Serena

Thomson Financial, a subsidiary of Thomson Corporation, employs 8,700 employees, delivering integrated information, technology, and applications to the financial services industry. A few years ago, the company analyzed its business processes and found common business challenges: issues of accountability and visibility, as well as “handoff” or workflow breakdowns between people, departments, and systems. While these are common issues, the company addressed them in a creative and unique way.

With a focus on streamlining sales, services, and operational processes, the company took a traditional back-office technology tool—Serena Mashup Composer—and employed it as a front-office solution to engage employees, eliminate handoffs and lock down processes. As a result, Thomson Financial has seen a double digit increase in employee productivity gains along with many other benefits. Today, thirty four percent of the workforce uses Mashup Composer to manage day-to-day activities.

We encourage you to view Clay Richardson, Forrester Analyst specializing in BPM, for this on demand webinar sponsored by Serena Software. Clay will discuss these changing trends and needs, and the key elements organizations need to consider when looking to reduce their costs, streamline their processes and get the most out of their people and systems.

On Feb. 17, 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law. For your agency, this means an influx of funds to fuel programs and activities with needed resources to spur economic recovery.  
 
But for every taxpayer dollar spent, your agency must live up to a new set of extremely high standards for transparency, speed and accountability. You’ll need to report to the newly established Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and also the American taxpayer (through the web site Recovery.org) on where the money is being spent and how it’s meeting the specific goals and targets outlined for the program. And as never before, your agency needs to be able to prove its programs are operating without waste, inefficiencies or unnecessary spending.  

Businesses cope with manual, repetitive tasks to get the job done. Email, conference calls, and “walking the cubes” are too frequently the process for requesting information, getting approvals and checking project status. Time and resources are wasted, errors abound, and everyone is less productive.
 
Automating these everyday business processes is the way to improve productivity and gain efficiency. Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) systems can provide a solution, but the cost and complexity to implement simple processes is often too expensive for many business units.

As CIO Insight recently stated, “Reducing costs and increasing productivity are the leading drivers of business process improvement.” These driving factors have never been more relevant in a time of tight or decreasing budgets, an uncertain economy, and many organizations looking to cut costs.  
 
With additional staff and resources, as well as huge initiatives being cut back, improving Business Processes offers real solutions to reduce costs, streamline current processes, and improve productivity even during a downturn.
 
The good news is that optimizing your business has never been easier. Serena Business Mashups delivers Lean Business Process Management with easy business process development, low cost of deployment, and fast return on investment. Designed to give you everything you need to easily design, execute, monitor and improve your business processes without the massive overhead and cost of custom development or a traditional Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), which can take years to deliver a return on
investment.  

Serena makes it simple to deliver collaborative process-centric web applications inexpensively so you can drive productivity and reduce costs. This paper provides a technical product overview of how we make this possible through Serena Business Mashups. With a focus on the technical contributions of Serena Business Mashups and how they further Development Process Management, Lean Business Process Management and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) investments, this information is relevant to process professionals within IT that are tasked with coordinating work across teams and the systems they use.