Business-Process Management: Tools for Tough Times

Computerworld - Here's good news for CIOs looking to do more with less. Business-process management (BPM) software can pay for itself within a year or two by linking expensive legacy applications to new, more streamlined workflows, customers say.

With BPM, "you can get to the point where you can see, on a second-by-second basis, what's happening in your business and where in the business are the holdups and where process improvement [is needed]," says Dean Pipes, an integration architect at The Toro Co. in Bloomington, Minn. The yard equipment manufacturer uses a BPM system based on Vitria Technology Inc.'s BusinessWare to pool its purchases from vendors to negotiate volume discounts.

Shippers are turning to BPM "to lower costs and to leverage the investment they've made in their ERP systems," says Ted Barnicoat, CIO at trucking company Trimac Corp. in Calgary, Alberta. He expects a return on his $500,000 BPM investment within two years through reduced paperwork and additional business from customers who find Trimac's BPM-based ordering system easier to use than those of competitors.

BPM requires a flexible application architecture that can accommodate new applications as needs change. It also requires a tool with the right mix of modeling, code-generation, workflow and monitoring capabilities. Veterans recommend that companies start slowly, allowing enough time to understand existing workflows and train workers to use BPM systems.

BPM is "friendlier" than implementations of other major software packages such as ERP, says analyst Eric Austvold at Boston-based AMR Research Inc. If a business process needs to be changed after it's deployed, he says, "you don't have to go back to a huge IT organization to rewrite a whole bunch of code. It's usually minor tweaks to the process model."

BPM Basics

BPM software allows customers to graphically map business processes, such as issuing or collecting a bill; transform that visual map into an application or set of applications; and manage the electronic workflow to monitor that the work gets done and allow changes to the workflow. The software is offered by a variety of vendors, ranging from makers of traditional enterprise application integration software to business application suppliers and "pure-play" BPM vendors.

Reston, Va.-based NII Holdings (formerly Nextel International) two years ago began to integrate applications such as finance and billing to eliminate the costly and error-prone practice of entering data multiple times. The wireless communications company chose Plano, Texas-based Fuego Inc.'s namesake BPM package based on the strength of its business-process modeling and its connectivity to legacy applications, says Jorge Perez, vice president of IT and CIO at NII.