MAKING BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT REAL: HOW PEOPLE POWER THE PROCESS

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1 W H I T E P A P E R > MAKING BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT REAL: HOW PEOPLE POWER THE PROCESS An overview of Savvion BusinessManager 7.5

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary 1 The Promise of Improvement 1 Your People Will Show You What to Do 2 The Progress Savvion Solution 3 Progress Savvion Process Modeler 5 Progress Savvion Process Asset Manager 7 Progress Savvion BusinessManager Platform 9 BPM Studio 9 Progress Savvion Business Rules Management System 11 BPM Server 12 BPM Portal 12 Progress Savvion Business Expert 14 Keeping the Team Involved Ensures That Initiatives Succeed 15 Success with Savvion 15 Hundreds of Companies across Dozens of Industries 16 Next Steps 16

3 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Purpose This white paper highlights how Business Process Management (BPM) can successfully identify and improve business processes based on how people work. The paper also illustrates the enabling role that Progress Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 plays in making BPM successful in real world situations. Intended Audience This paper can help BPM business and IT owners, project team leaders and members, managers, business analysts and consultants working in financial services, manufacturing and other sales driven organizations, as well as any business persons balancing quality control, regulatory compliance and profit pressures. THE PROMISE OF IMPROVEMENT: A GREAT THEORY THAT NEEDS HELP WORKING IN THE REAL WORLD Business improvement, higher efficiency, quality and customer satisfaction while cutting costs should be the goal of every person working. What s not to like about conducting business faster, better and more profitably? That s why so many ways of nurturing business improvement have sprung up over the years: Total Quality Management (TQM), process re-engineering, Six Sigma, etc. Each purports to encourage and track improvement initiatives; hence all have taken hold at one time or the other. Yet, despite avid acceptance in corporations, few manage to achieve their claims outside management texts and PowerPoint presentations. In those confines, issues can be simplified to the point that broad solutions seem to work. But, of course, such neat simplification ignores the messy realities of day-to-day business. Instead of making our jobs better and more efficient, the initiatives feel like work on top of the real work. Naturally, people, teams and departments fail to provide inputs while managers and consultants running the projects gloss over or make assumptions about the missing information.

4 2 Very few organizations are really ready for business improvement initiatives. People have never had to think in terms of process. They have difficulty in articulating their current processes, much less optimal ones. Best practices exist only in their heads, not as documents for others to learn from and follow. In addition, success at the executive level often has little to do with the performance of the organization. Worse, senior management does not have tools to correlate high-level metrics with the work people do every day. Pre-packaged systems often perpetuate these scenarios. The socalled solutions tend to be monolithic and difficult to adapt to individual organizations. They do not allow for special circumstances, which constitute the norm in business. Little wonder then that most organizations shrug off process improvement exercises. Solutions get released with fanfare and are lauded for a time. But in the end they are typically ignored as work continues pretty much the same way it always has. YOUR PEOPLE WILL SHOW YOU WHAT TO DO PROVIDED THEY HAVE THE MEANS TO COMMUNICATE AND COLLABORATE WITH YOU The best way to improve any business is to meet people where they work and understand how they think. Once you do that, you can let them contribute to improving the functions they perform. Appreciating these people is an important step in creating a culture that encourages business improvement. It is a human tendency that people understand and care about things that impact them daily or significantly. They need to know what s in it for IN BUSINESS, PEOPLE EXECUTE THE SAME BASIC PROCESS.

5 3 me? At all levels, people follow the same basic process: take one or more inputs, use that information to determine what to do, and then do it. The vast majority of people in any organization are relatively unconcerned with what happens outside their individual roles. But almost universally those same people care passionately about what they do because it reflects on them. As a result, they always want to do better. That is the key to managing process improvement. Real improvement happens when people are given the tools to define their jobs and imagine ways to make them better. Often, people don t know how to fix things. They only know what is holding them back. Even if they can t visualize a specific solution, people instinctively know what makes their jobs easier, faster and more efficient. They want to make it better because it improves their world. It is important to recognize that the people who do the work in an organization often have valuable insights. The most successful project improvement teams manage to capture such inputs and use them to solve process issues. Such a collaborative input method is the best way to nurture real process improvements. Improving a business starts with taking away pain and allowing people to do their jobs better. That means, understanding the process as it stands today, finding bottlenecks in it, and then testing potential improvements to it. Once these improvement ideas receive endorsement from the relevant constituents, solutions can be assembled and deployed by the people who have a vested interest in seeing them succeed. In a nutshell, that s what Business Process Management (BPM) is all about. BPM helps make business improvement real. It complements other management progrems (TQM, Six Sigma) and actually makes them more effective. THE PROGRESS SAVVION SOLUTION: PEOPLE FIND THEIR OWN ANSWERS Progress Savvion has created a comprehensive BPM suite, Progress Savvion BusinessManager 7.5, which allows people to collaborate on process improvement ideas, test and roll out real-world solutions, and control their daily process-driven business activities. It puts role-specific tools directly into the hands of those who know the process best so they can make an impact on the business.

6 4 SAVVION BUSINESSMANAGER SUITE SAVVION BRMS SAVVION BUSINESS EXPERT SAVVION BUSINESSMANAGER PLATFORM BPM STUDIO SAVVION PROCESS MODELER BPM PORTAL SAVVION PROCESS ASSET MANAGER BPM SERVER SAVVION DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT For the business person these tools include: > > The easy-to-use Progress Savvion Process Modeler, which helps them model and simulate their business processes so they can test their improvement ideas. > > Process Modeler Tabular view and flow view for a process description that allows users to define the process very easily. > > Process Modeler project-oriented process capabilities so that users who have the need to define processes with project management functions can specify their requirements. It supports specification of milestones, phases and provides timeline views. > > The easy-to-use, Web-based Progress Savvion Process Asset Manager, which helps people across functional areas share and socialize process improvement ideas. > > Business-driven performance scorecards, analytics and task management that help people control and manage daily business activities and process exceptions.

7 5 More technical people also have access to the feature-rich BPM Studio, which ensures rapid assembly and quick rollout of process applications. The studio supports sophisticated form designer, rules, integration, and web services and ensures quick deployment. Using Savvion BusinessManager, people can quickly transform and easily deploy their processes as applications on the Web. Then these process applications can be accessed easily and widely via portals or wireless devices. Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 ranks as the easiest and quickest way for business people to collaborate on and control process improvements. BUSINESS EXECUTIVE END USERS PROJECT MANAGERS BUSINESS ANALYST IT TEAMS Savvion BusinessManager creates an environment where project teams can drive business improvement through constant, simultaneous cycles of collaboration. Planning, identifying the best practices, prototyping and refining working solutions flow among the team with feedback at each stage improves output at the next stage. Tight integration of all phases of the process lifecycle, coupled with industry process templates, enables Savvion customers to quickly move from initial process discovery to production in as little as 30 days while seeing a 200% to 300% return on investment (ROI). SAVVION PROCESS MODELER In Savvion BusinessManager 7.5, collaboration starts with the Savvion Process Modeler, a high-quality business process designer featuring an innovative, code-free interface. With it, a business person can describe a business problem in a few minutes. There is no complex configuration or code to learn. You can either use its patent pending Tabular view to quickly describe your process or use the

8 6 diagram with drag-n-drop approach. These capabilities allow people to focus on the issues at hand rather than getting lost in the technicalities. People throughout the organization can easily install Savvion Process Modeler on their office desktops or laptops. Savvion makes it easy for just about anyone to jot down thoughts on a process and share them with others. Savvion Process Modeler enables people to: > > Model how the business works and how to improve it today. Savvion Process Modeler empowers people to create a visual representation of their business process using process-flow diagrams. These diagrams contain activities with the time and resources required to carry out each step in a process. In addition, business people with a vision for how a solution should be built can quickly put together Web-based forms to communicate how their solutions should work. There are number of built-in analysis tools like process path and 360 degree view that help you to understand and analyze your processes.

9 7 > > Simulate the bottomline impact of their process improvement ideas. Business people can test their process models against defined loads (10,000 orders, for example) while visually observing potential bottlenecks and contention points. Simulation reports include costs and resource utilization metrics to accurately predict performance and productivity. > > Document best practices, communicate requirements and comply with regulations. Process models form the starting point for applications. Savvion Process Modeler automatically generates documentation to communicate detailed requirements to anyone affected by the process. This documentation can also be used to maintain compliance with industry and government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and HIPAA. > > Optimize and improve existing practices. Savvion Process Modeler makes it easy for people to check ongoing process performance and optimize the process as needed. Business people can simply make changes to the process models, enabling application and process revisions. PROGRESS SAVVION PROCESS ASSET MANAGER Progress Savvion Process Asset Manager extends the core capabilities of Savvion Process Modeler by enabling cross-functional teams to share and socialize process-modeling projects. Any work done in Savvion

10 8 Process Modeler can be saved to a common location and reused by other people in your team. Business people using Savvion Process Modeler can search this process repository and apply best practices to their own efforts. Teams, particularly those spread over in multiple locations, are well served by this distributed design concept. People in different offices as well as those who travel often can check models out of Savvion Process Asset Manager and make modifications offline. When they re satisfied with the changes, they can check the revised models in, making their contributions instantly available to other team members. Savvion Process Asset Manager enables people to: > > Archive the organization s current policies and procedures. It provides version control for evolving processes. This knowledge base contains the operational best practices of the organization, enabling evaluation and reuse of a wide range of process models. > > Collaborate on process improvement ideas across boundaries. Savvion Process Asset Manager provides a browser-based capability

11 9 for people to browse, modify and adopt models created by other people, regardless of whether they are in the same department or location. > > Search for pre-existing best practices. Savvion Process Asset Manager makes it easy for business people to find and leverage work that has been done in other parts of the business. SAVVION BUSINESSMANAGER PLATFORM Once Savvion Process Modeler has been used to identify and begin the form improvement ideas, the Savvion BusinessManager Platform helps turn those ideas into deployable processes. The Savvion BusinessManager Platform brings powerful IT tools to bear that extend work done by business people. BPM STUDIO BPM Studio offers a visual development environment for assembling and rolling out practical process improvement solutions with BPM Server. Based on the popular Eclipse IDE, BPM Studio is intended for the more technical users, both business analysts interested in configuring running applications as well as IT professionals focused on deep systems integration. BPM Studio is geared specifically for application developers. However, remember that Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 also includes Savvion Process Modeler, the process designer for business people. That leaves BPM Studio to support collaborative design among IT professionals, business analysts, Web designers, and solutions providers. The key features of BPM Studio including visual process and business rule definition, Web services integration, performance metric and report design, and document management are accessible via the intuitive wizard-based interface. BPM Studio manages all version control and supports process model sharing with users of Savvion Process Modeler, using the common repository.

12 10 Specifically, BPM Studio enables technical professionals to: > > Leverage ideas stored in the Savvion Process Asset Manager. Process models are completely interoperable between Savvion Process Modeler and BPM Studio. IT staff can take improvement ideas from the people that know the situation best and enrich them to create usable solutions. BPM Studio supports the same simulation features as Savvion Process Modeler. Therefore, different improvement ideas can be tested against each other to identify the best alternatives. BPM Studio allows collaborative design among IT professionals through its intuitive, wizard-based interface. > > Identify data flow by defining the dataslots used throughout the process. Data fields can be populated from any source, including databases, external applications, and people. > > Integrate with external systems and Web services. Various adapters are included, and custom adaptors can be obtained

13 11 from third parties or created using the built-in adapter development framework. > > Define event-based business rules for managing dynamic aspects. Savvion Business Rules enable people to easily define and execute business policies and rules as intelligent components of Savvion BusinessManager process flows. Business rules are accessible either through the easy-to-learn natural language interface or the easy-to-use rule wizards that support common rule patterns. > > Design forms for human steps. Developers have the option of using system-generated forms, creating forms with the built-in form designer or customizing forms with any off-the-shelf form technology. Form ideas developed by business people in Savvion Process Modeler are available in BPM Studio. Again, developers have the option of using them as they are or enriching them. It is also possible to provide interfaces for wireless devices for particular tasks. > > BPM Studio is customizable and extensible. New tabs with reusable components such as adapters and rule wizards can be added easily to extend and adapt the tool to various industries and domains. SAVVION BUSINESS RULES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (BRMS) Managing business decisions is one of the key requirements to develop efficient business process solutions. Decisions are an intrinsic part of your business so the rules behind those decisions must also be an integral part of your business processes. When you design business processes, most often you need to model decisions into them. These decisions could be simple routing decisions or could be more complex business decisions like Does this order need an approval? or Is this customer a high value customer? or Is the customer eligible for special discounts? As decisions get more complex, the rule execution needs to be done outside your process model and the resulting decision brought back to the process to take it to the next work activity. Externalizing the rules behind complex decisions makes your process diagrams easier to comprehend and maintain. It also allows reuse of decisions and rules in multiple applications for rapid solution development and improved business agility. Savvion Business Rules Management System provides a rich

14 12 development environment for application developers and technology savvy business users to define and create their rule projects. With the BRMS Studio, you can use a model-driven approach to create rules that can be configured and deployed independently of your process application and can also be used across applications. Savvion BRMS is a highly scalable rules management system suited for enterprise-class, rule-based applications. BPM SERVER BPM Server is a versatile set of Java-based engines that manage running process applications. The server provides a rich set of services for executing and managing business process applications, including integration, workflow, and business rules. The BPM Server also includes Web applications for administration. BPM PORTAL BPM Portal provides business analysts and managers clear visibility and increased control. Using BPM Portal they can analyze process metrics and respond to problems and changing business conditions. These tools enable concurrent reporting of time, volume and informational data from a variety of applications, to determine if business processes are running at peak efficiency and meeting strategic goals.

15 13 BPM Portal enables people to: > > Monitor business activity in real time through a Web portal interface > > Measure performance with pre-built scorecards > > Analyze real-time data with a variety of out-of-the-box reports > > Collaborate with colleagues to complete their tasks > > Drill down into data with a visual query tool or use complementary business intelligence tools for more detailed data analysis > > Optimize processes by providing the visibility and metrics to make improvement decisions Every business has its own ways of measuring progress, according to its own objectives and goals. You could choose to eliminate the white spaces in a process, reducing time to completion. Or you might opt to add new steps to ensure compliance with a key signoff. Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 has the tools to quickly change business rules, alter process flow, and then modify and redeploy processes currently in operation. A manager can look at a list of process instances, get a color-coded status map for a specific process instance, then drill down into the active work step and change it. Each application in Savvion BusinessManager 7.5 can have one or more designated managers. Any person with the appropriate access rights can perform management functions using the Web interface of BPM Portal. Management functions include the ability to control and influence the behavior of applications. For example, a manager can change performers of tasks, change priority of work steps and process instances, and complete or suspend a process instance all in real time. BPM Portal provides more than 40 standard reports to help business people monitor process efficiency and effectiveness. It includes a visual query tool for browsing the Savvion BusinessManager event repository and generating reports. Whether these custom-defined reports are specific to one application or give a view across multiple applications, they can be saved for easy single-click access.

16 14 Managers receive scorecards for monitoring business activity, tracking metrics and adjusting behaviors where problems exist. A manager may also be inserted into the escalation process, providing a manual override of a corrective process before it is launched. PROGRESS SAVVION BUSINESS EXPERT Progress Savvion Business Expert gives visibility to the things most important to you as a business person and allows you to take a practical approach to business improvements. Savvion Business Expert enables practical business improvements that work within the realities of your organization and culture. It allows the business people to define business metrics and monitor them in real time. It alerts managers if there is any anomaly and suggests corrective actions to improve the business processes. Business Expert provides visibility to process anomalies so that you can instantly know where to target improvement efforts. It provides businessdriven, Web-based analytics so that business people do not have to rely on IT to identify and analyze problems. Most important, it puts business users in control at critical junctures to identify and easily implement enhanced solutions until the rest of the organization can catch up. Business Expert operates on real-time processes and business data.

17 15 For organizations with an existing business intelligence infrastructure, critical process data is easily integrated with third-party reporting engines including Business Objects, Cognos, and Crystal Reports, as well as Javabased reporting technologies. KEEPING THE TEAM INVOLVED ENSURES THAT INITIATIVES SUCCEED Savvion BusinessManager provides unprecedented visibility for teams. Traditional development processes discourage people. Business executives and project teams are frustrated by complex vendor methodologies that rely on unwieldy information-gathering approaches and provide little to no visibility on project progress. The result is inaccurately scoped process solutions and slow deployments. The Savvion approach is different. This approach provides repeatable results in as little of 30 days. Your team will experience rapid ROI on your first initiative and will become self-sufficient quickly. With Savvion, you can achieve success. SUCCESS WITH SAVVION Collaboration gets people involved yet control produces fast results Savvion BusinessManager is the easiest way for people to adopt Business Process Management as a competitive business asset. It focuses on helping people get their jobs done. People from all parts of an organization can work together to identify and test improvement ideas. As the best ideas are found, Savvion interconnected tools allow teams to quickly assemble and roll out solutions. Equally important, Savvion BusinessManager puts an emphasis on control of core processes, allowing management of rapid change without surprises. This approach is unique because it is based on the belief that control is entirely personal. When people have all the tools to get their jobs done and the ability to monitor their performance, they can rapidly assess the daily business changes and take quick action to adapt to them.

18 16 Little wonder that the Savvion system helps put process into action fast, often delivering measurable business return within 90 days. HUNDREDS OF COMPANIES ACROSS DOZENS OF INDUSTRIES Savvion products are at work today in a robust customer and partner base. As the BPM trailblazer, Progress Savvion moves enterprises beyond ordinary BPM with groundbreaking business-critical software, solutions and services that make them more competitive and cost-efficient. Especially in tough economic times, Savvion solutions enable business and IT to collaboratively deploy process improvement initiatives in as few as 30 days and deliver a return on investment as high as 300%. More than 300 of the world s top-performing companies, including 22 of the Fortune 100, choose Savvion to operate more productively and profitably. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Savvion can be reached at or NEXT STEPS Download and Use Savvion Process Modeler You can begin using the Savvion approach to business improvement immediately and see how Savvion Process Modeler can help you. Try it in your own organization and on your own issues. See for yourself how easy it is to take the first step. Contact Savvion for relevant best practices Because the Savvion approach has been adopted by hundreds of companies across dozens of industries, our representatives can draw from a wide range of best practices to provide you with solutions relevant to your company size, structure and field.

19 PROGRESS SOF T WARE Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) is a global software company that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. Our goal is to enable our customers to capitalize on new opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. Progress offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class infrastructure software spanning event-driven visibility and real-time response, open integration, data access and integration, and application development and management all supporting on-premises and SaaS/cloud deployments. Progress maximizes the benefits of operational responsiveness while minimizing IT complexity and total cost of ownership. WORLDWIDE HEADQUARTERS Progress Software Corporation, 14 Oak Park, Bedford, MA USA Tel: Fax: On the Web at: For regional international office locations and contact information, please refer to the Web page below: /worldwide Progress, Savvion, Savvion BusinessManager and Business Making Progress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its affiliates or subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Specifications subject to change without notice Progress Software Corporation and/or its subsidiaries or affiliates. All rights reserved. Rev. 05/