.

Going deeper in business processes, we would see in our companies, they don’t go alone. They’re always accompanied by people, technology and policies.

People

People are in charge of executing processes in day to day, producing a final result that usually is an added value for the customer. Because people are the ones making decisions and by one way o another, initiates the process, they play an important part in it.

Policies

Policies play an important role in processes and companies. They mark execution in a defined frame and moment of time. Are the restrictions that a process submits according to the requirements the same process was initiated.

A policy also makes a process different from other companies. It’s possible that the buying process between two banks be the same. But policies about amount of approval by a manager makes different from another manager in another bank. The same goes with the loan process. Policies make them different from bank to bank.

Technology

These are the tools used by the process and the people for completing the process execution. Most of the time makes the process more efficient incrementing the performance. People use technology to make their work faster saving costs to the company.

The join of this three pillars form the base of the executing of efficient processes in businesses. The search for ways how to increase the performance of these three pillars will take us automatically directly to the increase performance of the process reducing everyday costs in our companies and we haven’t gone to any process reengineering.