White Papers

21st Century Pain Points: It seems the more technology transforms the way you run your business, the higher the bar of customer expectations is rasied, and the faster the pace of change accelerates.

Change is the only constant. So said the ancient Greeks over 2,500 years ago. To be more precise, Heraclitus is famous for his doctrine that change is central to the universe, stated simply in his famous saying from approximately 500BC, "You cannot step twice into the same river." If anything, most of us would now observe that not only is change all around us but the pace of change is itself accelerating. The time available to respond to change or to effect change seems to be shorter and shorter.

Organizations of all types are today under increasing pressure to adapt frequently and in aggressive timescales. So why is this pressure increasing? What is agility and why is it imperative? How can your organization become more agile?

Some already see the potential for SharePoint as a strategic weapon. But they also see the slippery slope of “SharePoint Sprawl” and the brick walls created by the product’s rudimentary process support facilities. An internationally recognized BPM expert for more than 20 years and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Derek Miers explains how adding a comprehensive SharePoint-oriented Business Process Management (BPM) Suite to the mix solves many of the critical issues associated with widespread deployment of the platform.

In today’s economy, business process improvement is the #1 tool to cut costs.  Many organizations use lean BPM to meet this need. This study profiles three enterprises that saved $100,000s in time and money with lean BPM technology.

Although this guide is meant to stand by itself, it is even more powerful when combined with the Lombardi Blueprint process mapping tool.  For a 30-day free Blueprint trial, please visit http://www.lombardi.com/getblueprint.

Where do we start? Every company considering an investment in Business Process Management (BPM) practices and technology asks this question. How do you pick the process that best addresses corporate objectives, current problems, and feasibility concerns? To answer this question, you must engage people from every part of your business. You must be able to facilitate conversations about goals, responsibilities, problems, and, of course, processes. And these conversations must ultimately result in prioritization of projects and processes that everyone agrees have the biggest impact for your business. This is called process discovery. It is a crucial capability for your organization. In fact, process discovery is most crucial for companies that have committed to BPM as the question quickly evolves to – what do we do next? Answering that question is essential to on-going success with process management.

First Generation Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) have made great strides towards proving the power and value of externalizing business rule logic, and managing Decisions as critical corporate assets.  Still, shortcomings in 1st Generation BRMS ease-of-use and limitations in performance scalability have left the true potential of Business Rules unrealized.  With a code-free, model-driven architecture, Next Generation BRMS overcomes these shortcomings and fulfills the order-of-magnitude improvements in ROI, automation project time lines, agility, and business control that have been the promise and potential of Business Rules.

According to AMR Research, “Microsoft^© SharePoint^© is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft’s history, gaining more than 100 million client access licenses in a few years.” With its broad and growing presence, SharePoint has become a commonly accepted tool for end users, and is driving the demand for strategic applications that combine traditional content management with business process management. This whitepaper discusses how SharePoint can be transformed beyond content management and simple workflow and utilized as the cornerstone of an organization’s strategic process improvement project.

Over the years, as a result of working on many BPM (Business Process Management) initiatives worldwide, we have realized that many processes have project characteristics, demanding a unique approach in their management. We refer to these processes as Project-Oriented Processes (POP). BPM and PPM (Project Portfolio Management) systems each address the requirement of managing POP only partially. A single solution that provides the combined functionality of both BPM and PPM can alone meet the requirements fully. Extending a BPM system to include PPM functions can
therefore offer significant benefits.
Savvion’s comprehensive BPM System has been enhanced to:

• Combine the process and project definition functionality into a very simple and intuitive tool.
• Provide PPM functionality out-of-the-box.
• Meet the requirements of project-oriented processes that current BPM systems cannot meet.

This paper is intended for groups who want to make the business case for investing in BPM to drive process improvement. It provides an overview of the areas of benefit that companies can expect from BPM as well as concrete examples of value. It also compares the use of BPM to alternative approaches for driving process improvement. Finally, this paper provides a basic introduction to the costs associated with a BPM initiative.