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BPM and Portal Technology

Processes - not applications - make the company go 'round

Companies routinely spend a lot of time—and money—creating ways of passing data between disparate applications. In most cases, what they are actually trying to do is merge disjointed business processes.

Portal Budgets That was the case at Tetra, a Blacksburg, Va.-based manufacturer of aquarium products, where 40 people in six departments—working on at least three different information systems—must approve every engineering change.

This led to a situation in which each department processed paper forms related to engineering changes and passed them to the next department through interoffice mail. Needless to say, this was a lengthy process plagued by the frequent loss of forms, and almost no ability to track the progress of individual projects.

Tetra solved this problem by installing a business process management (BPM) platform—one of several newly emerging strategies companies are using to avoid the task of building custom interfaces between software applications that must interact to create new business processes. Other approaches include linking applications via enterprise portals, and expanding the use of applications that were originally purchased for a single purpose.

A BPM platform was the right choice for Tetra because it allowed developing a new engineering change process without heavy involvement from IT professionals. "We're a relatively small company, with a small IT shop," says Charlie Lisanti, Tetra's information systems consultant. "We needed a tool that could be easily integrated with
our Oracle and [Microsoft] Windows environment."

The BPM platform Tetra chose is the e-Work solution from Metastorm. It configured a new engineering change process by linking information housed in Tetra's existing systems.

Metastorm says users access e-Work processes via a Web browser or e-mail system. Integration to other client- or server-based systems is by means of a comprehensive integration framework, while data for management reports is automatically collected by e-Work without the intervention of administrators or process designers.

Engineering change requests are now initiated by electronic forms sent to the desktops of those with review and approval authority. The forms appear on a "to-do list," Lisanti explains.

Built-in timers monitor whether workers complete a form, escalating requests to the next layer of management if the deadline passes. A "Watch List" shows where each outstanding change request is at any given moment.

Overall, says Lisanti, what used to take an average of five days to complete now takes about a day.

Such transformations aren't news to Peter Fingar, coauthor of Business Process Management: The Third Wave. "BPM is today's killer application," says Fingar. "Hard coding new processes takes too long—by the time you've done it, the situation may have changed."

Jeff Mills, VP of channel development for BPM vendor Bluespring Software, likens his company's platform to Microsoft's Visio business diagramming program. "It's a process design tool and presentational layer, allowing you to visualize and interact with processes across the enterprise, writing the required code 'on the fly'."

And that's not just within the enterprise, notes Fingar. "Companies don't work alone anymore: they collaborate with others. Process integration isn't about bridging the divide between enterprises—it's about obliterating it," he says.

Paper processes in play

But BPM software isn't the only means of integrating business processes. Boston-based AMR Research says portals can be used as a vehicle for ongoing business process improvement and refinement.

Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific, a 55,000-employee paper & building products company, used a portal framework to process supplier invoices.

eWork Business Process "We wanted to redeploy people from repetitive tasks that didn't add much value into areas of the business where they could actually contribute to the bottom line," says Ian Senior, a Georgia-Pacific procure-to-pay manager.

When it comes to tasks that don't add much value, it's hard to beat keying invoices into an SAP enterprise system—especially given 75,000 invoices a year. The goal: a Web-based portal that allows suppliers to trade electronically with Georgia-Pacific, invoicing on a self-service basis directly into SAP.

The portal provides two means of generating invoices, explains Daniel Ball, a director for Wax Digital, the U.K.-based systems integrator that helped Georgia-Pacific design and install the portal.

The portal can accept manual data entries over the Internet, but it also accepts invoices in bulk from suppliers' own enterprise systems. The system-to-system connection involves spreadsheets submitted into SAP as IDocs—SAP's standard data interchange format.

What's more, adds Senior, having automated validation routines built into the interface between the portal and SAP has cut the time spent resolving questions about data in invoices.

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