White Papers

While a business process management system (BPMS) can save time and cut costs by governing process, it can’t decide what to do, given a particular circumstance. Today, many business decisions must be made amid change and uncertainty. How do you, for example, track and detect evolving fraud schemes? Price according to economic trends and risk levels? Keep up compliance with new regulations? Market to changing demographics?

The answer lies with business rules. A business rules management system (BRMS) enables the right decisions to be made quickly, giving businesses the agility to react to changing regulations or fluctuating markets, or to modify or launch a program, such as new pricing strategies for a loan product or insurance policy.

Software AG and FICO provide a single, seamless platform for maximizing the power and value their clients derive from their business process automation systems.  Choose the world’s top BRMS and BPM solutions combined in a single enterprise platform for greater quality, power and agility.

This white paper explores:

• The differences between rules and process management
• The importance of making changes independently to rules and process
• What to look for in a BRMS to gain the most value
• How to get started with rules management
• Case studies illustrating the value of adding rules to BPM
• The partnership between FICO and Software AG to provide a single, seamless enterprise platform for greater quality, power and agility.

Organizations often try to implement Enterprise Case Management by extending the capabilities of technology platforms not designed for the purpose. Some buy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions that meet a departmental need today but which cannot extend effectively beyond that initial need. Many more look to utilize Microsoft SharePoint and/ or Dynamics CRM for Enterprise Case Management. However, this requires considerable custom software development and the result is inadequate for today’s case management needs, lacks the flexibility to adapt as needs change, and lumbers the organization with inflexibility and an unacceptably high total cost of ownership (TCO).

Microsoft technologies provide powerful and valued support for much organizational work today. Yet complementary technology is required to meet the demanding requirements of case management work. Singularity delivers solutions which leverage the strengths of SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and other Microsoft technologies while complementing them with Singularity’s Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) to meet the key challenges of case management. The result is an Enterprise Case Management Platform built on Microsoft-based technologies which delivers on today’s challenges, allows cost effective adaptation to future needs as they arise, and reduces TCO.

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?

Case Management is critical to the work of many organizations but is often intensely manual, paper-driven and plagued by delay and poor visibility. Primarily this is because Case Management requires supporting knowledge work, where many of the important steps take place in people’s heads or through collaboration with colleagues, making knowledge intensive processes difficult to analyze and structure. Also, because cases are primarily driven by human participants reacting to changing context, cases do not follow a predetermined path defined in advance – they lack predictability, making them difficult to automate. In this white paper we define case management in more detail, relate it to the broader subject of how knowledge workers do their jobs, and identify the characteristics that have made knowledge intensive processes difficult to automate in the past. We show how a Business Process Management approach with specific support for knowledge intensive processes provides the most appropriate solution to Case Management. Finally we describe the specific features that make the Singularity Process Platform the leading solution for case management in the market.

Most large corporations are at risk of capture by inertia—the force that holds back progress and often seems to overcome once successful organizations as they grow. The organization captured by inertia is characterized by lumbering, ineffective processes. Even the most successful and effective organizations are subject to some degree of inertia’s dragging effect.

But there is an effective weapon against inertia for organizations that retain their determination to succeed and to be on top of their game: agility. Agility is a key attribute of successful public and private organizations in the modern world, and the need to increase agility is a top and urgent priority on most management teams’ agendas.

This paper first appeared as a chapter in the book, “Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done”.

www.MasteringTheUnpredictable.com

 

Business Process Management (BPM) is in a period of transition.  For the past several years, companies have been getting familiar with BPM, undertaking specific projects to address “burning process problems”, or launching tightly-scoped projects to understand the capabilities of BPM Suites (BPMSs) and how they should be used. The successes of those initial projects and pilots have given companies the confidence and vision to take their BPM efforts to the next level – moving beyond that first project to a broader program encompassing multiple projects that are part of a larger business process improvement initiative.  That leads to the logical questions:  “What processes should we focus on next?  How do we scale the discovery, development, deployment, and usage of process applications across the company?  What are the best practices we should follow to maximize reuse across projects to achieve economies of scale?” This whitepaper describes how the movement toward broad BPM Programs has changed what companies need in terms of BPM technology and “know how”.  We describe 3 steps for establishing a solid foundation for a BPM Program that will enable your organization to scale its process improvement capability in a way that will deliver maximum value to the business.

As market forces continue to change, business leaders are searching for the best ways to deal with uncertainty and deliver improved performance. They realize that human capital represents one of their most important assets. Knowledge work now accounts for 25% to 50% of all work, with the percentage growing. This paper addresses how businesses are taking a hard look at adaptive case management solutions to better serve knowledge work requirements, reaching beyond traditional technology and mindset to be more dynamic and collaborative.

While the benefits of BPMS for a wide range of processes are well established, an important class of unstructured, or case-based, processes have not benefited because of the limitations of conventional BPM Suites. This report, written by Bruce Silver, an independent industry analyst covering BPMS and founder of BPMessentials.com, describes the differences between Case Management and conventional BPM, including what to look for in a BPM solution to truly support case-based initiatives. BPM tends to focus on repeatable, structured processes, such as resource utilization, standardization, compliance, and end-to-end performance visibility. Case management; however, is applied to more dynamic, unstructured and ad-hoc processes that are dependent on human judgment to information contained in documents, such as customer complaints, claims exception processing, underwriting and so forth.

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.

Imagine a company in which each department spoke its own language: engineering, sales, customer service, legal, HR, and so on. I don’t mean the technical lingo specific to each function, but a different language for describing the most basic activities they perform: how their business processes work. Hard to get everyone of the same page? You bet. Well it doesn’t have to be. Written by Bruce Silver, an independent industry analyst covering BPMS and founder of BPMessentials.com, this paper explains the business value of standards-based business process modeling standards, tools, and methodologies, and how to use them effectively to improve operational performance, compliance, innovation, and agility.