Business Process Management

Defining Process

2010-01-27T05:39:00.000-08:00

The simplest and easiest to grasp definition of process manufacturing is that, once the output is produced, it cannot be distilled back to its basic components. In other words, once you put it together, you cannot take it apart. Think about it. Once you make a can of soda, you cannot return it back to its basic components such as carbonated water, citric acid, potassium benzoate, aspartame, and other ingredients. You cannot put the juice back into the orange. A car or computer, on the other hand, can be disassembled and the parts, to a large extent, can be returned to stock. Process manufacturing is common in the food, beverage, chemical, pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods, and biotechnology industries. In process manufacturing, we talk about ingredients, not parts; formulas, not bill of materials; and bulk, not EA(each)'s. You may think that we are simply mincing words and terminology. But, as we will see later on this discussion, there is more than a subtle difference in their impact on manufacturing.

Exact Acquires Vanguard Solutions Group

2009-12-06T11:54:00.001-08:00

Exact not only expects Vanguard to continue to sell GPS through these existing partners, but also expects Vanguard to expand its partner network. Balio, president and general manager of the new division defines the new relationship as "co-opetition", which, as the name suggestions, involves both cooperation and competition. He explains that while "Vanguard's ERP partners will compete with Exact for new accounts � they will also cooperate with Vanguard in enhancing their product offerings. It has been and continues to be our objective to provide our partners with a complete, integrated analytics offering. Our partners use our analytics to enhance the value of their products to both their existing customers and new accounts. We are dedicated to maintaining the partnership relationships to the benefit of all involved."

Prior to the Vanguard acquisition, in mid 2005, Exact acquired other companies. In August, it took a majority interest in Modulair Easy Access B.V., a logistics and warehouse software firm, while in June. It also acquired Kooijman Software, a software provider to construction and education organizations, and AllSolutions, a software provider to non-profit and service organizations. In May 2004, Exact acquired the Treadstone Group, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based (US) IT consulting and systems integration firm. All these acquisitions contribute to an incremental, rather than dramatic, revenue increase, and also to a gradual geographic coverage expansion.

The acquisitions follow the appointment of Rajesh Patel as corporate CEO on July 1, 2005. In a keynote address at the Engage 2005 annual user conference in early October, Patel said that Exact was firmly focused on the mid-market and that a core part of the company's growth strategy is not to be "distracted by [the] digestion or integration issues" caused by rampant acquisitions for market share purposes. He also stated that Exact has no ambition to climb up the market.

The Wizardry of Business Process Management

2009-12-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

The business process management (BPM) market is sizzling hot, with Gartner Dataquest estimating its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 13 percent in 2009. In fact, almost all leading BPM vendors have been buzzing about their unprecedented growth and profitability, especially amidst the ongoing economic drought.

It is truly difficult to argue against the need for companies from all walks of life to improve their business processes. Doing “better, faster, and cheaper” is the “slogan du jour.”

In his keynote presentation during the recent Lombardi Driven Online virtual conference, Lombardi Software’s CEO Ron Favaron referred to BPM as “Business Pressure Management.” That pretty much says it all. Logically, to the end of managing business pressures, Lombardi offers its broad BPM suite called TeamWorks Enterprise Edition [evaluate this product].

I also recently attended a Webcast by Appian Corporation, possibly the first BPM company to deliver process, knowledge, content, collaboration, and analytics capabilities in a comprehensive suite, Appian Enterprise [evaluate this product] and its software as a service (SaaS) counterpart Appian Anywhere. I particularly liked one slide in the presentation deck wherein the eight bullet points’ first letters cleverly spelled out the mnemonic REMEMBER (why to deploy BPM now) as follows:

* Retain customers
* Enhance standardization (and consistency)
* Measure business performance
* Evaluate components of processes (subprocesses)
* Manage all elements of the business
* Bottom line improvements
* Eliminate bottlenecks
* Rapidly deploy new services (and processes).

Indeed, these are some of the typical benefits of deploying BPM systems, but the trouble, called the lack of clarity and consensus, starts with the quandary about what exactly constitutes BPM, and what exact parts and capabilities of BPM help achieve those benefits? In other words, are there more important and better BPM suites and/or components vs. those that are of less importance?

In plain English, BPM entails all methodologies and tools that help businesses improve their processes. Depending on the context, BPM can be regarded as a management discipline, a technology, or even both. If one defines BPM as an approach to methodically design, implement, execute, control, and improve business processes, then one can argue that it is a management discipline. In addition, there exists a raft of accompanying IT tools to support this discipline in all of its abovementioned stages.

Extreme BPM Definitions

Simple as that, right? Well, not really, and my concern with the BPM word-use is semantics. Namely, so many people might still mean “business process modeling tools to help us with radical business process re-engineering (BPR),” which was all the rage back in the early 1990s. Indeed, this erstwhile people-centric approach of managing the overall business, independent of the specific technology or tools that are used to support it, has since gone out of fashion.

Namely, the problem is that the abstract world modeled in modeling tools often has not much to do with real-life business processes and typically cannot be implemented. If a business process analyst models a company all the way in, e.g., IDS Scheer AG’s ARIS tools, by the time he or she is done the model might already be obsolete.

And by the time the company implements the model, the dynamic economic environment will have already changed. Yet the model on paper (a bunch of flowcharts) must be deployable, usable, and maintainable in production. Business processes are about dynamics (or business agility, if you will) and a drawn flowchart is anything but dynamic.

On the other hand, the purely integration-centric approach of providing a way for software to communicate and execute automated workflow to accomplish discrete tasks via integration and process orchestration is not nirvana either. Many other vendors might mean that BPM is “an effective way for us to re-package our traditional enterprise application integration (EAI) tools under the guise of a service oriented architecture (SOA) orchestration project.”

IBM’s BPM suite, Fujitsu Interstage, TIBCO Software, Software AG (formerly webMethods), SAP NetWeaver BPM, and Oracle BPM come to mind here. These integration-centric BPM providers have often been accused by pure-play BPM suite providers of primarily targeting IT departments to try to sell BPM as a matter of service orchestration.

Yet, the true value of BPM should be to empower business users. To be fair, these larger companies have recently acquired companies that provide BPM software aimed at business users, and I imagine the competition from larger companies will only intensify.

For instance, zooming in on Oracle’s BPM product strategy, the idea here is to offer a complete and integrated BPM platform that caters to system-centric, human-centric, document-centric, and decision-centric business processes (workflows) in a single runtime environment. The suite is aimed at business owners and developers to collaborate, to define processes across systems and lines of business (LoBs), and to improve business process efficiency by modeling, executing, monitoring, analyzing, simulating, visualizing, and optimizing business processes.

But, by digging deeper into the Oracle SOA Governance suite and Oracle BPM suite, it is possible to note so many identical components, differing mainly in the fact that Oracle BPM has to also accommodate human interventions. The Oracle BPM suite can be bolstered optionally with the business process analysis (BPA), design, and modeling capabilities via the partnering IDS Scheer’s ARIS tool (e.g., for achieving Six Sigma compliance).

IDS Sheer’s blog post recently tried to demarcate the line between BPA and BPM suites as follows:

“The primary purpose of Business Process Analysis (BPA) tools is to visualize, analyze and improve business processes. BPA tools help translate every day business complexity into structured models (scope: from business to model). They provide insight into an enterprise’s structure – i.e. how strategy, products and services, processes, roles, information and systems are related and influence one another. By creating a single point of truth, BPA tools strive to improve the communication between various stakeholders in a company, safeguard corporate knowledge and support decision-making and change management. Most notable user groups are business managers, process owners, quality managers, business analysts, risk & compliance officers and enterprise architects. BPA tools have rich semantics in order to fulfill a broad information need. They enable users to visualize and analyze the enterprise from different point of views, e.g. from a performance-, risk & compliance- or architecture perspective.

Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) on the other hand serve a different purpose and target a different audience. While they do offer modeling capabilities, their primary purpose is to automate, execute and monitor business processes based on technical models (scope: from model to execution). Notable user groups are business- and information analysts, process engineers, software developers and system administrators. BPMS do not offer such rich semantics as BPA tools in the sense that their metamodel does not comprise concepts for performance management, risk & compliance management or architecture management. Then again, these concepts are not required to automate processes.”

A Fragmented and Crowded Market

Thus, the market for BPM software and related implementation, consulting, and training services is intensely competitive, rapidly changing, and highly fragmented. Every BPM aspirant likely encounters competition from internal IT departments of potential or existing customers that may seek to modify existing systems or develop proprietary systems in a do-it-yourself (DIY) fashion.

The process improvement adoption has started lately in many IT departments via implementing a set of concepts and policies for managing IT infrastructure, development, and operations. Some of these sets and disciplines are Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT Service Management (ITSM), and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT).

Moreover, there are a number of enterprise-wide initiatives around process improvement disciplines such as Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), etc. These frameworks of concepts and policies often require IT support in order to make operational best-practice workflows, while the linkage to business users is critical.

The market consists of a number of established BPM suite providers such as Appian, Ascentn Corporation, Cordys, Global 360, Lombardi, Metastorm, Savvion, Pegasystems, and Ultimus, to name some. In addition to the abovementioned SOA middleware and enterprise architecture (EA) providers, internal IT departments, and BPA and process mining vendors (e.g., IDS Scheer or Pallas-Athena respectively), BPM suite vendors also compete with companies that target the customer interaction and workflow markets, and companies focused on Business Rules Engine (BRE) such as Corticon Technologies, FICO (formerly Fair Isaac Corporation), and the ILOG division of IBM.

Competition additionally comes from professional service organizations that develop custom BPM software in conjunction with rendering consulting services. To further muddle the picture, there is a number of Enterprise Content Management (ECM)-based vendors such as the Documentum division of EMC Corporation, FileNet, the division of IBM’s Information Management Group, Adobe LiveCycle, Oracle Stellent, and Autonomy Interwoven, to name but a few.

What Constitutes a Full-fledged BPM Suite?

BPM suites’ scope can be sliced and diced in many ways. For one, Part II of my 2008 five-part blog series entitled “It’s About Process (or Ability to be Responsive)” outlined the necessary BPM suite components. But if one is to look at BPM suites through the lens of the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) loop, one could think of covering the following three necessary activities (within the feedback loop):

1. Business process modeling and analysis, which were explained earlier on;
2. Business process automation or execution; and
3. Business activity monitoring (BAM), measuring, process mining, and so on, as parts of continuous business process improvement efforts.

Most of the abovementioned contemporary BPM suites have a comparable basic functionality set, which has been specified as the desired capabilities of a BPM suite in Gartner’s 2008 report entitled “Four Paths Characterize BPMS Market Evolution.” These capabilities are:

* Model-driven development environment (with model-driven process execution rather than source code-based one). Processes can be changed bi-directionally, either in the design or execution stage (each impacting the other), and with an audit trail of changes;
* Process component registry or repository management;
* Document management and ECM systems;
* User and group collaboration;
* System inter-connectivity;
* Business event management, business intelligence (BI), and BAM;
* Online and offline process simulation and process optimization;
* Business rules management system (BRMS);
* System management and system administration; and
* Process execution and a state management engine.

While most of the leading BPM suites would address this prescribed broad functionality set by and large, they have some intrinsic differences that make them more suitable for one usage scenario versus the others. This difference often comes from the underlining architecture and the genesis of a particular suite. It may also be a consequence of the key customer segments that the vendor targets.

BPM practitioners understand some of the common usage types of BPM systems, often referred to as “human-centric business processes,” “system-centric (integration) processes,” and “document-centric processes.” Most of the real-life business processes have all of three elements in them, but some are heavier on one versus the other two.

In its whitepaper entitled ”Understanding Usage Scenarios An Enterprise BPMS Must Support,” Savvion identifies and describes four other equally important usage scenarios that are not very well understood. These are: case management, rule-based (decision-intensive) processes, project-oriented processes, and event-centric process management. Savvion claims to currently be the only BPM provider that can accommodate all of these seven usage scenarios.

What About Accommodating Change (We Can Believe In)?

But, after all this discussion, do BPM suites necessarily mean “build for change?” Do they by default mean easy automation, rapid iteration, and execution?

The bar has to be set higher, since pragmatic buyers are increasingly looking for proven fixed-cost business-driven enterprise-wide BPM deployments. An astute BPM suite should take a process-centric approach to managing business operations that can deal with any business workflow with high impact on overall customer service operations.

Metastorm’s [evaluate this product] white paper “Building a Business Case for BPM” asserts that there are three fundamental characteristics of BPM that make this technology the game-changer:

It’s About Process (or Ability to be Responsive) – Part I

2009-12-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

After several years (if not decades, even) of painstakingly corralling and setting up all their custom data, objects, tables and whatnot, and making sure that these static and/or dynamic transactional data are secure, many enterprise applications users have realized that the time is long overdue for them to start looking at ways to make their applications more process-savvy.

Companies are increasingly trying to adopt and implement standardized (and yet flexible and easily modifiable) business processes to help their operations run more consistently and smoothly. For example, the chief executive officer (CEO) might decide that as of, say, next month “All customer service cases must be resolved within 24 to 48 hours,” or, “We are going to institute a new sales process for all deals worth over US$100,000.”

However, these business processes often get communicated to employees in an ad hoc and unregulated manner. A process document with instructions may exist on a network file share, but people have not the foggiest idea that it’s there. And some employees might rely on word-of-mouth information from co-workers (so called “tribal knowledge”) to learn the processes for their jobs.

Consequently, standardizing and instituting new business processes can prove challenging for most companies, particularly larger organizations.

Indeed, until recently most enterprise applications have hardly been anything more than glorified databases — they could hold all of the information users may need and allow users to search for records based on various criteria, but they could not really help users to perform the functions of their daily jobs more effectively.

There’s still often no native automation and agility within the system that lets, e.g., a recruiter instantly know when the status of a candidate has changed or when a new position requisition has been entered into the system.

Indeed, when any changes are made somewhere in the organization, users have to remember to notify one another of the change or else rely on others finding the updates on their own. Neither solution is practical in the long term and invites the possibility that the software solution or best practice will not be adopted consistently by all employees at the company.

How can one then build processes into enterprise applications so that users won’t need to, time and again, rely on manual (pedestrian) methods of communication to inform others of changes, increasing the risk that many issues will fall through the cracks?

Introducing Workflow Automation

To that end, a built-in or an external standalone add-on tool (or capability) that can be used to solve the process automation problem is called workflow automation (or workflow management). Some will refer to it as business process management (BPM), and we will shortly try to point out the differences between the two – i.e., workflow and BPM.

Traditional enterprise applications typically feature some built-in functionality, such as a human resource management system (HRMS) or a procurement application, with some capability to tailor the base functionality through parametric configuration options (e.g., via “order types” that entail different mandatory and optional “order steps”) that users have to learn by heart.

To be fair, some enterprise applications have introduced workflow capability into their products to give users some ability to control the process behavior of documents such as an invoice or an engineering specification. But in most enterprise applications workflow is implemented through hard-coding, which means that programmers must develop and maintain the code.

In addition, workflow automation of the typical enterprise application is generally limited to a single document or task routing. This usually means that companies implementing an enterprise application must choose between accepting the vendor’s pre-built business process behavior or paying the vendor dearly to make expensive modifications to accommodate more complex processes, which will then make upgrades either costly or impossible.

In contrast, a specialized workflow tool enhances a single task and/or document routing by providing an integrated capability to include rich user interfaces (UIs), system integration, rule processing and event handling.

Rules are necessary to determine which path users should take next in a process that has multiple possible paths, e.g., an order worth less than US$1,000 does not need manager approval, but over that amount it does. On its part, an example of event handling would be a necessary step after a product recall: a “pull from shelves” notification must be sent throughout the distribution channels.

These capabilities can be pretty powerful, since in general, if users can come up with a standard rule that specifies when a particular event should happen, they can make it happen automatically with workflow. In other words, workflow becomes the magic ingredient that transforms many traditional transactions-capturing applications from a glorified database into fully functional tools that basically everyone in the company should find useful.

Workflow Components

The individual components that make up workflow are rules and associated actions — tasks, field updates, and alerts.

In general, a workflow rule is the main container for a set of workflow instructions. It includes the criteria for when the workflow should be activated, as well as the particular actions that should take place when the criteria for that rule are met. Every workflow rule must be based on a single object that users will choose when they define the rule, as this object then influences the fields that are available for setting workflow activation criteria.

For example, if a user defines a workflow rule for the “Job Application” object in an HR application, he/she will be able to set workflow activation criteria based on the values of fields like “Job Application Number” and “Status”. Users can also set workflow activation criteria based on standard fields, like “Record Owner” or “Created Date”, as well as fields based on the currently active user when a rule is evaluated, such as their “Role” or “Time Zone”.

When a workflow rule is triggered, there are many types of actions that can occur, starting with a workflow task (or step), which assigns a task to a user according to a particular template. Just as in Microsoft Outlook, tasks include information about something that needs to be done by a certain time, such as making a telephone call, creating an order, shipping goods, or paying an invoice. Typically, assigned tasks appear in a user’s “My Tasks” related list on their home tab (or page) and generate reminder messages that pop up when a user logs in.

When an administrator defines a workflow task, he/she provides default values for data fields like “Assignee”, “Subject”, “Status”, “Priority”, and “Due Date” for tasks that are generated by its associated workflow rule. Administrators can also make sure that a notification email is sent to the assignee when a task is automatically generated.

In additon, a workflow field update changes the value of a particular field on the record that initially triggered the workflow rule, while a workflow alert sends an email according to a specified email template. Unlike workflow tasks, which can only be assigned to users of the application, workflow alerts can be sent to any user or contact, as long as they have a valid email address.

A workflow rule can include any combination of these actions when the rule is triggered. For example, one rule might send out an alert and update two fields on a particular record. The action that one workflow rule takes can also trigger the execution of another workflow rule.

Workflow-enabled Applications

Many enterprise applications today come with built-in workflow management capabilities, such as the Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) suite and its on-demand Force.com (formerly Apex) platform, Agresso Business World (ABW) or Exact E-Synergy, to name only some.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM too includes a workflow module that users can use to automate their business processes based on the rules, logic, and actions that they design. Microsoft has revamped the workflow functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 so that it now uses the Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), whereas previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM used their own proprietary workflow engine.

The result of the revised workflow functionality is that users, administrators, and developers can design and create business processes using the workflow tools with new features and a new UI for creating and monitoring the workflow processes.

Windows WF provides a comprehensive programming model, run-time engine, and tools to manage workflow logic and applications. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM workflow UI relieves users and administrators from the need to interact with WF directly. Therefore, users do not necessarily have to understand the underlying workflow technology to create workflow logic in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

As a recap, a built-in workflow provides a tool to help companies set up and define business process activities (including the proper sequencing) that involved employees can use when working with the enterprise system’s data. Conceptually, one should think of a workflow as an application or service that runs in the background, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, constantly evaluating the data and the multiple workflow rules in the company’s deployment.

When the workflow service encounters a trigger event, it activates the appropriate workflow rules to run the workflow actions. Typical workflow actions include sending an e-mail message, creating a task, and updating a data field on a record.

By implementing workflow processes in the enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) or CRM systems deployments, users can enjoy many benefits, such as:

1. Ensuring that users track and manage their customer data and processes in a consistent fashion — instead of relying on users to remember the appropriate steps for processing data, managers or administrators can create workflow rules that will automatically determine the next required steps and assign activities as necessary;
2. Processing the customer data more quickly so that, for example, new sales leads or customer service requests are assigned and routed immediately upon record creation; and
3. Allowing users to focus on more value adding activities — instead of having to perform a large number of manual repetitive steps.

Workflow vs. BPM

Both Workflow and BPM are systematic approaches and technologies to improve a company’s business processes (and performance). From a business perspective, they are ways to make people, information and computers work together more consistently and efficiently to produce needed results.

For example, a workflow/BPM-enabled application could monitor receiving systems for missing or defective items, or walk an employee through the steps to troubleshoot why an order arrived late or not at all.

Both technologies foster ongoing collaboration between information technology (IT) and business users to jointly build applications that effectively integrate people, processes and information. They provide organizations with the ability to define, execute, manage and refine processes that:

* Involve human interaction (such as placing or approving orders);
* Integrate and work with multiple diverse applications; and
* Handle dynamic process rules and changes, not just simple static flows, (i.e., those flows that enable tasks with multiple choices and contingencies/escalations).

The market for workflow and BPM applications is highly stratified and fragmented, in part because the currently available products stem from different origins. Namely, there are former pure integration vendors or document management/enterprise content management (ECM) vendors that have meanwhile encroached into the BPM space.

The difference between workflow tools and BPM suites is largely a semantic distinction, and the gist of the matter is that a workflow engine is at the heart of BPM suites with process execution capabilities. Also, in most cases vendors who sell applications labeled as BPM are aiming at a bigger scope and more complex projects, with elaborate software supporting even more elaborate methodologies, process defintion and modeling, collaboration methods, and so on.

Features and capabilities are not necessarily the only differences between tools, since usually the products aimed at simpler processes focus strongly on “ease of use.” The designers’ assumption is generally that the users are non-IT experts within the company. Such workflow products might be built around the concept of an intelligent form. Basically, the user develops the workflow by filling in a familiar-looking form (e.g., a “tasks vs. actions” matrix), including the business rules.

Yet the limitations of the simpler workflow tools become evident when they attempt to manage inter-process dependencies amongst several applications, handle complex database integration and handle tasks that partake in larger, more complex processes.

For more information on BPM, see TEC’s earlier articles entitled “Business Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business” , “Giving a Business Process Management Edge to Enterprise Resource Planning” and “Business Process Analysis versus Business Process Management.”

Special credit also goes to CIO Magazine’s articles entitled “ABC: An Introduction to Business Process Management (BPM)” and “Making Workflow Work and Flow for You.” Some useful concepts and examples were also adapted from the Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Developer Network (ADN) book entitled “Creating On-Demand Applications with AppExchange: An Introduction” and from the Microsoft Press book entitled “Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.”

usiness Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business

2009-12-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Companies used to coordinate activities through the company manually. This resulted in inefficiency and errors in the operational process and often led to difficulties in improving the process itself. Organizations are increasingly focusing on the implementation of business process management (BPM) solutions for the purpose of improving functional efficiency and effectiveness in their core business processes.

Evolution of BPM

Approximately ten to fifteen years ago, organizations began assimilating their legacy systems in specific industries or divisions by integrating enterprise applications via data transformation and routing, event triggering, process automation, and adapters. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) vendors were flourishing at this time. They automated their transaction systems with ERP software while including the information systems from CRM software. Five years later, business process integration (BPI) solutions, namely business process modeling, business-to-business (B2B) connectivity, and vertical industry process templates were built on top of these enterprise application integration (EAI) systems.

Today, the market offers BPM solutions that incorporate both the EAI and BPI functionality in addition to functionality such as workflow, business activity monitoring, web services, rule engines, and portal capability.

What Is BPM?

Business process management (BPM) was recognized by the academic world in the fifties and sixties as an important ingredient in the quality management approach. In the eighties, authors Hammer and Champy drew the attention of business managers to process management, process (re-)engineering, and workflow management. Today, BPM is continually gaining ground. Many companies have learned from experience that BPM is a strong asset when facing the rapidly changing requirements that are typical of today's dynamic world.

The acronym BPM has been the cause of some confusion in the past. It can be mistaken for business process modeling, which is a subset of the more "evolved" business process management. It is important to note the distinction between the two.

Business process modeling is issued solely for the graphical representation of the workflow, which can be either information or an actual document in a business process. Business process management is the definition of the process as a whole, including EAI, business process modeling, workflow, and even B2B transport capabilities. Furthermore, BPM should not be confused with business performance management which belongs to the world of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing.
Organizations regularly implement CRM, SCM, and ERP applications. As a result, key business functions such as inventory management, warehouse management, or product lifecycle management are highly integrated. All these applications focus on a specific function or area within the company and are vertically managed.

What companies are looking to do these days is to (1) achieve horizontal integration in order to cater to cross-functional business processes, and (2) achieve true process automation to enhance the processing efficiency of company transactions.

What Are the Different Components in BPM?

BPM encompasses several disciplines intended for use across different divisions and areas within organizations. Some of these disciplines are

Business Process Modeling. "Defines" the process (usually in graphical format). As explicitly modeled processes are required for all subsequent BPM disciplines, process modeling is often perceived as the starting point of BPM. Defined with the use of a process modeler (not to be confused with graphical editors such as Visio or PowerPoint), the resulting model is composed of objects that are able to be related to by the BPM engines. Composed of different diagrams (to represent different dimensions of the organization), the model is stored in a structured repository.

Business Process Documentation. Responsible for the process-enhanced documentation. It complements the process diagrams by providing, through graphics, the what-to-do description and sequence of steps. It also adds the extended documentation by providing the how-to-do of business tasks to the model "skeleton". Items such as the work instructions, standard operating procedures, master templates, training components, etc. are added to the diagrams to create a documented process.

Business Process Certification. Takes care of the process's ability to comply either with industry documentation standards such as ISO or with an internal "gating process". It confirms that the processes have been approved or certified in a proper manner before their internal deployment.

Business Process Collaboration. Deploys processes (intranet or extranet publication) on the one hand, and provides users with the ability to leverage the process know-how into enhanced productivity via user and task collaboration, on the other hand. This BPM discipline addresses corporate-wide knowledge management (KM) by not only making documented and certified processes readily available to all employees and associates, but by also providing employees collaboration functions, which enable them to manage projects, tasks, or transactions in a work team approach.

Business Process Compliancy. Establishes the process's readiness to comply with internal and external regulations (such as Sarbanes-Oxley [SOX]). The compliant certified processes are then used to achieve governance certification, audits, or both.

Business Process Optimization. Responsible for continuous process improvement (CPI), including tools to assess the performance of the actual process against internal norms or industry benchmarks. The integrated quantitative analysis capability is used to identify bottlenecks and estimate throughput times and cost saving opportunities. This often includes a simulation engine to perform "what-if" analyses to locate process issues in a proactive manner.

Business Process Automation. Responsible for the integration between users, processes, and related applications, resulting in the system automation of the process tasks. Driven by a workflow management engine, the BPM process information, as modeled, can be used for automated transaction execution and routing, including task execution triggered by previous events, evolved task scheduling and user notification, real time monitoring of task execution, ad hoc execution, etc.
Organizations use BPM systems to improve the effectiveness of their core operations. BPM specifically coordinates interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. The expected results include

Saving money by automating the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away the non-value-adding activities such as routine decisions, transfer of data or forms etc., and providing users with tailored task lists.

Saving time by changing business processes as per technology, government, or competition requirements. With today's tight integration of process definitions and underlying applications, the changes in the definition can be deployed and communicated virtually immediately.

Adding value by opening up a range of functions that can be leveraged in a truly BPM-minded company. Value can be added in several areas—process (quantitative) analysis and optimization, quality certification (e.g., ISO)—requiring procedures to be created and published. Another area is compliance management (e.g., SOX) which is imposed on many organizations.

By implementing BPM, companies are able to orchestrate and leverage cross-functional business processes that are used over multiple systems, divisions, people, and partners.

The beneficiary of BPM systems is actually the customer. The customer will receive information sooner and products faster, which results in an improved level of customer satisfaction. This will translate into more revenue for the company.

Do You Need a Content Management System?

2009-12-04T02:30:00.001-08:00

The ongoing drive to save time and money drives organizations to look into content management. As the costs of software and implementation range from almost free to millions of dollars and choosing the right vendor or system is vital, this decision can be daunting.

The term content management: What does it mean?

Content management is a phrase you hear everywhere these days. Companies claim they "do content management" and vendors say that they sell content management software. People who hear about content management often think about how to create a web site. The text, images, movies, etc., that are shown on web sites are the actual content indeed, but content management entails more than meets the eye.

Prior to explaining what content management is, it is useful to define the word content. Content is essentially any type or "unit" of digital information that is used to populate a page. It can be text, images, graphics, video, sound—or in other words—anything that is likely to be published across an intranet, extranet, or the Internet.

Where does content management come from?

Currently, information, communication, and digital networks have made a major impact. In this society, there is much information available. A company needs to acquire and structure information that exists both within and outside of its own four walls.

Where does this need for information or this need for content come from?

It can be said that the buzzword of this era is content. Before content, the hype of the late eighties and early nineties surrounded documents. As companies were producing large volumes of information by the end of the eighties, and while business boomed for products like Word, WordPerfect, Excel, and Lotus 123, organizations faced an increasing need to organize documentation. Rather than printing and storing hard copies, the documents required digital storage. The market responded with the creation of a powerful software tool to manage this process. These solutions became known as document management systems (DMS).

By the end of the nineties, the terms changed from document management systems to content management systems (CMS). A lot of DMS vendors suddenly called themselves CMS vendors since the main difference between document management and content management is the fact that document management deals with the document in its entirety, while content management focuses on the individual parts that make up a document or even a web page.

Both systems follow the same basic rules, workflow and processes. However, due to the evolution of the Internet, companies began to be more focused on managing the web site at the content rather than document level. This caused the market to shift from document management systems to content management systems.

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge During Tough Economic Times -- A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part Six: Custom Development and Singl

2009-12-04T02:29:00.002-08:00

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge during Tough Economic Times -- A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part Five: Profitability and Changing

2009-12-04T02:29:00.001-08:00

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge During Tough Economic Times--A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part Four: RFID Software Issues

2009-12-04T02:28:00.000-08:00

At the IFS Executive Forum, which took place on March 29 and 30 in Orlando, Florida (US), leading research analysts and industry experts discussed how companies can still leverage technology to maintain their competitive edge, even during tough economic times. The event was held in conjunction with IFS World Conference 2004, and it included six panel discussions, with each panel including top executives, analysts, and journalists. Some of the renowned panelists were Geoff Dodge, vice president, Business Week; Dave Caruso, senior vice president, AMR Research; Barry Wilderman, vice president, Meta Group; Leo Quinn, vice president of operations, Global Manufacturing Solutions, Rockwell Automation; Dave Brousell, editor-in-chief, Managing Automation; David Berger, Western Management Consultants; and Josh Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting. Breakout sessions explored such topics as turning global competitive threats into opportunities, increasing the bottom line through operational efficiency, complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and using enterprise software to prepare for future challenges.

Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) was represented at the executive panel titled "The Future of Enterprise Software and How It Impacts Your Profitability", which was aimed at helping companies find out where enterprise software is going in the next five years, and how it can make or break their profitability and market share. The panel, which was moderated by Josh Greenbaum, included the following participants: Barry Wilderman; Peggy Smedley, president and editorial director; Start Magazine; Dave Turbide, an independent consultant and renowned columnist for magazines such as The Manufacturing Systems; and Predrag Jakovljevic, research director, TEC. In preparation for the event, we polled the thoughts and opinions of our experts and contributors: Olin Thompson, Jim Brown, Joseph Strub, Kevin Ramesan, and Lou Talarico, given they were unable to attend the event in person.

Below are the questions and consolidated thoughts and answers that transpired from the panel discussion. We also took the liberty to expand with a few pertinent questions and thoughts that were not discussed at the panel per se (due to the time limit), but transpired from many other interactions and presentations at the conference. Also, some pertinent articles published previously on our site, which may shed more light at the respective topic are mentioned as further recommended readings.

The questions are

Q1. What is the one piece of new software or technology that will be a must-have in the next five years? (see Part One)

Q2. Some pundits say the future of enterprise software lies in service-oriented architectures and component applications. True? False? (see Part One)

Q3. How does the development of new business processes and business process modeling fit in? (see Part Two)

Q4. What are applications hosting and other service models? (see Part Three)

Q5. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is on everyone's mind these days. Let's discuss the software issues around RFID and what kind of software solutions will be taking advantage of RFID. (see Part Four)

Q6. Technology aside for a moment, what can we say about its impact on profitability? (see Part Five)

Q7. With all this new technology, the question is what happens to existing applications and technology. Nobody wants to start over, but how much will existing IT systems have to change? (see Part Five)

Q8. Will the newest and greatest only come from packaged software? What about custom development? What is the build versus buy equation look like in the near future? (see Part Six)

Q9. How will the latest improvements in software flexibility and agility play in the single-vendor versus multi-vendor solution equation at multi-division corporations? (see Part Six)
Q5. RFID is on everyone's mind these days. Let's discuss the software issues around RFID and what kind of software solutions will be taking advantage of RFID.

A5: Well, we will have all likely heard of some concrete examples (or imagined ideas) of expensive (and thus highly pilfered) retail items (such as razors, prescription drugs, apparel, and DVDs) packaged with pin-sized chips and tiny antennae that send retailers and manufacturers information about their use, and even about those who buy (or attempt to steal) them. Or the stories of grocery clerks immediately knowing when perishable items on the shelf have expired and replacing them before the items are purchased. We've also have heard of a consumer ordering the latest "hot item" and tracking it in the real time through the entire supply chain right up to the time when it is ready to be picked up. How about the idea of tracking employees and their labor with an RFID chip embedded in their ID badges to automatically record their transactions and even control their authorizations for a given area to detect security issues?

These futuristic-sounding scenarios (though not necessarily of the future, given such technology was employed decades ago, but only where its price was justified, like in the defense industry or to track the movements of precious pets) are being touted as the applications of an automatic identification and data capture technology named radio frequency identification (RFID). RFID uses low-powered radio transmitters to read data stored in smart tags embedded with minuscule chips and antennae. The tags are attached to packaged goods that can communicate with electronic reading devices and deliver a message to a computer that alerts retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers when a product's state has changed and requires action.

While the potential of RFID technology is indisputable (for example, unlike bar-codes, RFID requires no direct contact or line-of-sight scanning, and it provides streams of data that can be differentiated and interpreted before being passed to an enterprise application), much more is required in moving RFID from a lab to a live environment. RFID has the potential of a new technology inflection point and it can be a missing piece in the long-lasting puzzle of squeezing excess inventory out of supply chains. It will be only this piece, however, when (and if) it reaches a critical mass of adoption and maturity over the next several years. Nowadays, the market is still in a "chicken-and-egg" conundrum—until more companies commit to RFID, the cost of tags and other infrastructure will remain prohibitively high for mass deployment. A few years ago, typical smart-label tags were between $1�$2 (USD) each, while today we may be looking at production volumes in millions, costing 30�40 cents (USD). This is further projected into billions of tags on individual items in the future causing the cost to ideally fall to five cents (USD) or so. Eventually, in the long term, the price might fall to a penny or less, with new technology and even greater volumes. Still, while the tag price might seem as a major barrier now, it will likely become a minor issue down the track, when many companies start grappling with RFID deployments in earnest.

Over that time, many companies will begin to deliver and potentially receive a higher proportion of goods with RFID tags and, thus, they will have a better understanding of the technology and its potential in broader business improvements per se rather than only due to the mandated Wal-Mart, (US) Department of Defense (DoD) or Target compliance. Namely, as the world's largest retailer, with over 5,000 outlets worldwide, Wal-Mart currently uses traditional bar-coding and UPCs (unique product codes) to identify items and cases or pallets of goods as they move through the supply-chain and out to the stores. By 2005, Wal-Mart has envisioned to have live implementations of RFID tagging using new EPCs (electronic product codes, which can carry more useful data than UPCs), with a mandate to the Top 100 suppliers to provide RFID tags on cases and pallets at distribution centers, followed by item-level tagging at a much later date. EPCs on tags should be easier and quicker to read than barcodes, since there is supposedly no need to unpack pallets to check contents, as RFID readers do not, unlike bar-code scanners, require line-of-sight, which should all result in less labor, fewer errors, and better management of inventory.

However, companies implementing RFID should expect increased labor in the first year or so, because vendors have yet to perfect solutions for automating tagging and embedding RFID in packaging material. Also, the current state of RFID technologies would also revolve around label creation and production, plastic chip development, intelligent shelving and packaging, to name but a few. Furthermore, to gain benefits such as product tracking, supply chains should logically begin RFID implementation at the manufacturing level, rather than at the distribution center, which is one step closer to a retailer in the supply chain. Still, "source tagging" cases at the manufacturer is too disruptive for most companies to implement.

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge During Tough Economic Times -- A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part Three: Applications Hosting

2009-12-04T02:27:00.002-08:00

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge During Tough Economic Times -- A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part Two: Business Process Modeling

2009-12-04T02:27:00.001-08:00

Leveraging Technology to Maintain a Competitive Edge during Tough Economic Times—A Panel Discussion Analyzed Part One: Introduction

2009-12-04T02:26:00.002-08:00

Business Process Management How to Orchestrate Your Business

2009-12-04T02:20:00.000-08:00

The Duet Architecture Outlined

2009-11-06T03:52:00.001-08:00

Despite seemingly simple processes that Duet enables, the product exemplifies how serious an undertaking a commercially available composite application can be. When the goals of Project Mendocino (now Duet) were first formulated, it reportedly[1] became clear that two very different architectures needed to be brought together. On the one side was the ubiquitous client application, which required local data storage, while on the other side was the proverbially complex SAP ERP environment. The different technologies in this case reportedly made it quite easy to select Web services as the interface technology, since both camps added standards-based Web services support in their last releases. However, in this case, simply connecting these two worlds using Web services did not offer a comprehensive enough solution. Namely, the goals required more extensibility, because SAP wanted to enable a model-driven environment on the client side, which would allow Duet to push additional screens and updates to the user without the need to continuously run through an installation and reinstallation whenever business needs changed.

On top of that, Microsoft Office currently works in online as well as offline modes. This capability had to be maintained in Duet as well, since users had to be able to trigger activities while being offline which would later have to be automatically resynchronized once their machines went back online. At the time, Microsoft and SAP also realized that the involved disparate system components (i.e., Microsoft Exchange Servers, Microsoft Office, and SAP ERP systems) are of such a high value to customers that massively updating those environments (and exposing the existing system landscape to any unnecessary disruption) would be unacceptable. SAP and Microsoft weighed these requirements carefully and realized that there was a the need for a communications hub that would sit in the middle of the two existing environments and "mediate" communication and processes. The hub collects various configurations from the back-end system, determines the objects that should be exposed, and decides which activities the user can trigger and how all of that ties together within the user screen. The communications hub is also referred to as the Duet Extensions, which are connected with the Microsoft Office client and the SAP ERP system. The result is that there are three primary parts to Duet's architecture: 1) the Duet Extensions; 2) the Microsoft Office Add-On; and 3) SAP ERP foundation.

More Than Meets the Eye

2009-11-06T03:51:00.000-08:00

In addition to disseminating useful SAP data among knowledge workers (outside of its traditionally limited power-user dispatch list), Duet has been crucial for being a "proof of concept" model illustrating the potential development and adoption of composite applications, especially when the result of a joint collaboration between two software giants and market influencers.

Indeed, Duet is one of the first examples of a tangible SOA-based composite application product. While several tools use SOA conceptually, in ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, this tool is based on consuming services in concrete ways that benefits almost every information worker. Duet showed how SOA can be applied to the user experience through familiar desktop applications, and for some users, it will deliver functionality that supersedes the need to work directly with any line-of-business (functional department) or back-office enterprise applications. By exposing functionality and giving even the most casual users an easier way to update data that normally resides only in the back-office system, Duet embraced the innovative potential of SOA services. It exposes features from underlying ERP systems in new ways that create more value. And these services can be used together, even though they were probably written for a system that was designed before SOA was someone's figment of imagination.

This fulfills one of SAP's short-term goals for ESA (SAP's variant of the SOA blueprint) adoption—to create simple services (software components, if you will) that work on top of legacy applications already used by organizations. In the future, the entire stack which encompasses ERP, CRM, and all other SAP Business Suite solutions will eventually evolve to use business objects as their underlying application. Instead of having a rigid and unwieldy monolithic set of applications, SAP is creating a collection of business objects that can be applied in more flexible ways. By late 2007, there will be more services to choose from than the ones used to support Duet, since ESA follows the SOA format of "model once, run anywhere". Namely, instead of hard-coding multiple solutions that apply to different domains, ESA employs business objects or services that are modeled in a way that allows them to handle different solutions. Duet is just one of many client-side solutions that ESA will enable.

To understand how Duet is in tune with SOA, it is important to become familiar with the new stack defined by SAP ESA, and to understand what a composite application is. Webopedia defines a composite application as an application that consists of more than one type of service delivered from an SOA environment. It can range from functionality to entire applications. Services are generated through "local" application logic that controls how services interact with each other. For more information, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, and BPEL.

As a composite application, Duet overlaps with nearly every part of the new SOA stack:

User screens. Duet uses the familiar Microsoft Office desktop interface, which is achieved not by hard-coding the UI, but through backend modeling and deploying it to the client.
Process orchestration. Duet uses a communications hub referred to as the Duet Extensions to route data to and within the ERP system.
Process integration. Using the aforementioned extensions, Duet translates data from Microsoft Office applications such as Excel into a format that is easily understood by existing ERP tools and their respective enterprise services.
Process workflow. All of the usual workflow processes within SAP ERP take place within the context of Microsoft Office's desktop tools.
Distributed data. The ability to cache data for working online or offline also plays an important part in the functionality.

Application Giants in Duel—and Duet—for Users' Hearts, Minds … and Wallets

2009-11-06T03:48:00.000-08:00

The relationship between the two software powerhouses, Microsoft and SAP, has been intriguing to put it mildly, at least since Microsoft's entry into the enterprise applications arena in late 2000 (see Microsoft 'The Great' Poised to Conquer Mid-market, Once and Again ). While the relationship has been depicted by many through a myriad of antonyms, such as "on-off", "hot-cold", or "love-hate", currently, it can best be described as "mutually civil". One can even find some uncanny similarities between the two, such as the occasional involvement in intellectual property lawsuits (whether as plaintiffs or defendants) or through the relatively recent, almost coinciding departures of technological visionaries, Satya Nadella and Shai Agassi, respectively (although Nadella was merely transferred within Microsoft, to the search and ad group that will hope to fend off Google's undeniable threat).

Microsoft and SAP then entered a "strange bedfellows" or co-opetion phase in their relationship, by dallying in business applications. Acting like two high-profile on-again, off-again celebrities, the two were dismissive about questions from the press and analysts about the inevitable competition this partnership would create (i.e., responding "We do target different sizes of companies"). Nonetheless, this stance become moot owing to SAP's forays into small business via SAP Business One and Microsoft's propping up of Microsoft Dynamics AX, as an upper mid-market solution. Then came a perceived snub by SAP for opting for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) as a primary development environment for its infrastructure and development platform (while there is, nonetheless, some lesser valuable interface options for the counterpart Microsoft .NET Framework environment). However, SAP's move was quite logical given the still lingering perception of Java's better fit for larger enterprises (see Understand J2EE and .NET Environments Before You Choose ).

Any hard feelings between SAP and Microsoft were short lived, as we found out in 2004 when the two were engaged in secret (and startling) merger talks, which was quickly put ad acta before the news broke (whether for good remains to be seen). For most of that year, both vendors had to spend time explaining their separate forays into developing next-generation, service oriented architecture (SOA)-enabled products. Then 2005 seemed to be the year of bliss, where the two expressed mutual respect, and even worked jointly on a commercially available product featuring best of both worlds. Specifically, SAP and Microsoft joined together to leverage the openness of the SAP NetWeaver and Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) blueprint (see Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver ) with the .NET-based architecture of Microsoft Office desktop applications suite (see Subtle [or Not-so-subtle] Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement ). The result was the joint product code-named Project Mendocino (the name of a town halfway between the companies' respective US headquarters) that promised to deliver familiar Microsoft Office desktop management and productivity tools as the façade for the heavy-duty lifting processes of SAP's enterprise applications. In other words, Project Mendocino extended and automated selected business processes from SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) through the familiar Microsoft Office user interface (UI), by providing role-relevant displays of information while retaining SAP applications' process context and the necessary collaboration and analytic tools.

Agresso + CODA, VITA + Link (+ CODA 2go): What’s the Sum? – Part 2

2009-10-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

Enter CODA Link Architecture

For its part, CODA’s value proposition is in being a best-in-class financial management solution with possibly unmatched connectivity (i.e., it plays nicely with others, if not almost everyone in the yard). By the very nature of its narrow functional scope, CODA’s financial management software provides a stand-alone solution that simply must fit into customers’ existing IT infrastructure to work with other business systems without negatively impacting them.

CODA focuses on solutions targeted at chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers. The “best-in-class” financial management designation comes from the single Web browser-based general ledger design that accommodates the “multi-everything” mantra (i.e., multi-currency, multi-country, multi-dimension, multi-subledger, etc.). This way CODA is able to meet both local and global requirements, and the system is compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), and International Financial Reporting System (IFRS).

CODA’s customers have been raving about the vendor meeting their needs for consistent and accurate data, and an up-to-date “single version of the truth.” In addition, they often talk about improved financial processes (e.g., purchase-to-pay, invoice-to-collection, record-to-report, etc.), more streamlined and effective financial period closing practices, complete audit trails, and flexible enterprise reporting and analysis capabilities.

CODA-Financials is targeted at midsize and large companies across all public and commercial sectors, while CODA Dream targets small and medium enterprises (SMEs) , primarily in the UK. Both products have a long heritage, and CODA certainly has a remarkable reputation in the UK’s CFO/controller community.

CODA-Financials has a similar number of customers as Agresso, and has customers in all geographies (about 2,800 customers in over 100 countries). CODA has local sales and service & support hubs in the US, Europe, and Singapore.

The current Release 11 of CODA Financials (code-named Neon) has seen significant research and development (R&D) investment (the vendor estimates around 300 person years) to meet its customers’ changing needs. These are along the lines of helping organizations to achieve superior finance processes and improve business visibility (e.g., performance by company, location, product, line of business, etc.), regulatory compliance, and corporate governance.

In recent years, CODA has expanded its offerings beyond accounting transactions into other areas relevant to CFOs, such as financial analysis, financial consolidation, cash management (through the acquisition of OCRA), and financial governance solutions/business process control. This has enabled CODA to cross-sell these solutions to existing customers and even to organizations that do not necessarily use CODA’s financial management applications. However, the effort has not realized significant increases in revenue. For more on these events, see TEC’s 2005 series entitled “Best-of-breed Approach to Finance and Accounting.”

Superior Connectivity

The underlying Link architecture provides the backbone for CODA’s sophisticated and interoperable enterprise financials solution. Link’s capabilities give financial executives’ applications’ change management capabilities in terms of fast implementation, “low-impact” integration, and pain-free upgrading.

CODA’s standalone specialist financial management software has been designed to work with other surrounding IT systems, thanks to its notable system compatibility and easy integration. For one, the vendor’s stand-alone components fit into existing infrastructures due to their support for the following platforms (per each architectural layer):

* Hardware – Windows/Intel (Wintel) ; HP-UX servers; SUN SPARC; IBM pSeries (formerly RS/6000); and IBM System i (formerly iSeries and AS/400)
* Operating systems (OS) – Microsoft Windows; UNIX; Linux; and OS/400
* Databases – Microsoft SQL Server; Oracle; Sybase; and IBM DB2
* Web servers – Internet Information Services (IIS) and Apache HTTP Server
* Web browsers – Windows Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox
* Integrated development environments (IDEs) – Microsoft .NET Framework and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (formerly J2EE).

Moreover, integration with other key business systems can take place via either CODA 2link, a user-friendly integration tool (with more structure to it), or simply Web Services that capitalize on SOA principles. CODA 2Link offers a choice of appropriate toolsets for integration, starting with table-based batch loading integration. Integration can also be done via online remote procedure calls (RPCs), via extensible markup language (XML) in a distributed manner, or via a combination of XML interfaces and Web Services.

That is to say that this architecture blueprint provides both simple integration (via Microsoft Excel uploads) and advanced integration options. The latter options include Structured Query Language (SQL) batch uploads, Visual basic .NET and/or C language application programming interfaces (APIs) for legacy systems. Last but not least, and as said before, integration can also be programmatic via XML and Web Services.

User access is via a pure Web client or embedded within Microsoft Office (CODA also has its own implementation of AJAX called APE). Moreover, personal digital assistant (PDA) devices and mobile delivery of personalized reports are also supported.

The Web-based deployment and infrastructure for effective data management provides secure and personalized access to an up-to-date “single version of the truth.” The system ensures that everyone is “on the same page” by keeping functional updates “in sync” for all users, and by gathering, unifying, and analyzing data from systems across the entire organization, in a timely manner.

The system offers wide-ranging automation capabilities for data entry and processing, reconciliation, reporting, and financial processes. Personalization capabilities are also at the core of the architecture, with users driving configuration and tailoring of forms, inquiries, reports, and so on. There is a single graphical user interface (GUI) and look-and-feel for all CODA products, and users can redesign CODA’s processes and screens that come “out of the box.”

But the “Future Proofing” feature is the ability to decouple users’ personalized interfaces from the underlying CODA version on the server side, which provides for minimal impact on interfaces when moving to the latest CODA release. In other words, all user-driven customization and integration is preserved and protected through the upgrade process.

So, How is CODA’s SOA Better Than Other SOAs?

In addition to the aforementioned support for multiple platforms and personalization capabilities, I was wondering whether the CODA 2link SOA-based architecture is any different and better than other SOA counterparts, and how. In other words, SOA is known for plugging pieces together, and most SOA platforms are fairly evenly matched in that regard.

If there is something that differentiates the Coda 2link’s performance from, say, SAP NetWeaver, IBM WebSphere, or Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) connection capabilities, then users need to know that, and why it is better. CODA believes that its unique selling proposition (USP) with CODA Link is the extent of its coverage. Namely, all of the granular functions within CODA are available as Web Services, which means that anything that users can do within CODA’s finance system can be easily integrated to and accessed via another application – a front-end business system, or another back-end system, for example.

This feature also means that users can achieve a greater level of integration than with other systems, and avoid the normal pitfalls of enterprise application integration (EAI) and middleware products such as having to duplicate customer records or other data, for example. We should also note that OFM, WebSphere and NetWeaver are really middleware offerings that require extensive certification processes for best results. What CODA is providing is standards-based (the WS-I or Web Services Interoperability organization) service entry points into its business applications.

The vendor is not supplying a middleware solution per se, but rather a finance engine that can sit at the heart of an enterprise-wide, integrated, best-of-breed applications suite that meets the unique requirements of the customer in a way that no broad homogenous application suite could. The organic use of Web Services provides

* the ability to upgrade CODA but not have to change users’ screens;
* the ability to use the same development methods irrespective of the underlying hardware and software platform;
* integration with other systems independent of location (i.e., intranet or outside the firewall, at subsidiaries, affiliates, business partners, etc.);
* a single point of maintenance (repository) for financial business rules and security.

Furthermore, the entire Link infrastructure has full version support, so that CODA can guarantee that any integrations made using any of the technologies it offers within its architecture will continue to work through future upgrades of CODA. This versioning support, which enables consumers to maximize their investment in R&D around solutions they build even over multiple upgrades from CODA, is possibly a unique proposition that should resonate with some prospective customers.

Back to Agresso + CODA

The merger with Agresso has certainly given CODA a safer harbor from less friendly acquirers, while Agresso now has a two-prong product strategy along the “change” theme. On a somewhat negative note, despite Agresso’s ongoing success, its revenue is still centered on Europe, with only 9 percent of 2008 revenue coming from outside the region.

The Wizardry of Business Process Management – Part 3

2009-10-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

It’s About (the “Six Rs” of) Automation, After All

Companies have to optimize their processes through technology that automatically integrates new objectives into their systems to adjust for every specific situation. They need a “brain” that ensures that processes and decisions are optimized per these new objectives in both mainstream and exceptional situations.

The idea is to get the initial process quickly and iterate later. Business users can do it one customer issue at the time, starting with any business process that needs improvement: e.g., open a new account, charge dispute, detect fraud, increase credit line, handle a missed payment, and so on.

As said in Part 2, Pegasystems (also known as Pega) users can use the familiar Microsoft Visio diagramming tool to visually create (model) the processes that will deliver better customer service. There are many pre-built solution frameworks with industry best practices to get them jump-started if necessary.

But the second brick in the Yellow Brick Road is the ability of the technology to automate all necessary computer programming. Namely, business people can draw nice pictures and diagrams to capture objectives, but if between that model of what you want and ultimately running your business you need to do lots of tedious Java or C++ programming, you cannot be agile and nimble enough. To that technical end, the model that business users create should actually automate the programming that makes the business process run.

The final brick in the Yellow Brick Road of BPM is the automation of business processes that then “drives the work to be done” by, well, automating the actual work. In other words, the work is not merely tracked or routed for human intervention, but is also completed with the power of smart automation and minimal manual effort.

Nirvana would be to ultimately automate the work for people, who then only add value as required. Although the human touch is always needed, the point of business process automation (BPA) is to eliminate any distractions.

Again stepping out of Trefler’s presentation’s narrow scope, let me try to explain here how Pega’s SmartBPM suite really turns work automation into a tool for business changes on the fly. Let’s explore the “Six Rs” of driving work to be done via Pega’s BPM technology.

As the first “R,” the BPM product makes it easy for users to receive the work that needs processing. SmartBPM has a broad ability to receive input out-of-the-box from virtually any conceivable channel.

To that end, flexible, self-expanding extensible markup language (XML)-based data structures make it easy to capture whatever data, attachments, images, or other content may be appropriate, so that users can always have the right information at hand. Web services, e-mail notifications, and so on are all treated through a common software architecture, to ensure that processes designed for one particular channel can be leveraged in a multi-channel environment.

The second “R” stands for route. To that end, rules ensure optimal work management for either people or systems by organizing related work into Cases and Folders, thus prioritizing and managing them. The duplicate checking ability prevents redundancy, while skills-based routing (SBR) optimizes work assignments.

For the third “R” of automation, report, the system offers over 100 standard reports, plus an open database to integrate with other customer information and enterprise reporting systems. Canned reporting capabilities can even be extended to include real-time business activity monitoring (BAM). For instance, built-in Service Level Agreement (SLA) management and statistical sampling provide management impacts in real time.

Customers use these capabilities to coordinate and control key business functions. For example, National Australian Bank (NAB) uses SmartBPM to control the receipt, prioritization, and execution of billions of dollars of high value payments, ensuring that every wire transfer request is handled according to the best practice.

The Exceeding “Three Rs” of BPA

But these are just the basic three “Rs” of BPA, something like the reading, writing, and arithmetic abilities in elementary school. They are the basis of what was originally called workflow automation that represents the procedural side of the world.

These days, competitive organizations need much more than the basics. To that end, PegaRULES Process Commander, a thin-client collaborative environment for both business users and IT departments, brings the further benefits and the power of automation with the additional three “Rs” that make the procedures even smarter.

Thus, the fourth “R” stands for research: the ability to dynamically get the data needed to automate work when and as needed, and use the best sources. Retrieving data if and only if it is needed saves resources and money. In addition, the system saves users’ time by only asking relevant questions and making it easy to dynamically insert alternative data sources.

Then comes the “R” for respond: the ability to reduce effort and provide service by ensuring that interactions with people are “smart.” For example, users are able to alter the forms and fields of the hypertext markup language (HTML) screens based on the rules and the situation. In addition, companies are able to notify partners, customers, and other relevant parties effectively and appropriately, and even have them directly participate in the completion of the work over the Web.

Last but not least, the sixth “R” stands for resolve: the ability to drive work through to completion with the power of an inference engine. In other words, it is the ability to fully automate work where possible and guide users if and when user involvement is needed.

The “Six Rs” of Automation in Action

Pega’s customers use these BPA capabilities to weave policies and other declarative rules into their procedures. As an illustration, let’s see how the “Six Rs” would work at an insurance call center:

1. Receive – A New York customer wants to add boat coverage to his homeowners and auto insurance plan. He or she goes to the online portal, gets partially through, but has questions about what happens if he or she moors in Maine in the summer, but brings the boat back for storage in New York in winter. He or she picks up the phone, switching from the Web to the phone channel.
2. Research – In the background, the system pre-determines that the local insurance agent is not skilled enough to write the policy for a boat moored in Maine, calculate the right policy for a commission sharing (and potential discounts), and up-sell.
3. Route – Thus, the customer profile triggers an SBR to a preferred customers queue in the call center. The right customer service representative (CSR) quickly asks a few relevant questions (e.g., near-shore or offshore sailing?) and recommends an additional multi-line coverage umbrella.
4. Resolve – The customer receives a quote to his liking and the change in policy is resolved by underwriting and a system-driven straight-through processing (STP) to be bound.
5. Respond – The customer gets an automatically generated confirmation e-mail with a print snail mail follow-up and confirmation of the change of policy and debit acknowledgement.
6. Report – The activity is monitored for ongoing process improvements and optimization via productivity and quality alerts.

The benefits of such intent-driven user experience are that it eliminates the CSR’s guesswork, since the system analyzes information on the customer history, coverage, value, prior interactions, etc., as well as the insurance provider’s business goals to determine the best course of action. Furthermore, CSRs benefit from improved effectiveness and efficiency, since the SmartBPM suite guides the agent through the interaction process and delivers the appropriate scripts, process steps, and customer information exactly when needed. In addition, Pega dynamically alters the agent experience to accommodate multiple roles (e.g., sales vs. service) and locations.

The Wizardry of Closing Execution Gaps

Going back to Alan Trefler’s luncheon presentation, in summary, he concluded that it takes the following: corporate courage (not to flinch in these times, but to instead try to see what can be done), a BPM brain (to capture the business intent), and a heart (a service oriented architecture [SOA]-based infrastructure). This creative cinematic BPM metaphor did not come out of thin air, since the presentation took place exactly on the 70th anniversary of the great “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Another salient point in Trefler’s creative speech was that the market for BPM software is driven by competitive businesses that seek to close the execution gaps that may exist between their business objectives and their actual business processes. Pega’s target customers are large, industry-leading service organizations faced with managing transaction-intensive, complex and changing processes that seek the agility needed for growth, productivity, and regulatory compliance.

Financial services organizations require software to improve the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of customer interactions and transactions processing. Pega’s customer process management and exceptions management products allow its financial service customers to be more responsive to changing business requirements. Representative Pega’s financial services customers include Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, HSBC Group Holdings, JPMorgan Chase & Co., National Australian Bank (NAB), and TD Bank Financial Group.

Pega’s financial industry knowledge and experience has resulted in solutions to help these customers close execution gaps and improve the following processes:

* In Bank Card Operations: Multi-channel service; Self-service account opening; Product roll-out; Fraud processing; Customer on-boarding, etc.
* In Retail Banking: Event-driven marketing; Account opening; New product introduction; Service case management; Specialized fulfillment, etc.
* In Wholesale Banking (e.g., wire transfers and treasury management): Proactive service monitoring; Account servicing; New product introduction; Compliance trade monitoring; Exception management, etc.

For their part, healthcare organizations seek products that integrate their front-office and back-office initiatives and help drive customer service, efficiency, and productivity. Representative Pega’s healthcare customers include: Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Group Health Cooperative, HealthNow New York, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (Kaiser Permanente), and Wellpoint.

Pega’s healthcare industry involvement has resulted in solutions to help these customers close execution gaps and improve the following processes: Automated Underwriting; Sales Renewals; Appeals & Grievances; Consumer Directed Healthcare (CDHC) offerings; Facilitation; Authorization Management; Small- and Large-Plan Enrollment and Servicing; Disease/Care Management, and so on.

Insurance companies, whether competing globally or nationally for customers and channels, need software to automate the key activities of policy/contract rating, quoting, customization, underwriting, and servicing as well as products that improve customer service and the overall customer experience. Representative Pega insurance industry customers include: American National Insurance Company, former American International Group (AIG) that recently changed name into American International Underwriters (AIU), John Hancock, Farmers Insurance Group, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, and The Prudential Insurance Company of America. Pega’s insurance industry knowledge and experience has resulted in solutions to help these customers close gaps and improve the following processes: automated underwriting; event-driven marketing; product cloning; claims management; legacy transformation, etc.

A CRM Provider Too?

While its customers are typically large companies in the financial services, healthcare and insurance markets, with SmartBPM Suite, Pega is also able to offer solutions to a broader range of companies and industries, such as telecommunications, government, life sciences, manufacturing, and travel services. Marquee customers here include Amgen, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), General Electric Company (GE), Ford Motor Company, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, and The ServiceMaster Company.

All of the abovementioned companies are largely concerned about their customer service levels. Pega’s customer interaction know-how has also resulted in solutions to close gaps and improve the following processes: Customer retention and cross-selling; Specialized fulfillment; New hire training; Post-order clean-up; Objection handling; Reducing on-call time, Product warranty and servicing management, and so on.

In fact, Pega is also regarded as a customer relationship management (CRM) provider. ZDNet’s 2007 blog post mentioned Pega within a Forrester’s CRM Wave research document. Pega does acknowledge the competition from CRM application vendors including Chordiant Software, Microsoft Dynamics CRM by Microsoft, Siebel by Oracle; Pivotal CRM by CDC Software, and Consona CRM to name but a few.

There is also competition coming from companies that provide application specific software for the financial services, healthcare, insurance, and other specific markets such as Norkom Technologies, SmartStream Technologies, SunGard, The TriZetto Group, Oracle’s solutions for financial services, Misys, etc. An interesting nugget of information is that Pega used to be a Salesforce.com on-demand CRM customer. The vendor recently made a decision to replace Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition with its own CRM system, in an “drink your own champagne” manner.

Michael Jackson: Greatest Hits for ERP Users

2009-10-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

You Are Not Alone – a customer representative will be with you shortly. Please hold the line!
Beat It – I’ll fix the label printer myself!
Dangerous – The old server is on fire because your boss decided that a new one is not necessary.
In the Closet – Where’s that interface the vendor promised us?
Black or White – As a project manager, you probably already know that implementation can only be a success or a failure
Remember the Time … when you could still track inventory without having to go check in the warehouse?
Who Is It … that sent all invoices to the wrong customer?
Keep the Faith – Still waiting for those bugs to be fixed?
Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough … sales orders into the system and then please try NOT to use the “delete all” button.
Heal the World – try lean manufacturing. If that doesn’t work, try this:

Blame It on the Boogie
Blame it on yourself (sunshine)
Ain’t nobody’s fault (moonlight)
But yours and that boogie, boogie, boogie (good times)
All night long (boogie)

Customer Relationship Manufacturing: the Symbiosis of Sales and Manufacturing

2009-10-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

The departments within a company are like the children in a family: the owner, chief executive officer (CEO), or any other decision maker in the company, has a favorite department—in somewhat the same way that parents tend to have a favorite child. Not having children of my own, I did some research on the topic and found this very interesting article on a study about the burying beetle (Nicrophorus vespilloides), an insect that seems to have a family structure that is very similar to ours.

Another study from Temple University shows that “even a child who feels its parents may have favored one sibling over another will still be generally content later in life.” I thought children were supposed to be more than “content” later in life; but again, I have no children, so what do I know?

In a manufacturing company, the two favorite children (i.e., departments) are sales—because they make money—and production, because sales cannot make money without them. The parents (owner, CEO, etc.) usually have only one favorite, depending on their professional backgrounds, personal reasons, etc.

Still, in the same way parents admit that having a favorite child should be avoided, a wise decision maker in a manufacturing company will know that having a favorite department is not good for the business, mainly because it will create non-constructive competition between departments, which affects productivity.

Why Do They Need to Work Together?

Harmony, peace, well-being, and a positive work environment? Yes, those are good reasons too; but in the end, it comes down to the fact that the two departments are more efficient when working in tandem, therefore making the company more profitable.

Close cooperation between departments—especially between production and sales in manufacturing—can be a very important competitive advantage. It is especially true for small to medium businesses (SMBs), for which the competition is tougher. SMBs today need to be very flexible and to easily adapt to the fast-changing market—which is very hard to do when you have internal competition between departments. Here are three reasons why sales and production should get over their sibling rivalry.

1. Manufacturing companies must address shifting customer needs. This is done mostly by understanding those needs and how they evolve. This process cannot be fulfilled by either of the two departments alone. Production needs constant feedback from sales on the quality of the products, market trends, etc. And sales needs to know how production can adapt to new demands and how those changes will impact the company.

2. They can both improve each other’s activities. Sales can sell more by knowing how products are made; production can make more and know more about what customers really need. Both departments can provide vital information for one another. Sales and customer service can gather data about defects, returns, and many other types of problems, which can then be used by production to improve quality. On the other hand, production can share its knowledge on how to address these problems, which will benefit the customer care team when speaking to customers.

3. Inefficient collaboration between production and sales can affect other departments. Think about distribution or warehouse management. If production is making too many finished goods and sales cannot sell them, those goods will probably have to be stored in the warehouse for weeks, maybe even months—which means extra costs. Purchasing can also be affected if production does not know which raw materials are needed and in what quantities because sales cannot tell production how much to produce.

How to Make Them Work Together?

What you should NOT DO is tell both of them they’re your favorite child (department), as the woman who wrote this article did. Having a favorite will probably happen anyway, but you should act as if there were no difference. This way, neither team will have an advantage over the other, which will help avoid frustration, poor communication, bad- mouthing of each other, etc.

Probably the most important thing to do is define workflows that include both departments. This should create a continuous exchange of information between production and sales. Knowledge bases created and maintained for products and customers, with well-structured data and well-defined analytical processes, should be available to both departments as a common source of know-how.

Something else you could try is to make departments switch places regularly, for a short period of time. Have one of your sales people work in production for a few hours and vice versa. Getting to know exactly what the others do—and how they do it—will help them understand and accept the others better. Just make sure they don’t end up like Mark Twain’s prince and pauper!

Have regular meetings with both teams, together. Each team will be aware of the problems the other team is facing, which will make it easier to convince them to help. Also, this will make them all feel like a part of the same team—which is precisely what a company should be.

Assign common objectives to both teams. This way, no one will have reasons to say that they tried but the others weren’t ready or did not listen. Responsibilities, as well as rewards, should be equally shared between the two teams (which should really work as one).

On the technical side, an integrated business solution or suite should be used by both departments. This will allow collaboration and sharing, as well as definition and implementation of workflows, which will make everyone’s work easier and ultimately more efficient.

Food and Drug Safety: Prevention Better Than Cure (For Sure)

2009-10-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Namely, the “G.I. bug” that our 18-month-old likely got in her playgroup spread so quickly and violently to anyone who was in contact with her (including the broader family members that stopped by to just traditionally exchange holiday gifts). Sure, viral gastroenteritis might likely have had nothing to do with what we ate at the time, but the feeling of being listless and other unpleasant (and unspeakable) G.I. bug symptoms were quite similar to those that food poisoning outbreaks can “treat” us to.

Food processing and distribution are not be the only market with burning product safety issues, since similar issues can also apply to the drug and pharmaceuticals sector or consumer packaged goods (CPGs); remember lead-tainted toys or antifreeze-laced toothpaste coming from China? Still, we all seem to be the most sensitive about food-related breaking news, possibly due to the likelihood of those hitting home (perhaps even in a willful way by bio-terrorists).

Thus, some food processing market experts have lately been frustrated by companies’ focus on location and lot control, serial number tracking, and traceability as the panaceas to solve product safety issues.

While important, these critical capabilities still help mostly with minimizing the damage (i.e., during product recalls), but the damage to customers and company’s brand has unfortunately already taken place, leaving many folks seriously ill (if not even fatally affected).

Track-and-trace After the Fact: Good But Insufficient

On the other hand, while I agree that detecting the problem before “the horse leaves the barn” would be a great use of IT tools, my IT experience still only involves location and lot tracking (while the product is in the hands of the manufacturer) and traceability (once the goods go to the customer). The goal has typically been the immediacy of problem identification and minimizing the extent of a product recall.

Sure, random sampling of ingredients is usually performed by labs and quality control (QC) departments, but they can only report an “accept” or “reject” status. To also be fair, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is a systematic preventive approach to food safety and pharmaceutical safety that addresses physical, chemical, and biological hazards as a means of prevention rather than finished product inspection. Still, like lot control and traceability, HACCP is only a piece of a much broader product safety issue.

Proactive Product Safety

Some of the market experts within leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors have thus started to develop a broader strategy to proactively protect food safety. The higher the risk (e.g., from non-processed “bag & ship” leafy green vegetables, seafood, meats, fruit and vegetables, dairy products, etc.), the greater the need for a proactive strategy.

Ultimately, this proactive approach could become part of an overarching governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategy (and message). Namely, companies can either choose to be reactive and support regulations and tracking as an imposed requirement or take a more proactive stance as part of a more comprehensive corporate social responsibility (CSR) message.

In other words, providing nutrition labeling and track-and-trace capability is one thing, whereas adding food education and balanced eating with more “green” or “organic” products is a whole different level that goes beyond simply compliance reporting. Implementing a comprehensive food safety management program both on the internal production side and overall supply chain side is one thing, whereas educating consumers is a CSR message.

Certainly, phrases like “organic or real food” and “farm-to-table” may sound like elitist jargon tossed around at upscale restaurants, and completely out of touch with the folks than cannot afford even a $0.99 burger (or such junk food) these days. But the country’s top chefs, several of whom traveled to Washington, DC for President Obama’s recent inauguration, hope that Obama’s apparent flair for good and healthy food will encourage people to expand their horizons when it comes to what they eat.

These chefs tout locally grown, environmentally friendly and - most importantly - nutritious food. They urge diners, even those who may never be able to afford to eat at their extravagant restaurants, to grow their own vegetables, shop at farmers’ markets, and pay attention to where their food comes from.

But before this “organic pie in the sky” becomes a reality, let’s see what some pundits within ERP providers have in mind when it comes to being proactive about food safety. Whenever there is a serious discussion about the food industry, one cannot avoid Olin Thompson, VP of Industry Strategy at Lawson Software and former contributor to TEC’s newsletter (e.g., see TEC’s previous article entitled “Food Safety, Government Regulations, and Brand Protection”). Lately, Olin has been talking about his (and Lawson’s) holistic approach as the “Four Ps” (”4Ps”) of Food Safety (along the lines of well-known 4Ps of the Marketing Theory).

“Four Ps” of Food Safety

The first “P” is “Prevent” or take steps to avoid a problem, since the best defense is good offense. Olin considers this as the most important of the four Ps, whereby sanitation, QC, and HACCP are some utilized practices. The idea is to build a quality fence around your business, with top management’s genuine commitment to food safety. To that end, your business system should provide the following capabilities:

* Product specifications during procurement processes;
* Supplier/vendor ratings;
* Inbound QC testing;
* Quality specifications as part of inventory management modules;
* Product quarantine management;
* Product aging tracking;
* Date-sensitive picking; and
* Lot tracking.

The second “P” stands for “Prepare” or build the ability to react to a problem if and when it happens. Good preparation presumes that you will have an incident and prepares you to respond via integration of food safety data with operations and automated data collection (ADC), storage, and analysis of food safety data. To that end, your business system should provide lot track-and-trace and location management capabilities.

Next comes “Prove,” to both yourselves and other concerned parties, that you are preventing problems and you are prepared to react if you have one. In other words, you have to be able to prove to all concerned parties that your product recall system will respond when it is needed (whether due to problems of an internal nature or coming from customers and regulators). This can be achieved by frequently testing the system, whereby the business system should be able to conduct mock recalls.

Finally, the last P is “Proactively respond” (OK, Olin acknowledges that it requires a little stretch here to get another “P”). Namely, if a problem is uncovered, one must be aggressive in addressing the recall and other needs, since holding back usually makes it worse. All incidents must be taken seriously and the company must respond quickly and completely. Over-response is often less expensive in terms of dollars and negative PR than under-response.

While management commitment to a proactive response is critical, the company’s business system should also provide rapid recall support. In other words, to meet the four-hour response requirement set forth in the Bioterrorism Act of 2002, the system must provide the actionable information in minutes rather than hours.

Which Enterprise Applications Can Cater to the 4Ps of Product Safety?

The critical part in the 4Ps-enabling applications landscape would be a Process Manufacturing ERP system like Lawson M3 [evaluate this product]. These systems are typically the most important for tracing and establishing the quality fence. Namely, ERP systems process inventory transactions that can come from the entire value chain. Process manufacturing ERP systems often have the laboratory software applications as well, while the procurement module can handle specifications, vendor certifications, and vendor rating.

Interestingly, Olin doesn’t consider product lifecycle management (PLM) systems to be critical with regards to product safety. Still, he at least acknowledges PLM systems’ help with creating quality specifications and matching approved ingredients to geographic markets (e.g., can this ingredient be in a product that is going to be sold in Japan?).

Supply chain event management (SCEM) tools are certainly critical for visibility and action reasons, albeit they can overlap with the inventory management modules of ERP systems. These visibility and workflow-based tools help only if they have lot tracking capabilities, perhaps bolstered with radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors and accompanying applications.

To that end, recently launched Lawson M3 Trace Engine is a standalone solution that combines repository, SCEM, data cleansing and integration, and workflow capabilities for food safety in extended supply chains. The product was described in great detail in my previous two-part blog series.

Manufacturing execution systems (MES) are important since HACCP capabilities are often found within them, but typically a MES is lot-blind and thus has to be interfaced to an ERP counterpart. Likewise, a laboratory information management system (LIMS) or quality management system (QMS) is a critical part of the quality fence for handling testing rules, analysis of results, vendor ratings, lab instructions, etc.

But as a standalone solution LIMS/QMS is usually not linked to a recall system. Most recall systems are part of ERP, which again demands some involved integration or interfacing.

The Changing Face of CRM

2009-10-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Being customer centric includes a wide range of strategies, approaches and ideas. Agile manufacturing, focused factories, flexible specialization, customer relationship management, and mass customization are strategies that emerged from the literature in the last decades. Despite different backgrounds and focus, the major objective is to improve the ability of enterprises to react swiftly to changing customer needs and to address the heterogeneity of demand more efficiently.

As a result, sales organizations have to optimize their customer relationships by relying heavily on technology. In particular, organizations will have to count on CRM vendors to deliver visibility into streamlined operational and supply chain efficiencies, mainly so organizations can retain existing sales opportunities. Other CRM challenges include the need to measure the impact of sales campaigns “on-the-fly” and to offer greater insight into sales analytics. This document will take a look at how some CRM vendors are working to meet the challenge.

The Challenges Marketing Organizations Face

Marketing and sales driven organizations face a variety of challenges at different levels. At the senior management level, the challenge is to maintain and increase profitability and grow market share. Inherent in these is the need to identify key performance metrics to

• Increase customer penetration
• Conduct sales planning and forecasting to predict future revenue accurately
• Use and leverage sales resources effectively
• Manage all information relevant to a particular sales account
• Implement opportunity management to obtain visibility into the sales pipeline and to qualify, manage, and distribute sales leads to appropriate personnel
• Perform sales performance analyses to monitor results by region and individual territory
• Apply product configurations and estimates to enable the sales staff to provide accurate and timely quotes to their customers, on–the-fly
• Employ collaborative tools to ensure accurate information is delivered to the customer
• Ensure customer retention by providing consistent personalized service across all client interactions

The Evolution of CRM: CRM 2.0

The CRM space has evolved from a one dimensional set of tools which provided limited interaction between back-office functions and client facing functions. Today, it has evolved to become a set of tools that are versatile enough to meet a unique set of capabilities, that are interactive, and that can provide visibility to an organization. The new CRM, “CRM 2.0”, is based on tools and principals from social networking sites, wikis, blogs, community forums, and RSS content syndication. The use of CRM 2.0 requires a paradigm shift away from just implementing a customer centric business model, to engaging the customer. This engagement becomes an integral part to any line of business that can benefit from customer input—whether it be product design, research and development, procurement, etc. Therefore we can describe CRM 2.0 as both a business model and a strategic philosophy used to actively engage customer collaboration, and is supported by a technology platform and business process.

In addition to CRM 2.0, we note below some other CRM applications.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM enables an organization to collect data on its customers (data mining) and develop predictive analysis by dividing clients into various segments through the use of rich application online analytical processing (OLAP). Among other things, it can be used to predict the likelihood of a customer purchasing a product or the impact of pricing models.

Mobile CRM

Mobile CRM is one of the fastest growing segments of the CRM marketplace as companies are looking for innovative ways to reach customers. The convergence of fourth generation WIFI networks, and the addition of greater functionality uniquely designed for wireless technologies, has resulted in a fully mobile office environment. The belief is that a dynamic, integrated sales force can increase the number of sales opportunities by giving sales personnel more time to meet with clients, as opposed to engaging in daily and weekly administrative work. This technology provides customers with the opportunity to have information, on-the-fly and reduces order processing time.

Integrated CRM

As many organizations—especially those within the small medium business (SMB) enterprise space—do not regard marketing, service, and sales as separate activities, CRM systems must be able to provide an integrated view of these and other back-office functions. Typically a sales representative or call center may require one view that gives them the ability to look at previous or past sales orders, track the status of a customer order, view any pricing or billing issues, and see information on sales contracts. These integrated functions are designed to optimize service to the customer.

Customizable CRM

Some sales organizations have become frustrated with rigid CRM packages that offer only one type of specific functionality and do not address the unique characteristics of their business. To remedy this, customizable CRM packages offer multiple CRM templates that are easily configurable and can support different enterprise verticals, providing flexibility and performance.

Outsourcing CRM

As the current economic slowdown continues, there may be a continued demand for outsourcing CRM—specifically call centers. In the US, there are increased compliance issues that companies need to respect, particularly with regards to the vigilance of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce “do not call” legislation. However, lower forecasted economic activity may cause some US-based organizations to consider outsourcing a portion of their call center operations to stimulate onshore activities. This may potentially create a demand for focused contact center CRM applications

On Demand CRM SaaS

For organizations with a limited budget yet requiring some, but not all, of the feature functionality from major on-premise CRM solutions, on-demand (SaaS) CRM may be an option. It has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through its subscription-based pricing model. Additionally, the ease of deployment (as the application is accessed over the Internet) can be an advantage worth looking at if your business model is not complex.

Some Vendors Offerings
The TEC vendor showcase http://www.vendor-showcase.com is an excellent place to review the CRM space and vendor offerings in greater detail. Below are some CRM solutions that I reviewed and found worthy of mention.

Pivotal CRM by CDC Software
Pivotal CRM by CDC software is a flexible and feature-rich product which enables users to define their enterprise requirements through a customizable file template built on the MS .NET technology framework. It provides versatility to clients in the ever-changing financial services industry and to other, heavily compliance-laden industries, such as health care.

Maximizer CRM 10
Maximizer is a leading vendor of highly accessible CRM solutions. It offers an on-premise version, which has over 8,000 corporate clients, ranging in size from large global organizations to individual entrepreneurs. There is also a mobile version available, which allows users to access remote Web-enabled applications through a PDA device. The product builds on the organization’s twenty year legacy of success.

NetSuite CRM+
If your organization is considering an integrated end-to-end solution that delivers a robust CRM tool which includes sales force automation; customer support and service; analytics capabilities; and Web-enabled functionality, then this product provides the full “360 degree” of customer requirements. Through a simple click on a web portal, you can view all financial transactions by your clients. Your sales force will be able to enter orders directly into the system using remote access to engage supporting enterprise systems, like ERP, to review production schedules, thus enabling another level of customer service.

What Does the “L” in PLM Really Mean

2009-10-02T08:33:00.002-07:00

According to Merriam-Webster, one definition of lifecycle is “a series of stages through which something (as an individual, culture, or manufactured product) passes during its lifetime.” In a typical manufacturing environment, these stages include conception, design and development, manufacture, and service. Ideally, a PLM system should manage the entire lifecycle that covers all the stages. Originally, however, the concept of PLM was designed to address product definition authoring and, later on, define data management issues for the design department. Not every stage receives equal attention under the PLM umbrella, and the application maturity of each stage is not yet at the same level.

Conception is the earliest stage of a product lifecycle. Within this stage, ideas are the raw input and development projects or tasks are the output. New ideas for product development come from different sources such as research work, through newly available technologies, brainstorming sessions, customer requirements, and more. Some of the ideas might be incorporated into existing products as new features; some might not be feasible at the moment; a large amount might simply be eliminated; the rest (grouped or alone) might become new concepts, and some of them might finally reach the development level after evaluation. Briefly, the conception stage is a process of idea attrition—only the good ones get to the next step. In this area, management applications are not quite mature and the adoption rate is relatively low. Part of the reason might be that conception is strongly associated with creativity, and people are not yet convinced that this can be handled well by machines.

Product design and development is the main stage where abundant product definition information is generated. When a concept becomes a development project, people need tools to define not only what a product should be (product design), but also how it should be manufactured (engineering design). Computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and computer-aided engineering (CAE) are all well-recognized PLM tools that support the definition, as well as some execution processes. The adoption of PLM tools increases engineers’ individual productivity tremendously—but they also need a platform to collaborate internally (with peers and other departments inside the organization) and externally (with development partners, suppliers, and customers). The application of PLM for the design and development stage is the most mature. It is an exemplary approach for most organizations to start their PLM initiatives from this stage because it produces the majority of product definition information.

Manufacture is a joint task performed by enterprise resource planning (ERP), PLM, and other systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES). ERP takes the lead from the planning and control angles, and MES manages and monitors the production processes on the shop floor. The reasons for having a PLM system in place at this stage are:

1. PLM provides information for what and how to produce.

2. Tight connection between PLM and ERP also helps companies develop better products that are produced in a better way.

Service includes marketing, sales, distribution, repair and maintenance, retirement, and disposal processes related to a product. The quality of these services relies on the accuracy, integrity, and timeliness of the product information that is provided. In general, the more complicated a product is, the more important it is to have the product information available for the mentioned service activities. Another reason for having a PLM system is increasing environmental compliance requirements. For example, at the time when a product enters into the last stage of its lifecycle, the manufacturer has to make sure that the disposal procedure can be handled properly so that the disposition has minimum impact to the environment—especially when it is an asset type of product that lasts years or even decades. Instead of hoping that the user will keep the manual shipped with the product, the disposal instruction has to be stored and managed securely somewhere within the manufacturer’s PLM system.

Drive down cost? What does that really mean in a supply chain world? » Fixes and Risks

2009-10-02T08:33:00.001-07:00

Drive down cost? What does that really mean in a supply chain world

2009-10-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

In the first part of this series of three, I will identify the challenges organizations face when driving their costs down for the supply chain network, as well as look at some strategies to bring down cost in the overall supply chain process. Here I’ll discuss two concepts on cost: cost cutting and cost reducing, and will be using definitions which are in line with Jim Tompkins article The Riddle of Supply Chain Cost Reduction. In the upcoming blogs, I will specifically discuss aspects of inventory management and IT systems and how to implement better business processes to achieve the cost reduction measures in an organization.

Many organizations would like to lower their cost in the entire supply chain, but achieving this is not possible without suitable strategic plans in place. Usually, in cost cutting strategies, organizations don’t look at the entire value chain, but decide to cut for sake of saving some dollars. When you think about cost cutting, is it really a good, strategic plan for the organization in long run? Or should we be looking at reducing non-value added activities and processes from our value chain? In an economic downturn, the latter makes more sense—organization should be looking at the overall, long term objectives and ask what it wants to achieve while maintaining its profitability.

Now the question comes: should organizations be cutting or reducing cost? For some companies there is no difference between cost cutting and cost reducing—however, there is. Let me describe the fine difference between these two strategies. In cost cutting, each department or group within an organization has the mandate from upper management to bring costs down to a minimum. However, this mandate is not based on visibility throughout the entire organization. Cost reducing, on the other hand, cuts out only non-value added activities from their supply chain process.

In general, when a supply chain manager considers cost cutting, he or she is looking solely from the perspective of “where can dollars be saved”. And this is often done through quick fixes, without realizing that they are actually much more harmful. Below is a table of typical, cost cutting quick fixes and the potential risk they may have to the overall organization.

khudsya_scm_table_resized.png

The above cutting tactics will lessen cost in the interim, but may also create major issues for the organization in the long run. That is the reason why many organizations won’t realize benefits from cost cutting.

Instead organizations need to adopt the strategy of cost reducing for their overall supply chain in their supply chain network. Cost reducing includes

* Buying raw materials at the right price from the right strategic partner (supplier) and moving the material in the most effective and efficient manner (channels), while keeping in mind that the objective is to move as little as possible so the material price stays low.
* Making product in a lean manufacturing facility will reduce waste and increase operation throughput. It will also reduce the overall lead-time to deliver. When doing this, organizations need to keep in mind that quality does not need to be jeopardized to implement this new process. It’s important to measure key cost reducing indicators to see if cost reduction has been achieved.
* Transportation has a variable cost, depending on mode and location. The best ways to reduce cost is for organizations to establish relationships with its suppliers so they can plan their freight delivery in a manner which will benefit both parties. This also allows organizations to manage the freight delivery of finished goods to distribution centers and customers in the most cost effective and economical manner. Organizations should also use tools to analyze each transportation delivery to understand hidden cost and to build an improved transportation model.
* Distribution centers need to have a best-in-class facility layout which can reduce the movement of material, as well as reduce the need to store inventory at other locations. Organization should apply the best practices of warehouse management to run the distribution center and remove inefficient labor cost. Organizations should also keep in mind the environmental impact of distribution centers, and strive to reduce the energy consumption and waste of packing material.
* Inventory should be managed in-house, at stores, and in warehouses. The number of days supply is stored at a location needs to be evaluated on a daily basis so that organizations don’t get stuck with non-conforming inventories. The bottom line is to keep business profitable by having the right inventory, at the right location, at the right time to create satisfied customers.
* Outsourcing should be evaluated through key indicator metrics, regardless of which activity is being outsourced. The organization should identify the benefits (profit) of outsourcing based on timelines and measure its return on investment.
* IT systems are just one of the places where organizations need to re-evaluate their current providers. Some systems are out-of-date and need to be replaced or upgraded with new technologies or capabilities. These systems will identify the organization’s obstacles regarding data accuracy, completeness, and timeliness. All IT systems need to be able to integrate with each other, as well with other third party providers and partners.

These areas of supply chain need to be analyzed further for companies to implement a cost reducing strategy. Some, which are simpler and easier to achieve, have already been identified in this blog, but others are harder to achieve without further collaboration with other parties in the supply chain network.

Intelligent Manufacturing Systems: Beating the Odds, Mightily

2009-10-02T08:31:00.001-07:00

EnterpriseIQ’s Architecture

The extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) product was originally written in the now almost esoteric Delphi environment (from the client-server era) on top of an Oracle Database. The suite features a two-tier architecture, with all business logic (i.e., rules and transaction processing) residing on the Oracle database server.

IQMS chose Oracle’s database technology (Internet-enabled via an Apache Web Server) for its reputed safety, security, and high performance. However, the vendor packages and abstracts the database in an embedded way (via a silent installation routine) that mitigates the traditionally high price and heavy administration downsides of Oracle.

Repeated IQMS user surveys confirm that the database is easy to administer and maintain this way, with no need for intensive Oracle programming. Following a silent installation routine, the server works like a refrigerator (or some other white appliance): all users have to worry about is the quality of what they put into the system and how to properly use its output.

The EnterpriseIQ product has meanwhile been largely rewritten in Microsoft Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET), which makes it compatible with Microsoft .NET Framework. ASP.NET is used for the client-side technology (except for Microsoft Windows CE in the warehousing module), while Oracle Database remains as the back end. This combination of Microsoft and Oracle technologies somewhat resembles IFS’ approach.

IQMS strongly believes that this unified “same DNA” suite (even if on a seemingly out-moded two-tier client-server architecture) results in online transaction processing (OLTP) that is very fast; much faster than if IQMS had adopted a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as other contemporary vendors do to stitch together disparate applications.

The OLTP and decision support systems (DSS) processing speed has reportedly been an important criterion for customers selecting IQMS. As Randy Flamm, IQMS’ president and founder, said during our recent exchanges:

“At IQMS we have always believed it is easier to develop and nurture a product rather than attempt to integrate to another company’s package. Essentially this is what SOA is about – integrating many packages for use across an enterprise. For the most part, our opinion is “SOA what!” We don’t need to build on this platform because we handle almost every function within our own database.

Is there a need for some partnering? Yes. We understand there are report writing and spreadsheet automation software packages out there (Crystal Reports and Global Software) that handle this better than an ERP system ever should or could do. We utilize these to tie into our package for extracting and presenting data, but that is where the need for SOA in our package starts and stops.”

For user friendliness and intuitive navigation (e.g., with jump-around and drill-down features), IQMS has chosen a Microsoft platform for the client side. In addition to transactional performance, other advantages of the two-tier architecture are data integrity and user interface (UI) independence. Namely, there is a whole host of UI choices: traditional graphical UI (GUI), .NET client (including the variant for mobile users), portals, and Telnet client for warehouse workers. IQMS uses Terminal Server and Citrix for wide area network (WAN) links to its UNIX or LINUX back-end servers.

My belief is that the reliance solely on Oracle’s database might, in the long term, limit IQMS’ market opportunity, especially within smaller companies that are standardizing on Microsoft SQL Server. The vendor claims that prospective customers are more focused on the solution than on the technology, and that the database system doesn’t matter.

Fine, but maybe also offering an on-demand and software as a service (SaaS) solution could help in that regard (think of Plex Systems, formerly Plexus)? At this stage, IQMS does not see the justifiable demand to take the SaaS plunge (i.e., the gut-wrenching product rewrite).

More of EntepriseIQ’s Traits

Despite being tightly woven and with an extensive footprint, EnterpriseIQ is a reasonably open system and is also modular. Users have to go for a basic core ERP package, and can decide on optional modules to extend the enterprise as business and demands grow. Therefore, of the more than 20,000 concurrent user licenses, below is the breakdown of licenses per modules:

* Over 10,000 concurrent core ERP system user licenses,
* Over 3,600 concurrent customer relationship management (CRM) user licenses,
* Over 3,300 concurrent shop floor system licenses,
* Over 3,000 concurrent wireless warehouse management system (WMS) licenses.

In addition, IQMS has also sold over 15,000 RealTime Machine Monitoring (mentioned in Part 1) licenses. While the system’s scalability comes inherently from Oracle database, after adding French language capabilities to EnterpriseIQ in late 2008, IQMS now supports the following eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, and Swedish.

In addition to multiple languages, IQMS claims support for multiple enterprise entities/plants (on a single database instance) and multiple currencies. The double-byte character set (required to support Chinese), the ability to specify language by user in a single system, and other global requirements were also driven by customers, as even small manufacturers in this time and age need to operate as parts of a global supply chain.

Pre-empting the Dreaded “I” Word

IQMS claims that its single-source offering resonates well with the companies that are wary of any hidden and unneeded expenses, especially these days. These smaller manufacturers are particularly “allergic” to hearing about the need for any interface.

Indeed, multiple products and interfaces come with the burden of continuous management and upgrade coordination and an increase in IT support staff. Also, one has to deal with multiple software vendor maintenance contracts and worry about the financial stability of multiple software providers, each of whom will likely have different business strategies.

Moreover, when different applications require their own databases, it becomes quite problematic to write holistic reports over multiple databases. Complex SOA-based configurations also come with speed and performance issues. Last but not least, there are many ongoing support issues that come with multi-vendor solutions, starting with each vendor’s decision to provide offshore support rather than a more intimate local call center. When support and customizations come from value added resellers (VARs), whom should the customer call first in case of a problem?

But EnterpriseIQ is certainly not meant to be all things to all people. I concur with Frank Scavo’s recent post on IQMS on his Enterprise Spectator blog:

“…Now, having said that, I’m sure there are major gaps in IQMS functionality for some clients, especially once you get outside of its target niche. But that’s the beauty of a niche strategy. IQMS doesn’t have to be all things to all customers. It only needs to be all things (or most things) to a few customers…”

R&D Work Never Ends

IQMS’ management is aware of how much more capability the company needs to develop, and the idea is to particularly intensify research & development (R&D) these days. The intention is to further distance itself from (or leapfrog) competitors that seem more concerned with cost-cutting and survival tactics.

Accordingly, in mid-2008, IQMS delivered EnterpriseIQ version 7.4.1.20 with over 1,000 built-in reports and 400 enhancements to areas such as quality management, electronic data interchange (EDI), WMS, product lifecycle management (PLM), security, and forecasting. Earlier in 2008, IQMS announced its enhanced support for the process manufacturing industry with the release of the Master Batch manufacturing capability. Master Batch is aimed at companies such as compounding or formula-based manufacturers that are focused on heavy mixing and blending operations, and require the ability to handle multiple operations in a single routing.

To best support process manufacturing needs, ERP systems should give manufacturers the flexibility to enter process bills of material (BOMs) based on formulas where the components either total 100 percent or they can be added based on volume or weight quantities. Comprehensive BOM/formula functionality also has to provide co-product/by-product capability, flexible packaging alternatives, flexible batch sizes, yield/scrap calculation, grading and re-classification of products, alternative and substitute formulas (and routings), “what if” costing scenarios, and more.

On the other hand, the most recently released Assembly Manufacturing type is designed especially for manufacturers seeking consistent quality and greater traceability within assembly processes via enhanced tracking of complex routing structures. Potential benefits of this assembly structure include the ability to identify product availability and costs at each stage of production as well as the option to choose between either dispatch lists or finite scheduling.

Some companies might also benefit from the detailed lot traceability, operator certifications and training, and tool tracking functionalities. The Assembly functionality is IQMS’ response to an ongoing trend toward imposing more requirements for machine shops, metal fabricators, and process-related operations, especially in the medical device field, which has strict traceability concerns and constraints.

Offering an Entry-level Product

To attract the lower-end of the market, in 2007 IQMS delivered the EnterpriseIQ LE (Limited Edition) version to provide a lower-cost entry-point ERP solution. The product is packaged to meet the needs of single-site manufacturers and smaller supply chain environments (in terms of lower EDI volumes).

IQMS achieved the lower price benefit by packaging just the functionality most often used by manufacturers with single-plant operations. EnterpriseIQ LE version gives small manufacturers the same set of core ERP capabilities found in the full version.

Functionality such as manufacturing and inventory management, quality control, sales and distribution, and financial and accounting management are all included in a single database and at an affordable price. Certain features that are customarily used to support larger operations are not included, such as those used for multi-plant operations.

By choosing EnterpriseIQ LE, customers who operate only one plant and currently have no ERP system in place should gain an initial modular, single-source ERP solution that can be tailored to fit their business needs and designed to scale up with optional modules that work seamlessly within the core system. IQMS is also offering a migration path with this LE version for companies that might eventually grow into multiple locations.

The final part of this blog series will analyze IQMS’ recent involvement in the user experience (UX) design. The vendor joins the fray of many peer ERP vendors that have been working on injecting a breath of a fresh air into their offerings. By putting the full power of commonly used applications on one intuitive and personalized screen, these vendors hope to speed users’ productivity and drive leaner results.

6 Ways Vendors Are Talking At You Instead of To You

2009-10-02T08:30:00.002-07:00

15 years ago, you could forgive a company for thinking that a Web site was something they needed to have because everyone else had one. But by the end of the dot-com boom, pretty well everyone had realized that a corporate Web site was much more than just an online business card or brochure. Today, a company’s Web site is one of its most important assets, simply because it’s the first point of contact with potential customers.

Unfortunately, when it comes to talking to those potential customers, many companies are still missing the mark, and enterprise software vendors are among the worst offenders.Instead of talking to you, they’re talking at you. Here are 6 ways they’re doing it.
Making Meaningless Claims

If you’re developing a tagline, a good rule of thumb is to analyze the claim you’re making and think about whether any of your competitors would ever claim the opposite. If the answer is no, you need a better tagline. For example, a software vendor might use the classic three-word tagline structure and come up with something like “Flexible. Powerful. Efficient.” Since no vendor would claim to be rigid, weak, and wasteful, it’s neither memorable nor effective.

Shouldn’t the same rule apply to other communications?

Apparently not, it would seem. Vendor Web sites are chock full of unsupported claims that sound good, but don’t mean much. For example, almost every vendor’s site claims that the vendor is an “industry leader.” But what does that mean? How is it measured? Who decides? And more to the point, if every vendor is an industry leader, is that claim really going to help you decide?

What you want to know is what sets the vendor apart, and how that affects you. For example, if you run a financial services company and you’re looking for accounting software, are you going to pay more attention to a generic “industry leader” or to the “leading provider of accounting software for financial services firms?”

Probably the latter, right? And if that vendor backs up the claim with some hard information about their expertise and ties it into your business, so much the better.

But most vendors, content to wow you with their leadership, don’t do that. Why not?
Talking About “Businesses” Instead of Talking About You

Vendor Web sites are full of descriptions of businesses. Businesses facing challenges. Regular businesses becoming best-run businesses. Businesses applying best practices to achieve explosive growth. Businesses in turmoil. Businesses suffering in a weak economy. Businesses burdened by regulation.

But the only business you care about is your own.

This may sound picky, but to me, these generic descriptions sound a little too prescriptive. They sound like the vendor, without even asking what your business is actually doing, knows what it should be doing. Like without understanding where you want your business to go, they know where it should go.

If you would only implement their solutions.

And in their defense, many vendors deal with hundreds or thousands of companies—certainly enough to see what successful businesses (and unsuccessful ones) have in common.

But having things in common doesn’t make businesses the same. Your business has its fair share of unique characteristics, and you’re more keenly aware of them than a vendor will ever be.

So isn’t it easier on the ears when a vendor asks what you need? When they acknowledge that your business has its own problems and its own requirements? When they ask you what you want instead of telling you what “businesses” need?
Making It All About Themselves

If vendors aren’t telling you what you need, they’re probably telling you how good they are. Industry-leading this, best-of-breed that, and redefined the other. They’re almost daring you to speak ill of the software they’re so proud of. And pride in your work is great, but the problem with this approach is that it implies that the software is perfect, and it’s your business that has the problems.

But facts are facts. No solution is going to do 100% of what you need it to do. You’re going to have to make some compromises, and so is the vendor. In other words, the “best fit” solution is the one that comes closest to doing what you need with the least amount of headache. And vendors know that. The chest-beating tone is just that—a tone. But it does create an impression of how you’ll be treated as one of their customers.

So why not change the tone? Wouldn’t you prefer to hear that a vendor has a great piece of software and that they’ll work with you to integrate it into your business as smoothly as possible? Wouldn’t you rather feel like you’re working with your vendor and not for them?

I thought so.
Not Providing Concrete Examples

I see this one all the time. Vendors start by extolling the virtues of their solutions, then they make a bunch of claims about what those solutions will do for your business, and finally they throw a laundry list of features at you in the hopes that you’ll recognize what you need. But they rarely connect the dots.

The problem is that many vendors approach things backwards. They developed all kinds of neat features to (presumably) solve common business problems. So when they tell you that a feature exists, they think you’ll a) connect it to the problem it was designed to solve, b) immediately see its value, and c) recognize the benefit they claim it brings.

A more effective approach is to just spell it out. Rather than claiming that a solution “manages customer interactions, from contact data and history to calendaring and tasks,” (for example) a vendor might explain that when a customer calls the support department, your rep can see what products they have, what problems they’ve had in the past, and what other reps have told the customer. The call goes smoothly (and quickly), the customer feels valued, you save money, etc., etc.

It takes just a few extra words (or a short video) to explicitly connect a feature to a real world problem, connect the problem to a solution, and connect the solution to a benefit. And as a potential customer, you now know a lot more about what you’re buying.

Again, wouldn’t you rather deal with a vendor that goes out of its way to give you all the facts?
Making Information Difficult to Find

The problems I’ve listed so far all assume that you’ve actually found something like the information you’re looking for. But a number of vendor Web sites commit the cardinal sin of making information hard to find in the first place. You can find examples of this easily enough, so rather than listing some, let me just say this:

You should never have to work to find the information you want on a vendor’s Web site. That’s the vendor’s job.

Every vendor should be doing everything in its power to make sure that all the information you could possibly want is available, easy to find, and easy to act on. From information about solutions, to feature lists, demos, trial versions, references, testimonials, contact information, and especially purchasing information, it’s up to the vendor to make sure you find it. Not the other way ’round.
Assuming You Care

That issue of responsibility brings me to the common thread in all of these problems: vendors assume you care. About them. And they’re not wrong. They’re just going about things the wrong way.

What they’re doing is assuming you’re willing to slog through reams of marketing material to get at the information you want, convince yourself that their solutions are right for you, and buy.

You, on the other hand, care about whether vendors’ solutions can address your specific problems. You care whether the vendors can deliver what they promise—on time and within your budget. You care whether they’re going to support you before, during, and after your implementation.

How Project Management Can Help Manufacturers

2009-10-02T08:30:00.001-07:00

Recently there were two great articles published on our Website touching the interesting problem of interactions between traditional manufacturing management and project management: The Business Model for the 21st Century Is Project-centric and Weather the Recession with Project ERP. I agree with the respective authors that the project-driven management approach can help companies improve their businesses in any kind of economic situation, whether during a recession or a booming economy. But in this blog post I would like to share some thoughts with you on other aspects of how project management can help manufacturing.

1. Project management has been—and still is—a useful methodology to run and manage standalone projects, such as new product development or the selection and implementation of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In this type of project, the project’s targets, scopes, resources, and other parameters are quite obvious and defined by the substance of the project itself. In my examples, they are to develop a new product and to prepare the necessary documentation and equipment for manufacturing; and to have a new ERP system deployed and running where well-trained users are successfully dealing with it and the managers are receiving the information needed in a timely and convenient manner.

Usually, organizations have no problems with this type of project management use—everyone understands it clearly and the methodology is well defined. In addition to engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturers creating unique custom-made products and usually managing those customer orders as projects, project-driven activities can also be beneficial for assemble-to-order and make-to-order types of manufacturing businesses. For example, an internal customer order fulfilment policy can be created where some orders are segregated as projects, and business processes are defined based on project management knowledge.

2. Project management methodology can also be used in managing internal company changes which, at a first glance, might not seem like a “traditional” project, or might not seem to be a project at all. Here are two examples: a) due to market requirements, a manufacturer has to reduce a cost of a particular product; b) a manufacturer must identify and eliminate supplier-related bottlenecks in the purchasing of key components for the production. In these cases, it is not that easy to recognize project targets, scope, and work breakdown tasks. However, I do believe that this type of business challenge can be characterized as a project, and standard project management techniques can be successfully applied in this case. A company might have multiple projects running simultaneously: special project management software or an ERP system that includes a project management module can be used for these types of projects as well as for standalone projects.

3. And finally, a few words about the matrix structure of a company as an area of project management knowledge and application of methods. As the term suggests, there should be “horizontals” and “verticals,” as in a matrix. Let’s say there are traditional functional or department managers, and at the same time there are product managers assigned for for the development and management of particular products or product families. The functional chain of “purchasing, planning, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping” will be our “horizontals”, and product managers with their teams will be the “verticals”. Our matrix is the intersection of the horizontals and verticals (see fig.1). A product manager can assign different people for the different projects (employees working on the same project are highlighted with blue).

matrix-structure.jpg

Figure 1. Matrix structure [click thumbnail to enlarge]

Companies with a matrix structure type of management, as mentioned in Weather the Recession with Project ERP, should be able to track and manage costs by products or by product groups throughout the entire product lifecycle. This is only possible when using ERP systems that are smart enough to distinguish those costs and associate them with a corresponding product, or even with a product component. With all the seeming simplicity of this structure, in reality it is not that easy to implement, or to achieve the expected level of effectiveness.

The major problem businesses face when implementing a matrix structure within a company is a potential conflict of interests between functional and product managers and their employees—especially when they make diametrically opposed business decisions. Here is an example to demonstrate this:

Say you are a material buyer and you are required to purchase either material A or material B this week, but you are limited in your budget. You might get a very good deal and save lots of money on material A because the supplier is offering a discount this particular week only, but at the same time, a product manager insists on purchasing material B according to his own priorities. In addition to this, your boss is not a product manager but a purchasing director, and she is going to appraise your performance based on how effectively you spend the company’s funds. So what would be your choice as a buyer? Tough question, isn’t it?

As you can see, a matrix structure implementation is very challenging and it involves huge structural changes at all levels of the employee hierarchy. More importantly, a psychological shift in people’s approaches and working habits is essential. On the other hand, many companies have been able to overcome these hardships to elevate their businesses into the next level.

I know of a manufacturing company that was implementing an ERP system for the first time, implementing ISO quality standards, and changing its organizational structure into a matrix at the same time. In fact, I was the ERP implementation project manager at that company and I must say, it was an interesting and challenging time.

To SaaS or Not, Is That a Question?

2009-10-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Before any vendor can embark onto delivering a SaaS offering, it must thoroughly consider a number of harrowing SaaS technology choices and their implications. Thus, Part IIa also analyzed the decision’s impact on the functional footprint (scope) of the future SaaS product, after which the aspiring SaaS vendor must identify gaps within its in-house skill sets and define how to fill them.

This part continues with the other major remaining technical considerations before any vendor can embark on delivery of a SaaS offering.

The Tenancy Decision

While the true multi-tenant design approach for SaaS is the best in terms of highest scalability and lowest operational overhead (and it allows moderate to extensive software modifications), it also requires the highest initial investment. Thus, in some cases, the traditional single-tenant hosted/application service provider (ASP) model or partial/hybrid (something in between) solution may be appropriate. Namely, the application virtualization approach enables single-tenant solutions via tenant management (virtualization) tools from Wrapped Apps Corporation, Parallels, or Citrix Systems.

The major considerations here for independent software vendors (ISVs) (not necessarily end users per se, although everyone should be informed at least) are the following: whether there is legacy code that could be somehow leveraged (or that would be difficult to rewrite), how many new SaaS implementations per year are forecast, and whether the SaaS model has been proven in the target market. In any case, it is critically important to get the product’s architecture right up front, since making any corrections and rectifications along the way will be complex and expensive.

In addition to the tenancy considerations, one must address the questions of scalability (in terms of load balancing and routing), availability, performance, and configuration-driven customization (both to accommodate personalized look-and-feel and special functionality). Other architectural factors are system integration, information security (including identity management), usability, communications (e.g., via e-mail, short message service [SMS], instant messaging [IM]), global (multinational) capabilities, audit and compliance, and system backup and recovery.

The above overwhelming combination of factors influences not only the SaaS applications architecture but also the underlying infrastructure (platform) architecture. I would also add the cost of full time employees (FTEs) charged with handling all these issues.

While there are costs with multi-tenancy, over time the costs to handle each of these architectures can and probably will exceed multi-tenant design costs. Current macro-economic conditions are making one or the other approach seem cheaper right now, but as the economy rebounds, the question will come up about long-term strategy.

Finally, the costs for compliance are very high (and can be so high that it is out of reach for new entrants) to get enterprise-class services and certifications and audits, such as ISO/IEC 27001, SAS 70 Level II, Systrust, etc. Each part of the system must be audited and these audits can cast to the amount of US$100.000 and higher. Thus, multiple components in any architecture will lead to higher compliance costs, but that’s another blog topic.

Forget Not About the “SaaS Plumbing” Thingies, Either!

But even solving these multiple pieces of the architectural puzzle is only the beginning, since one also must include many SaaS-specific “must have” pieces of functionality, such as a pricing engine, a billing engine and payment processing, tenant and subscription management, service provisioning, system usage and performance (uptime) monitoring, and subscriber management and self-service. Creating all these “SaaS plumbing” components requires significant effort (in addition to the necessary “know-how”), and the company must thoroughly plan for it.

During the Webcast mentioned in Part IIa, Scio Consulting International claimed that this functionality takes from 20 to 50 percent of the research and development (R&D) effort for an entire SaaS application. The conventional wisdom is to leverage commercial SaaS components and services for time-to-market (TTM) reasons.

For example, commercial SaaS billing applications options would be OpSource Billing CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management), Zuora, or Vindicia, whereas SaaS customer management applications would be OpSource Billing CLM and Aria Systems. While PayPal has become the standard for online payment processing, uptime service level agreement (SLA) monitoring can be done via TrustSaaS, Absolute Performance, and the SaaSMonitor.com offering from MVP Systems. Last but not least, SaaS enterprise applications integration (EAI, including links to on-premise applications as well) is offered by Boomi’s AtomSphere suite, and Cast Iron Systems. Sonoa Systems provides analytics, management, and IT governance solutions for cloud services and application programming interfaces (APIs).

PaaS The Hosting, Please!

This brings us to the discussion about choosing the technology stack (with the following technical layers: application, deployment platform, and infrastructure) in a do-it-yourself (DIY) or other fashion. Namely, as ZDNet’s blogger and SaaS connoisseur Phil Wainewright explains well in his recent blog post, there is a plethora of platform choices for vendors, including commercially available platform as a service (PaaS) options.

Some examples of available PaaS offerings would be the following: SaaSGrid from Apprenda, Force.com from Salesforce.com, Google App Engine, Bungee Connect, Facebook’s Platform, Apple’s iPhone Platform, pieces of Microsoft’s still upcoming Azure Cloud Platform, and so on. In the case of Salesforce.com, there are three main ways that ISVs can partner with the vendor as a platform: build, market, or sell.

Force.com is designed for those that want to build applications (without bothering with porting, integration, security, hosting, infrastructure, etc.), while the AppExchange directory is for ISVs that already have an application of their own and are focused on marketing it. The upcoming Checkout service (currently in the pilot phase) will be for those who want to fulfill sales using Salesforce.com’s infrastructure.

Force.com is also flexible, so that developers can use Salesforce.com’s Visualforce presentation-layer development environment or other toolkits such as Eclipse (Salesforce.com has an Eclipse plug-in), or other third party development environments to create custom applications that do not look like the traditional Salesforce.com user interface (UI). In addition, Force.com has its own programming language, Apex, which can be used to create highly customized applications via the Java-like language.

Indeed, selecting the right PaaS may simplify the technical decision process, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce development and operating costs. A PaaS takes care of software components (services) creation (via managing metadata and portals), deployment (i.e., ordering, provisioning, and metering), and execution (via SLA management, billing, and subscription management).

In fact, the abovementioned necessary SaaS add-on plumbing applications (monitoring, billing, provisioning, etc.) also come bundled within a PaaS, and can save time and money while adding value to the vendor’s operations. Finally, a PaaS also provides the necessary components for reporting, alerts, and dashboards.

Two Force.com Endorsements by ERP Veterans

Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2008 user conference, which coincided with the historic US Elections, was marked by exuberance, confidence, and an overall upbeat feeling, in sharp contrast to the ongoing market sentiments. Ray Wang and Vinnie Mirchandani have described the event in their respective blog posts.

What really caught my eye there was seeing the two longstanding enterprise resource planning (ERP) players, CODA (now part of Unit 4 Agresso) and Fujitsu Glovia, opting to write brand-new products on Force.com. Salesforce.com’s blustery chief executive officer (CEO) Marc Benioff even (half-jokingly or not) taunted SAP (during his intellectual debate with SAP’s co-founder Hasso Plattner in early 2008) to rewrite the SAP Business ByDesign on-demand product on Force.com, rather than to “further torture and embarrass itself” (and the rest of the traditionally stodgy on-premise vendor community).

Even though this challenge might sound ridiculous for too-proud SAP to acknowledge and succumb to, that suggestion begins to make sense to me, in light of the giant’s initial faltering with SAP Business ByDesign. Well, maybe SAP could acquire Salesforce.com and solve its SaaS conundrum once for all, but that might be a bit difficult to pull off (at least during these days of limited spending)?

I concur with Dennis Howlett, who in his recent blog post on CODA wondered why a company with a 30-year history of writing world-class finance applications and with 2,600 renowned customers would entrust its on-demand future (i.e., the CODA 2go SaaS product) to a new, relatively untested platform. According to Jeremy Roche, CODA’s CEO, the attraction came in the following four distinct forms:

1. Access to a pre-built infrastructure that includes a security model, workflow, reporting, and multi-tenancy.
2. The ability to gain immediate access to Salesforce.com’s customer and partner ecosystem.
3. The ability to have the Coda 2go product run from Salesforce.com’s datacenters, reducing the need for infrastructure and gaining access to massive painless scaling.
4. The inheritance of Salesforce.com’s credibility in maintaining a world-class service since Coda 2go runs on the same servers and infrastructure as Salesforce.com’s.

For its part, Glovia had initially ported a cut-down on-demand version of its established glovia.com ERP product. The vendor named its erstwhile SaaS product GSinnovate, but has apparently not sold a single license since 2006. In our recent discussions, Glovia conceded the need for the SaaS channel (and more), and thus the decision to go for Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and Force.com. Glovia plans to deliver on-demand products that will address one business process at a time, starting with the generally available glovia.com Order Management product.

There Is No Such a Thing as a Free Lunch PaaS

At the end of the day, a PaaS platform is not a charity that is free of charge, but rather a significant cost item that will cut into the SaaS vendor’s bottom line ever after (as well as will all the other necessary individual SaaS plumbing components). Thus, many SaaS aspirants might still opt for the grueling DIY approach by using some free and open source software (FOSS) LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) bundle or Ruby on Rails (RoR).

On the commercial software side, there is always Microsoft’s stack, which consists of Windows, Internet Information Services (IIS), ASP.NET, and SQL Server. Progress OpenEgde, Oracle SaaS Platform, various SaaS programs from IBM, and so on are other SaaS platform (but not necessarily all-inclusive PaaS) alternatives.

In any case, the DIY vs. PaaS dilemma should take into the account whether there is a match between the technology requirements with the SaaS vendor’s available in-house expertise. When leaning towards PaaS, the SaaS vendor should ascertain whether its target market is part of a particular PaaS marketplace (ecosystem), as well as the time-to-market and R&D cost savings vs. the costs of using the PaaS. Certainly, there is a trade-off between the abovementioned benefits of a PaaS and the dependence on the PaaS provider (i.e., what happens if the PaaS provider goes out of business?).

How Project Management Can Help Manufacturers

2009-10-02T08:27:00.002-07:00

1. Project management has been—and still is—a useful methodology to run and manage standalone projects, such as new product development or the selection and implementation of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In this type of project, the project’s targets, scopes, resources, and other parameters are quite obvious and defined by the substance of the project itself. In my examples, they are to develop a new product and to prepare the necessary documentation and equipment for manufacturing; and to have a new ERP system deployed and running where well-trained users are successfully dealing with it and the managers are receiving the information needed in a timely and convenient manner.

Usually, organizations have no problems with this type of project management use—everyone understands it clearly and the methodology is well defined. In addition to engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturers creating unique custom-made products and usually managing those customer orders as projects, project-driven activities can also be beneficial for assemble-to-order and make-to-order types of manufacturing businesses. For example, an internal customer order fulfilment policy can be created where some orders are segregated as projects, and business processes are defined based on project management knowledge.

2. Project management methodology can also be used in managing internal company changes which, at a first glance, might not seem like a “traditional” project, or might not seem to be a project at all. Here are two examples: a) due to market requirements, a manufacturer has to reduce a cost of a particular product; b) a manufacturer must identify and eliminate supplier-related bottlenecks in the purchasing of key components for the production. In these cases, it is not that easy to recognize project targets, scope, and work breakdown tasks. However, I do believe that this type of business challenge can be characterized as a project, and standard project management techniques can be successfully applied in this case. A company might have multiple projects running simultaneously: special project management software or an ERP system that includes a project management module can be used for these types of projects as well as for standalone projects.

3. And finally, a few words about the matrix structure of a company as an area of project management knowledge and application of methods. As the term suggests, there should be “horizontals” and “verticals,” as in a matrix. Let’s say there are traditional functional or department managers, and at the same time there are product managers assigned for for the development and management of particular products or product families. The functional chain of “purchasing, planning, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping” will be our “horizontals”, and product managers with their teams will be the “verticals”. Our matrix is the intersection of the horizontals and verticals (see fig.1). A product manager can assign different people for the different projects (employees working on the same project are highlighted with blue).

matrix-structure.jpg

Figure 1. Matrix structure [click thumbnail to enlarge]

Companies with a matrix structure type of management, as mentioned in Weather the Recession with Project ERP, should be able to track and manage costs by products or by product groups throughout the entire product lifecycle. This is only possible when using ERP systems that are smart enough to distinguish those costs and associate them with a corresponding product, or even with a product component. With all the seeming simplicity of this structure, in reality it is not that easy to implement, or to achieve the expected level of effectiveness.

The major problem businesses face when implementing a matrix structure within a company is a potential conflict of interests between functional and product managers and their employees—especially when they make diametrically opposed business decisions. Here is an example to demonstrate this:

Say you are a material buyer and you are required to purchase either material A or material B this week, but you are limited in your budget. You might get a very good deal and save lots of money on material A because the supplier is offering a discount this particular week only, but at the same time, a product manager insists on purchasing material B according to his own priorities. In addition to this, your boss is not a product manager but a purchasing director, and she is going to appraise your performance based on how effectively you spend the company’s funds. So what would be your choice as a buyer? Tough question, isn’t it?

As you can see, a matrix structure implementation is very challenging and it involves huge structural changes at all levels of the employee hierarchy. More importantly, a psychological shift in people’s approaches and working habits is essential. On the other hand, many companies have been able to overcome these hardships to elevate their businesses into the next level.

I know of a manufacturing company that was implementing an ERP system for the first time, implementing ISO quality standards, and changing its organizational structure into a matrix at the same time. In fact, I was the ERP implementation project manager at that company and I must say, it was an interesting and challenging time.

That’s No Ordinary RFI—Why BPM and the TEC RFI Are So Important to Your Software Selection Project

2009-10-02T08:27:00.001-07:00

If you’re currently involved with your company’s software selection and implementation project, then I’m sure you can appreciate how difficult this process is. From figuring out what you want your new system to accomplish, to “go-live”—and everything in between—enterprise software selection is no easy feat. In fact, it can be downright grueling.

To start your software selection project off on the right foot, you must first define all of your current business processes—and then document them. This task alone can take months. However, with the right methodology and tools, the time spent doing this can be cut down significantly. If you are using your own methods for gathering requirements, your list of business processes must be structured in such a way that allows vendors to easily apply them to their products and determine whether they can support certain functionalities.

Again, no easy feat!

Many organizations often start a software selection by first choosing a vendor and then working in tandem with the vendor throughout the process of identifying and modeling their business processes on software capabilities. This is all fine and dandy—but who knows your business better than the people who perform these processes day in and day out? You, your department managers, and IT staff. Why put the onus on the vendor to perform this task and then risk not being certain that everything your new system may need has been identified? Not to mention the cost this type of vendor service could carry!

So what’s a software selection project manager to do?

Let’s take a look at how you can build a comprehensive request for information (RFI) by first reviewing the basics principles of business process modeling (BPM) and how it correlates to the RFI.

BPM Made Simple

Review Your Existing Systems and Business Processes

This process starts by documenting your business process workflows across all departments and functional areas. Knowing the capabilities of your current software is important in understanding where you need to add and improve functionality. It’s also important for you to review systems currently in place in order to gauge whether it’s worth upgrading your current software, as opposed to acquiring a new system. At the same time, reviewing your business processes can help you pinpoint areas where you can replace inefficient practices with best practices that will be supported by your new software.

List and Prioritize Your Functional and Technical Requirements1

Functional requirements are capabilities that you need the software to have. BPM ensures that all functional requirements are included in your RFI and eventual request for proposal (RFP). It helps you identify your customization requirements early on and make them part of your decision. It allows you to map your business processes to features and functions so that vendors can understand and accurately respond to them.

Technical requirements are things that the new software needs to support in order to integrate smoothly into your existing IT infrastructure. Assigning initial priorities to the functional and technical requirements will help you sort out what is important—and what is not.

Creating Your RFI

Now it’s time to map your processes onto a software feature-and-function model that will allow you to clearly communicate your needs to software vendors. Great! But how do you explain those processes to the software vendor in a language they can understand?

RFI, Anyone?

The process of building an RFI can be painstaking for an organization. A traditional RFI is primarily used to gather information to help make a decision on what steps to take next in your software selection project. In addition to gathering basic information, an RFI is often used as a solicitation sent to a broad base of potential vendors for the purpose of gathering information, developing a strategy, building a database, and preparing for a RFP or request for quotation (RFQ).

Why TEC’s RFIs Can Help You

TEC’s RFI and RFP templates do a lot of the tedious work for you. They are created in a manner that allows an organization to easily define which features and functions it would like from the software and how important each of those features and functions are to the business.

These industry-standard RFI and RFP templates also help ensure accurate responses from vendors. The RFI templates contain thousands of functional and technical criteria that have been vetted by TEC’s analysts. TEC’s RFIs on average cover about 75 to 80 percent of a business’s functional requirements. These RFI documents can also be customized to meet your company’s own unique requirements.

The RFI and RFP templates help you obtain accurate information from vendors that can then be compared with your business requirements.

Making Your Software Evaluation Easier

Once your RFI is complete (having added your custom functionality and prioritizing what features and functions are important to your business), it’s time to go after some vendors to see what they have to offer and how well they can support your business processes.

Sending your prioritized RFI to a long list of vendors and gathering their responses could take several months. Do you have that kind of time? Probably not.

TEC has developed a structured methodology that, within a complex selection project, narrows down the list of potential vendors to only those that match your business model, priorities, and special requirements. How? With TEC’s online decision support system (DSS), ebestmatch™. By taking advantage of our knowledge bases (KBs) to compare the vendors on your long list, you can quickly—and easily—see how well each vendor addresses your specific requirements. You can also use ebestmatch to create “what-if” scenarios that show you how well each vendor’s solution will scale as your business evolves.3

The Choice Is Yours

Time is of the essence when it comes to selecting software. The process can be long and drawn out, so why not arm yourself with some methods—and tools—that will help move it along more smoothly and quickly? The choice is yours. Good luck!

The Wizardry of Business Process Management

2009-10-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and chief executive officer (CEO), gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive…Capitalize.” Trefler began by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore,” and may just need some ruby slippers to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can recapture the spirit of the event here.

But before I start to paraphrase the spirited presentation, some introduction to Pegasystems and Trefler is in order. Pegasystems provides BPM software to drive revenue growth, productivity, and business agility to over 760 of the world’s most sophisticated organizations in financial services, insurance, health care, government, life sciences, communications, manufacturing, and other industries. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US), the company employs over 900 people in its offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Pegasystems’ Genesis

Much has evolved at Pegasystems (a.k.a. Pega) from its very first customer Citibank in 1983, which used Pega’s first-generation product written in what now is the seemingly ancient assembler language. The product was rewritten in the mid-80s in the less ancient PL/1 imperative programming language, and in the mid-90s in C++. For the next 10 years, the vendor sold a number of packaged (but still separate and disjointed) customer relationship management (CRM) applications for financial services and health care, and was doing sort of OK.

While those applications dealt with process issues, they were not BPM solutions per se. But the latest inflection point took place in 2004 when Pega rewrote its product suite yet again, this time with the idea of empowering both business users and IT staff to “Build for Change (BFC).” The idea behind this now trademarked slogan is that companies can deliver value more quickly and nimbly, and thus outperform their competitors.

The current SmartBPM Suite makes business processes easy to build and change by directly capturing business objectives and eliminating manual programming. The suite also unifies business rules and processes into composite applications that leverage existing systems (IT assets).

Moreover, a library of best-practice frameworks complements the unified BPM suite. These solution kits are tailored as jump-start enablers in target industries. The solution frameworks reportedly drive 60 percent of Pega’s overall business and contribute significantly to both its revenue and to customers’ more rapid return on investment (ROI).

Last but not least, the suite is built on a quite open and standards-based architecture to meet the challenges of the world’s most sophisticated and distributed enterprises. Consequently, Pega has enjoyed success in terms of unprecedented growth since 2005.

In 2008, Pega had revenues of US$212 million, up 31 percent from US$167 in 2007 (more than twice than the BPM industry’s compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of 13 percent that was mentioned in Part 1). There was a 50 percent license revenue growth with only a 16 percent growth in professional services revenue. Half of Pega’s revenue last year came from increased adoption at existing accounts. The early 2009 numbers in this regard seem to be even more impressive.

Expansion’s Opportunities and Challenges

Pega’s growth rate, total revenues, focus, and financial stability argue for the vendor’s bullish posture and a goal of becoming a US$1 billion software company, although I will believe it when I see it. There is certainly much room for expansion for Pega, in terms of new international presence, penetrating new industries, and relying more on partner delivery (rather than via its direct force).

Pega markets its software and services primarily through its direct sales force. Strategic partnerships with consultants and systems integrators (SIs) are important to the vendor’s sales efforts because these firms influence buying decisions, help identify engagements, and complement Pega’s BPM software with their technology and domain expertise.

Sure, the vendor could increase its reach via original equipment manufacturer (OEM) alliances (i.e., to have parts of SmartBPM embedded in other vendors’ offering) or a value added reseller (VAR) channel. Nonetheless, at least Pega can substantiate its increasing reliance and success via strategic SI relationships.

Namely, there are nearly 3,700 total consultants in Pega’s partner ecosystem (a 1,740 percent increase from 2004), while partners delivered over 168 projects in 2008 (up 50 percent from 2007). In 2008, Pega also saw a 75 percent increase in software license deals sold together with partners as compared to 2007, to around US$30 million (which earned over US $250 million in 2008 partners’ professional services billings).

These partners may deliver strategic business planning, consulting, project management, and implementation services to Pega BPM customers. Currently, Pega SI partners include Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, IBM Global Business Services (GBS), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Satyam Computer Services, Steria, Virtusa, and Wipro Technologies. Three large global SIs–Accenture, Capgemini and IBM GBS–made significant investments in their Pega practice in 2008 and together they reportedly contributed the lion’s share of the new software license bookings in 2008.

The Chess-BPM Connection?

Coming back to Pega’s CEO Alan Trefler, it would be an understatement that he is an interesting and colorful person. Back in 1975, as a 19 year old “dark horse” player Trefler became the major upset case in international chess tournament history.

Namely, in the open section of the World Open chess tournament, Trefler, with the official rating of 2075, 125 points below the lowest master rating), and ranked 115th in the tournament, scored 8-1 to tie for first place with International Grandmaster Pal Benko, rated 2504, and ahead of Grandmasters Nicholas Rossolimo and Walter Browne. OK, being a chess aficionado, I can nitpick and say how the heavyweights of the time such as Bobby Fisher, Anatoly Karpov, Boris Spaski, etc., were not at that tournament, but his success still speaks volumes.

In our one-on-one informal conversation at Gartner’s Summit, Trefler told me he abandoned chess because of poor pay (the winner’s prize was a measly US$ 2,000 at the time) and a dearth of ladies in geeky chess circles. Therefore, he switched to teaching computers to play chess at first, then to teaching computers to improve business processes. Well, it is comforting to know that the IT field appears less geeky and more attractive to the fairer sex than chess.

One thing that struck me about Trefler, in addition to being gregarious and quite approachable for a founder of a large and successful company, was his humility. He even admitted that at least once in the company’s history, he almost seriously screwed up, but apparently that has not been the case in the recent past.

In order for some of you to be able to follow the parables and metaphors in Pega CEO’s presentation, bellow is a description of the company’s current offering. Pega provides a comprehensive rules-based BPM suite intended to help its customers plan, build, and manage BPM solutions. Pegasystems’ abovementioned BFC mantra is delivered through a SmartBPM suite of patented rule-driven BPM capabilities.

Pega Products

PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC) is at the core of the SmartBPM Suite and provides capabilities designed to model, execute, monitor, and analyze results of processes. The product includes an application profiler that allows a business process to be defined based on business goals and objectives, with simplified “fill in the blank” forms. PRPC also simplifies business process modeling, allowing business users to graphically describe and test an intended business process within the system itself.

The software uses the results of the application profiler and process modeling to create a new business solution, including user interface (UI) and executable business models. PegaRULES Process Commander also provides a Web browser-based graphical development environment, execution engine, and management dashboard for rapid business application and solution development.

The SmartBPM Suite offers additional capabilities, including business process analysis, process simulation, enterprise application integration (EAI), portal-based integration, enterprise content management (ECM), and case management to the PegaRULES Process Commander capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, Pega additionally offers dozens of purpose- or industry-specific Solution Frameworks built into the SmartBPM Suite. These frameworks allow organizations to more quickly implement new customer-facing practices and processes, bring new offerings to market, and provide customized or specialized processing to meet the needs of different customers, departments, geographies, or regulatory requirements.

The Wizard of (BPM) Oz

For those who might not have seen “Wizard of Oz,” a quick synopsis follows. Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) and her dog Toto have been swept away by a tornado from her lush farm in Kansas to a wonderland of munchkins, flying monkeys, and different-colored horses. The Good Witch of the North, Glinda (Billie Burke), advises Dorothy to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City and the all-knowing Wizard of Oz to find her way home.

Along the way, she meets the Scarecrow (played by Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (played by Jack Haley) and the Cowardly Lion (played by Bert Lahr), who help her fend off the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), while hoping to receive what they lack themselves (a brain, a heart, and courage, respectively). The Wicked Witch of the West is attempting to get her sister’s (the Wicked Witch of the East) Ruby Slippers from Dorothy. If memory serves me well, the Wicked Witch of the East was killed when Dorothy’s house landed on her due to the tornado.

In his luncheon presentation at Gartner’s BPM Summit, Trefler started with acknowledging that these are indeed interesting times to be in business, to say the least. Namely, all of us are facing unprecedented challenges of not only how to survive, but also how to possibly capitalize on opportunities.

When we think of metaphors to describe the times we are in (some might refer to the Great Depression, others to the New Deal, etc.), Pega came to the Wizard of Oz metaphor after reviewing the past year. Namely, if we go back 12 to 18 months, like Dorothy in the movie, we were all in a beautiful green and verdant place, where businesses could easily enter new markets, people could buy houses without putting any money down, etc. Everything looked up at that time, and we recently sadly learned that these practices were unjustifiably (and irresponsibly) overutilized.

Consequently, during the last 6 to 12 months, the economic maelstrom, the tornado of change, has ripped off our traditional foundation and roots, and taken us from profitability (way up there), so that we all are “not in Kansas any more.” And, while we all get back to our senses about where we are, who is really suffering? IT departments and staff are certainly under pressure to keep the engines running, but wide-eyed and innocent business users (like Dorothy) are at the greatest point of inflexion trying to figure out how to go forward and bring their businesses back to profitability and their comfort zone (a beautiful Kansas farm).

But in these times with hardly any profit margins, when IT folks are overworked and when business management has become defensive and insular, what can rank-and-file business users do? Business users need some useful advice, and to that end, Trefler said that good news is that there is a good source: the BPM Summit host, Gartner (the Good Witch), with all its insights, visions, affable speakers, magic wand, etc. One piece of advice that analysts like Gartner preach to companies is that they need to espouse and achieve their viable business goals before they can get back to the mystical land of profitability.

Many companies realize that the “Ruby Slippers” that will take them back to the comfort zone are a magic combination of processes and rules, and if one can figure out how to put them together and “click their heels,” one can have tremendous results even in the darkest and the most dour times like nowadays. As the best proof of concept, it is interesting to note that in the midst of all this economic disaster, Pega’s stock is at a nine-year-high.

As was said earlier on, the vendor grew 31 percent in 2008, with a whopping 70 percent software license growth in Q4 2008, despite the fact that it sells significantly to the currently embattled sector of insurance and banks. Indeed, insurance providers and banks do not seem like they’re on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz (a road back to profitability), but these are (somewhat surprisingly) conservative environments (except for top executives’ pays) that only go for solutions that have been proven to work.

All joking apart, these service organizations buy only what they can put together easily, so they can get to work and benefit quickly. To that end, this blog series will explain shortly how Pega allows these organizations to avoid the time and expense required to create lengthy policy manuals and system specifications by automating the rules-based creation of system documentation.

The “BPM of Oz” Main Protagonists

The conclusion thus far is that with the right team, IT tools, and a bit of analyst magic (know-how) to improve processes, things are possible for business users even during these dour days. So, who should be the faces and main protagonists of this journey to profitability?

For one, every project needs a business sponsor who is senior enough to set the direction, get courage, and keep on path despite the quagmire. In his funny presentation, Trefler assigned the following task to the Cowardly Lion: to be the chief operating officer (COO) that has to acquire courage and sense an opportunity to go forward.

Although Pega is a staunch proponent of BPM being aimed at business users, companies also need a sound technical infrastructure to make sure that technology is brought to bear. To that end, the Tin Man is appointed as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) IT architect with a SOA heart to handle all the master data and processes (blood and nutrients moving throughout the corporation’s body and feeding it).

But the sponsor with courage and the SOA technical and data infrastructure heart (and a cardiovascular system) are not enough. What is that other crucial piece that is necessary? Well, companies need the brain or the place to capture the business objectives and intent. BPM suites with all necessary metadata, rules, and processes (i.e., the institutional knowledge) are the brain, and of course, the Scarecrow would be in charge of that.

Humans are visual creatures, and engineers and technologists especially like to draw pictures and diagrams, and the brain needs to understand how the business should use those intertwined data. The brain needs to easily espouse the business intent and know how to use the data to that end, especially when times are tough and users are under pressure.

Businesses need to do this team exercise quickly and on the fly. In reality, the competition has never been darker, and those ominous flying monkeys in the movie represent today’s competitors that will sweep everyone away… everyone is hungry these days.

The Yellow Brick Road of BPM

In the main part of his presentation, Trefler maintained that the Yellow Brick Road, which will lead any business to Oz (and back to profitability), consists of three capabilities, starting with the ability to directly capture business objectives into the BPM system by the business users. The BPM system is actually an integrated database of rules and processes that is able to expand to the extent of the business.

At this stage, I have to depart from Trefler’s short and focused presentation to explain how directly executable business requirements put business changes in the hands of the business users. To capture new objectives, enterprises need an environment that is adaptable and “change-aware” so that processes are dynamically impacted by ever-evolving corporate business objectives.

Accordingly, SmartBPM processes use an open, relational database of rules to organize enterprises’ business thinking with visibility and control. Processes and rules become assets of the enterprise that are organized by roles, with an audit trail, versioning, and security built in. This includes the ability to capture and document new changes without “wiping out” previous definitions, thus allowing organizations to find and re-execute historical definitions as required.

Their business processes are built out of small, granular definitions, each structured to address a specific policy or procedure. These elements are linked together by logical names that reflect the intent of every process step or sub-step. This allows the processes to be change-aware, i.e., to have the repository of rules (RuleBase in Pega’s lingo) to figure out for itself how to insert a change into the right places.

Each new business rule adds a specific refinement to specialize previously defined objectives. New rules are automatically “slotted” into other procedures and decisions that they impact.

This automatic positioning is more efficient and error-free than the typical alternative of laboriously locating and coding changes across dozens of separate software modules or updating manual procedures in three-ring binders scattered all over the place. Change-aware processes capture the new objectives of management in an active database that gives processes and rules the same visibility and reusability that organizations get when they centralize key master data such as the enterprise’s customer or accounting master information.

Moreover, easy and safe Web browser-based forms are designed with familiar metaphors to match the processes with decisions that are being changed, thus helping guide business user-driven changes. The forms define the “Concepts” that drop into the RuleBase in bite-sized chunks. To edit the rule that defines a process, users use the familiar Microsoft Visio flowchart tool, which dynamically interacts with the SmartBPM execution engine to gather all the needed information.

The flowchart tool captures the diagram and its details in the RuleBase as operational instructions. The built-in stencil on the left of the flowchart form (see figure below) includes augmented workflow shapes and facilities that interactively prompt for the information needed to make the diagram executable. In other words, the act of specifying this process actually automates the process.

flowchart.png

Even a Business User Can Do IT

Another option is to create special rules within a Decision Table form (see figure below) with rows and columns. In this matrix form too, business users maintain business rules, just like in a spreadsheet. Business users can invoke the decision table form (or a decision tree) by clicking on the particular Decision shape in the flowchart form. These intuitive “Fit for Purpose” forms make accessing the authoritative RuleBase easy and safe.

decision-table.png

Specialized forms ensure accuracy and allow interactive testing with sample data to ensure they do exactly what users intend. Business users quickly learn to understand what a rule definition like the following one does: “IF the Balance Amount is under $1,000 AND the State equals Massachusetts, then the Rate is 2.5. But, if the State equals New York with the Balance Amount between 1,000 and 5,000 THEN call a special additional rule for New York.”

This ability of forms to guide the user for safe and easy delegation to the IT staff is of critical importance. One big problem with conventional programming is how little support in terms of specifications a programmer gets when creating and editing a new module. The forms make the job easier in SmartBPM, allowing the system to guide the definition and prevent errors.

There are dozens of available specialized rule structures to facilitate an easy and safe way to record business objectives. Pega also allows customers or partners to add their own structures into the very core of the BPM engine, should a special need require another specialized rule type.

Last but not least, working models hereby replace traditional voluminous paper specifications and requirements. Coming back to Trefler’s words, there is no longer a need for large and thick Microsoft Word documents and sign-offs between business and IT users. This is the case even when we are talking about documenting rich objectives and workflows, such as multichannel customer service.

5 Things You Should Not Confuse Business Performance Management With

2009-10-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

If you search for business performance management (BPM) on Google, you’ll get around 700,000 results. Out of this huge number of results, you will presumably refer to a popular source—Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, BPM is “a set of processes that help organizations optimize their business performance.” The same source affirms that some people see it as the next generation of business intelligence (BI). Both of these explanations—unfortunately—lack clarity.

Going back to the Google search, there are a few near-synonyms for BPM that one can choose from: business intelligence performance management, performance management scorecard, key performance indicators, and business performance metrics. Similarly, Wikipedia has four synonyms for BPM as well, including corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise performance management (EPM), operational performance management (OPM), and business performance optimization (BPO).

Confused? Is it BI, a set of processes, scorecards, performance indicators, metrics, or are all these equally valid parts of BPM? Since we intend to write a series of articles on BPM, we thought we might start this thread a bit differently and first try to explain what BPM should not be confused with.

1. Business Performance Management (BPM)
There is always a kind of confusion when using the same acronym (BPM) for different software packages (i.e., business performance management and business process management). In spite of the undoubted links between these two application types, they differ greatly for the majority of software users and IT professionals. Broadly speaking, a generic business process management system allows analysts and business managers to design and model business processes in a graphical and descriptive view, then execute them, monitor the processes, and finally, modify or optimize them.

There are similarities between business process management systems and enterprise application integration software and workflow automation solutions. By the way, notice yet another BPM abbreviation here: business process modeling, which is a substantial element of business process management. This is basically a business process capturing, visualizing, and description technique (or set of techniques) that provides companies a clear view on processes and helps them to analyze these processes in order to improve them.

2. Business Intelligence (BI)
Is BI part of BPM? Definitely! You can make any kind of business decision based on accurate information, and the efficient way to get that information is through a BI tool. Still, BI is not enough. The best BI tool in the world can give you the greatest dashboards, graphs, ad hoc reports, and so on, but they are completely useless unless you have a good idea of what to do with them.

It is safe to say that BI is the framework or the tool that will help you improve your business, but it will not complete this task for you. This is where BPM comes into play. A BPM provider should be able to support you in defining your business processes and objectives, as well as the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to follow. Furthermore, your BPM provider will assist you in building the tools you need in order to extract the right data from the right place and then interpret it according to the already defined objectives.

3. Balanced Scorecard, Business Process Measurement, and Key Performance Indicators
When talking about business performance management, we should clearly understand that it is possible to successfully manage “something” as long as that “something” can be measured. In other words, in order to estimate how well your business is doing, some formal methodologies, criteria, and metrics are required.

However, it is not enough to estimate your company’s achievements using financial criteria only. There are other important activities which (while difficult to quantify and evaluate) are necessary to compare and evaluate in order to have a more complete picture. Balanced scorecard, business process measurement, and KPIs were developed as a systematic approach to help managers of all levels effectively control the company or departments within the company and to be able to quickly react to market and environmental changes and challenges.

These three concepts are really closely related to each other, but represent different views of the same process. Balanced scorecard is used mostly by the top management level of a company to monitor overall business performance towards strategic goals of the company. Mid-level and operation management usually use business process measurement parameters to visually examine routine and day-to-day processes towards short-time or current goals of the department or organization. Both of these methods utilize KPIs as a metric to count and analyze countable and often uncountable criteria. Those indicators usually look like set of diagrams and graphs that fluctuate dynamically depending on how the numbers change. Sometimes these sets of diagrams are called dashboards (using the analogy of a car or plane dashboard with a number of gauges on them).

4. Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Six Sigma
At a first glance, these mechanisms, methodologies, and concepts can be referred to as different types of business process management. They reflect different views of the same core business processes improvement and talk about product, process, customer satisfaction, quality, and practical techniques to plan, organize, and control this process. They all consider business processes improvement as a global strategic goal and, as a result, companies achieve better financial numbers.

Certainly they are not the same things. While there are plenty of books, articles, and Web sites available to help readers understand the concepts, at the same time the non-dedicated reader who isn’t a professional in these concepts can easily become confused in this ocean of information.

Generally speaking, total quality management, lean, and six sigma as methodologies are much wider and deeper in substance than business performance management—which is a very useful and helpful way to estimate the current business and financial situation of an organization, as well as providing food for thought for managers at all levels to assist them in optimal decision making.

5. Reporting and Analytics
An in-depth explanation of the difference between BI versus reporting and analytics exceeds the scope of this post. So we’ll make this part short but sweet: analytics is complex reporting, while BI is a sophisticated reporting and analytics tool.

Most accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM), solutions offer reports, and most of them even allow you to do analysis on sales, purchases, productivity, and more. As our jobs are becoming very information-intensive, reporting, analytics, and BI are essential to today’s workforce.

Reporting and analytics tools do not always provide data in a format that can be used by a BPM product. Oftentimes, information comes from a variety of sources and—just to make things worse—different tools are used to extract it. A BPM tool should be able to gather all the required data from all available sources and convert it into a format that can be used in the decision process.

Essential ERP - Current Market Trends - Part I

2009-09-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

The growth of ERP has been a direct result of the fierce global competition, short product life cycles, highly distributed operations, and information-driven management that characterize today's business environment. The vast majority of companies have always hoped to purchase an information system as a product, not as a collection of technologies, components, and services. Leading ERP vendors have been successful so far because they have been attempting to build such a product.

A typical ERP system today offers broad functional coverage; vertical industry extensions; a robust technical architecture; training, documentation, implementation and process design tools; product enhancements; global support and an extensive list of software, services, and technology partners. While it is not a system-in-a-box yet, the gap between its desired and actual features is becoming smaller every day.

The worsening plight of most ERP vendors, caused by the market slowdown, which started in the fourth quarter of 1998, continued in full force throughout 1999. Particularly affected was license revenue, which declined more than 10% in 1999 compared to 1998. The market was dramatically less profitable than in 1998 (down 27.3%), measured in the total raw $ net income (Source TEC). We believe that the continued ERP market slowdown in 1999 was in part attributable to the following factors:

The historical growth in sales of ERP applications has come from large, Fortune 1000 multinational corporations. This market has been highly penetrated (over 60%), and new, large-scale back-office implementations in the F1000 customer base have all but stalled.
The relatively untapped Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SME) market has been cautious about starting new projects due to the bad publicity caused by a large number of unsuccessful ERP implementations in the past. This fear has been additionally aggravated by the need to integrate disparate systems, given that currently no single vendor can offer a complete end-to-end solution (from supplier to end customer).
The technology paradigm shift from Client/Server to the Internet created uncertainty about investing in traditional Client/Server technologies, which are still prevalent among leading ERP players.

Consequently, we believe that the following trends in the ERP market are the direct consequence of vendors' attempts to 1) resolve current ERP functional and/or technological deficiencies, and/or 2) expand software sales both within their existing and potential customer bases, particularly in the lower-end of the market.

About This Note: This Technology Note covering the current marketing trends for ERP is presented in two parts.

The ERP Market Trends covered in this note are:

ERP Functional Scope Expansion
Sharper Vertical Focus
Flexibility Enabled by Adaptable Architecture The ERP Market

Trends that will be covered in Part II of this note are:

Web- and E-commerce Enablement of ERP Systems
Intensified Market Merger & Acquisition Activity
Advent of Application Hosting Services.

1) ERP Functional Scope Expansion:

While ERP packages excel at combining financial control with multi-plant manufacturing & distribution coordination, they generally lack extended supply chain planning and flexible execution functionalities that can enable one business process today but change rapidly to handle tomorrow's new models. They are also often found lacking when it comes to delivering special financial features such as robust budgeting or international consolidation.

Nevertheless, ERP's main functional weakness is in its planning function - master production scheduling (MPS) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP) modules that decide how and when to respond to customer demand with available resources. These modules are generally insufficient to support a real-world supply chain because they only deliver the following:

Business transactions without much responsiveness
Production focus without understanding demand
Control without intelligence (decision support system)

From the flexibility point of view, the vast majority of ERP products have been designed to operate in an over-the-wall fashion. Such stovepipe logistics cannot adequately react to dynamic changes in customer demand. Moreover, at each handoff between applications, increased uncertainty leads to overstocked inventories, longer wait time and slower response. In the Internet-driven, dynamic trade environment, the following things increasingly happen:

Services eclipse products - Companies use services such as vendor-managed inventory and direct store delivery that require on-the-fly business process change.
Demand drives production - Companies are moving to make-to-order and late-assembly manufacturing strategies.
Price matches market conditions - Businesses reduce inventory to maximize profits in commodity or supply-driven markets.

The key to dynamic trade is agility, which is where traditional ERP packages have stumbled in the past. Early ERP adopters discovered to their dismay that implementing these systems was only the first step toward creating a competitive information technology infrastructure. They and new users alike are now looking for significantly more comprehensive functionality - from advanced planning and scheduling (APS), to sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM), to business intelligence (BI) and e-commerce tools - and demanding that they be integrated into their ERP backbone. Users' visions of ERP are evolving from tactical to strategic, and users are no longer willing to choose between integration and function. ERP users who have gone live in the past three years have been making purchases of extended ERP products (bolt-ons) to provide tangible ROI for their multi-million-dollar investment.

Consequently, during the last three years, the functional perimeter of ERP systems began an expansion into its adjacent markets, such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product data management (PDM), manufacturing executions systems (MES), business intelligence/data warehousing, and e-business. The major ERP vendors have been busy developing, acquiring, or bundling new functionality so that their packages go beyond the traditional realms of finance, materials planning, and human resources.

We believe that, within the next two years, ERP will be redefined as a platform for enabling e-business globally. Originally focused on automating internal processes of an enterprise, ERP systems will include customer and supplier-centric processes as well. The conclusive evidence of this redefinition is the move of all major ERP players into CRM and SCM applications. As a result of this trend, we predict that within the next three years, over 65% of the license revenue of the SCM market and over 50% of the license revenue of the CRM market will come from current ERP vendors (70% probability). Currently, these figures are estimated to be less than 10%.

Global financial capabilities (including support for the Euro), advanced planning and scheduling (APS), product configurations via the Web, supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, business intelligence (BI), and component-based (object-oriented) architecture will remain the order winners for the next two years. After that period of time, we believe these functional and technological features will be demoted into commodities (order qualifiers).

2) Sharper Vertical Focus:

While competitive costs (low and flexible software license pricing and implementation costs) and outstanding global service (proven fast implementations and customer loyalty) will remain important requirements for success, particularly in the lower end of the market, vertical focus will be the key factor for survival.

Vendors that will survive the next three years will have focused their business and product on particular industries, preferably those with a current low penetration (See Table 1), instead of a more generic, horizontal approach. Winning ERP products will demonstrate deep industry functionality and tight integration with best-of-breed 'bolt-on' products in a particular vertical.

Table 1 - ERP software implementation percentiles (Source: Computer Economics, June 1999)

Industry Sector	No Activity	Researching, Piloting, or Implementing ERP	ERP Already in Place
Composite for All Sectors	47	34	19
Manufacturing	24	35	41
Distribution	50	32	18
Banking & Finance	39	48	13
Insurance	65	27	8
Healthcare	65	26	10
Trade Services	51	37	12
Professional Services	48	26	26
Utilities	>50	35	15
Transportation	57	33	10
State & Local Government	63	25	13
Federal Government	76	20	4

Verticalization can be seen as part of a larger effort by ERP vendors to ease the implementation of their products. By now, almost everyone in the IT industry has heard horror stories of ERP implementations that took two or three years and cost tens of millions of dollars. That happens, in part, because the ERP packages usually arrive needing to be configured for the business and the industry entirely from scratch.

By configuring parts of the package in advance for a given industry and circumventing functions not required in that industry, vendors can shorten and ease the implementation process. The pre-configuration may be based on the size of the company, the specific hardware, or the vertical market. Rapid implementation tools and industry-specific templates add value to the ERP investment by streamlining the process-modeling phase for fast implementation and time to return on investment. In fact, software implementation time reduction is a key element of success in any enterprise-wide technology project.

Users have increasingly looked for an ERP system designed for a specific business. Software that combines industry-specific functionality with the flexibility to accommodate each company's unique processes goes a long way toward improving the functional fit and the speed of implementation. This pragmatic approach helps companies close the gap between system performance expectations and final results achieved.

Another advantage lies in the fact that industry-specific, global enterprise solutions based on open architecture and proven technology standards facilitate faster integration of companies being acquired as part of a corporate growth strategy. Typically, as companies grow and want to compete globally, multi-language and multi-currency functionality become increasingly important.

In addition to core ERP functions, integrated industry-specific applications can add significant value. Vertical focus indicates that software contains industry-specific features and that ERP vendors have certain industry expertise.

For example, in mill industries such as pulp and paper, converting, and steel manufacturing, an enterprise solution must be based on product attributes and customer specifications being active throughout the production, inventory, and order fulfillment flow. These systems also must have an integral view of the plant floor for tracking work center level costs, quality of work in progress, customer order status, and roll/product movements. Integrated trim management and rough-cut capacity planning are crucial elements for mill industry enterprise solutions in order to connect production activities to customer order fulfillment. Integrated advanced planning and scheduling (APS) and maintenance planning further optimize throughput, reduce costs, and eliminate the need for redundant systems or custom interfaces being developed between applications. In the food and beverage industry, as another example, one challenge is to provide rapid, timely information flow through global food and beverage manufacturing and distribution enterprises. Integration between ERP and process control systems or manufacturing execution systems (MES) is also of a great importance. Because of the volatile nature of the business, with consumer tastes and government regulations constantly changing, the enterprise system must also accommodate rapid product development, efficient replenishment, accurate forecasting, and customer quality demands.

Finally, in implementing an industry-specific application, it is important to ensure that the application provider's implementation team includes members with in-depth knowledge and experience in that industry. Vendors geared toward certain industries should have solid integration skills or strong relationships with systems integrators that have industry-related expertise. This should significantly streamline implementation time by eliminating a lengthy vendor or integrator learning curve.

3) Flexibility Enabled by Adaptable Architecture:

The rapid pace of global business today places a unique set of challenges on companies looking to improve and automate their operations, and at the same time, remain poised to adapt quickly to change. With increased competition, deregulation, globalization, and mergers & acquisition activity, buyers will increasingly realize that architecture plays a key role in how quickly vendors can implement, maintain, expand/customize, and integrate their products.

The product architecture is going to do much more than simply provide the functionality, the user interface, and the platform support. It is going to determine whether a product is going to endure, whether it will scale to a large number of users, and whether it will be able to incorporate emerging technologies, all in order to accommodate increasing user requirements.

An adaptable architecture is the least common denominator for a flexible ERP system. Although a component-based architecture is not an explicit requirement for ERP flexibility, component-based applications generally provide greater flexibility than their monolithic counterparts. Further prerequisites for flexibility will be the abstraction of technical complexity (manifested via the use of intuitive tools, aids, or wizards that guide user through a set of steps to achieve a desired end result) and an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface.

Componentization refers to the act of breaking up large, monolithic ERP systems into individual modules or components that would work together. It is the practical embodiment of object-oriented programming (OOP). Object-oriented software design and programming were developed to enhance software maintainability and to simplify the creation of advanced GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).

Object orientation means that design, linkages, etc., use objects as their basic building blocks, which is a radical departure from traditional 'procedural' design and coding methodologies. An object class is a combination of data and processing logic. The data for a class may correspond to a relational database table, but this is not necessarily the case. The processing logic comes in methods, which are similar to subroutines or procedures. By maintaining processing logic with the associated data, programmers have an easier time finding reusable pieces. Therefore, object-oriented systems can be significantly smaller and easier to maintain than classical procedural code in which procedures and data are separated.

By breaking up the large applications into components, vendors are able to more quickly fix or add functionality. The accounts payable component, for example, could be enhanced without having to touch any other financial components or any of the other modules, such as planning or logistics. And once the ERP vendor has established a component architecture, it becomes easier and safer for IT to customize the systems. Componentization will prove to be crucial to enable ERP systems to support e-business activity since the new e-commerce capabilities are being delivered as individual components. Componentization also helps the vendors extend the core ERP system with supply chain, CRM, and SFA solutions.

Interest in componentization, however, began long before e-commerce. The perception at the time was that ERP applications were too big and unwieldy, and that they needed to be more flexible. Componentization would not only make it easier for the ERP vendors to enhance their solutions, but also make it easier for customers to upgrade the software. With componentization, a customer could incrementally upgrade only selected components without having to upgrade the entire ERP solution, which usually would entail a substantial effort.

In summary, a component-based architecture is beneficial for the following reasons:

It allows a developer to create a composite application in which a Web-based user interface accesses functionality in the packaged application.
It can enable message-broker-based integration of several disparate packages or legacy systems.
It allows a vendor to roll out new versions of the application in a modular, incremental fashion rather than all at once.
It may drastically reduce the total application code.

Componentization is thus necessary for vendors to move their ERP systems intto e-commerce and to provide other capabilities. Therefore most vendors insist they remain fully committed to it, although progress has been slow. The reason for this lies in the fact that componentization is enormously difficult to achieve even when the commitment is solid. At best today, some vendors have succeeded in creating large-grain proprietary components, which are simply large function modules.

For example, SAP has made progress in breaking its core R/3 system into large-grain components and all new pieces are being added as components. J.D. Edwards embarked on a rewrite of its WorldOne ERP suite when the component craze broke, so the company incorporated componentization into its redesign. Oracle also rewrote large amounts of code and has managed to componentize to a large extent. Baan, cash strapped, considered a component game and made only initial steps in the Baan Series release, but completion is still a long way from reality (it has been delivering component-based external APIs to internal business functionality, which still relies on its non-component-based 4GL). IFS, Intentia, Symix, JBA, and Psipenta are some of mid-market ERP vendors that have either entirely or to a significant degree componentized their products.

Implementing a fully component-based architecture requires that vendors completely redesign their applications and then rewrite it using C++, Java, or a component-based 4GL, and run it under COM, CORBA, or Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). Some vendors who attempted this approach, specifically Marcam Solutions and SSA, experienced a harrowing, time- and-resource-consuming, make-or-break transition which resulted in their being acquired. We believe that less than 35% of ERP vendors will deliver a completely component-based architecture within the next four years (70% probability). We also believe that the first vendors who deliver a truly open, modular system will capture the lion's share of the remaining non-penetrated ERP market.

While ERP customers may not be fully aware of the benefits of componentization as yet, they have been embracing the more open interfaces and improved integration capabilities that the vendors are providing, capabilities also intended for the componentization effort. During the past few years, ERP vendors have opened up their tightly interwoven modules and created application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect to 3rd-party best-of-breed systems.

SAP, for example, has created over 1,000 business application programming interfaces (BAPIs) for use in integrating third-party products with the core ERP system. This requires open APIs to enable the integration of third-party data reporting and analysis tools as well as other above-mentioned ERP extension tools.

Instead of the costly, risky move to full componentization, most ERP vendors have selected a safer approach. They use component-based APIs to construct a "fa�ade" for their existing application. When done properly, these APIs provide programmatic access to common business objects (e.g., an order, a business partner, a delivery), which are mapped to the existing application's functionality in a way that shields users from the complexity of the underlying code.

However, APIs alone are not sufficient. To bridge the differing semantics and business processes enabled within each participating application in an extended ERP environment, either vendors or users must employ message broker technology (a special-purpose, preferably 4GL tool that can readily transform and route data as it moves between applications).

Despite the user preference for a single, 'one-stop shop' vendor, componentized software products, interoperability standards and Internet technology will lead to fewer large-scale projects and an ongoing stream of smaller ones. Moreover, vendors will increasingly attempt to conduct system integration and consulting work themselves, which will further decrease the industry average license revenue/total revenue ratio.

The shift in the packaged applications market toward component architectures will place new planning and implementation requirements on user organizations. In particular, existing customers will have to make a choice about when to implement components and how much of their application can be safely componentized. We strongly advise customers to take a slow but steady approach to componentization. A "big bang" component implementation would likely be too risky for most companies to undertake.

Nonetheless, we recommend that ERP customers at least begin to think about the changes that componentization can bring on.

Summary and Overall User Recommendations:

Without a doubt, ERP remains the information backbone for contemporary manufacturing enterprises. However, today's ERP systems are required to address more than the processes taking place within the walls of an enterprise. They must be able to address the players and processes involved in extended enterprise - the people and partners that the manufacturers collaborate and coordinate with in their supply chains.

Users' need to understand their business requirements and critical business processes can never be overemphasized. Not knowing their present business state of affairs as well as their strategic intent and direction will disqualify any future ERP system implementation from being a success. Clarifying this should help users create a long list of vendors to include in an ERP package selection. Precedence should be given to vendors with a proven vertical focus on the user's industry.

Users should also be aware of consolidation in the ERP market, and corporate viability should play a prominent role in every selection process. Virtually all software selection teams appreciate the importance of product functionality and product technology requirements in making the right decision. Too often, however, these are the only criteria that play a role in the decision-making process. Other often overlooked factors can determine the eventual success or failure of a new system, including vendor corporate strategy, global service and support capabilities, financial viability, and, of course, cost.

After receiving the final proposal from each of the vendors included in the negotiation stage, users may want to put into action any counter-proposal or negotiation steps, which may include a combination of the following: a request to lower initial software costs, a decrease in maintenance fees, negotiating the license fee per module, negotiate discounted license fees for casual users, provision for future incorporation of "extended ERP" components by bundling them into the contract now at negotiated license fees, etc. 'Bolt-ons' should be selected only from official business partners of the primary ERP vendor, after making sure that partnership is not a mere marketing pitch.

Finally, users should ensure that their critical requirements are unequivocally spelled out in a contract with a selected ERP vendor. Future clients are also advised to request the vendor's written commitment to promised functionality, length of implementation, and seamless future upgrades, particularly for recently released products and products whose release date is due in the near future.

Adonix + CIMPRO = A Feature-Rich Action ERP Product, But With Challenges

2009-08-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

Adonix (www.adonix.com ), a abreast captivated French action applications provider for mid-sized mixed-mode accomplishment and administration companies, is shipment its new Adonix X3 Action Suite. When Adonix acquired the CIMPRO artefact from MAI Systems Corporation (NASDAQ: NOW), a provider of business solutions to the accommodation industry, in December 2002, it promised to use the CIMPRO appliance abject as a starting point to accompany a abounding Action ERP alms to the mid-market. Adonix X3 is a web-native ERP band-aid for mid-sized companies, amalgam manufacturing, distribution, warehousing, chump accord administration (CRM), and accounts functionality. The new Adonix X3 Action automates and integrates the circuitous adapt administration and planning requirements of action manufacturers.

Adonix is a absolute international, independent, mid-market ERP provider, founded in 1979, with over 7,000 barter worldwide. According to Alex Attal, CEO Adonix North America, "Adonix addresses the needs of the underserved "Fortune 50,000" of mid-market companies."

Although abreast held, the aggregation letters an amoebic advance amount of 5% additional acquirement advance via accretion that resulted in 2002 acquirement advance of about $75 actor over $45 actor in 2001. The aggregation claims abiding advantage and a 20%+ anniversary investment in R&D. With 750 advisers and 150 business ally in 18 countries, Adonix claims a arrangement of over 2,000 accomplished professionals

In backward 1999, Adonix X3 was launched. That artefact now serves about 700 new barter through 1Q 2003 and is experiencing a 20% acquirement growth. Adonix X3 technology and applications serve as a above allocation of the new Adonix X3 Action Suite. To the absolute X3 product, Adonix has rewritten and added the action functionality from CIMPRO.

Adonix X3 generally exhibits above appearance and capabilities compared to a lot of of its associate mid-market competitors' products, decidedly in agreement of scalability, flexibility/configuration, multi-national capabilities, multi-site capabilities, and the abutment for abounding platforms (UNIX and Windows NT/2000/XP, appliance Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Oracle databases, both through the Windows- and browser-based client). Further, Adonix uses industry-standard accoutrement such as XML and Java, calm with Adonix API's (application programming interfaces) that accessible the arrangement to communicating analytic calmly with business partners, trading exchanges and added applications and languages. In accession to the platforms mentioned, the aggregation afresh ported Adonix X3 to IBM's Websphere Appliance Express.

The CIMPRO acquirement was the a lot of contempo in a alternation of acquisitions that began seven years ago. Adonix has back acquired four added software vendors for their assets and ability and has melded the best of their capabilities into an chip action software framework for mid-market companies. For added advice on Adonix above-mentioned to CIMPRO acquisition, see Adonix Grows Roots Adjoin The Odds.

CIMPRO is far from a new name to those who chase Action ERP. CIMPRO was a baton in the amplitude from the mid-80's to the aboriginal 90's from Datalogix. In the aboriginal 90's Datalogix developed GEMMS as a sister artefact to CIMPRO. In the mid-90's Datalogix was acquired by Oracle with GEMMS now confined as the affection of the Oracle action accomplishment band-aid and CIMPRO affective to MAI. When MAI adjudge to focus on added markets in the 2002, Adonix acquired the CIMPRO business (see Will Adonix Provide A Warmer Home To CIMPRO?).

Adonix absitively to carbon the CIMPRO functionality appliance the Adonix toolset, accommodate it with the adapted X3 modules (financials and purchasing for example) and rename the consistent artefact the Adonix X3 Action Suite. This fast-acting move should affected some of the CIMPRO shortcomings mentioned like multi-national capabilities, that bound the marketability of the absolute CIMPRO Classic and CIMPRO V packages.

The celebrated CIMPRO strengths are still actual accordant to action manufacturers today and accept been preserved and, according to the vendor, added in the X3 Action Suite. These include:

Richard Surdez, Vice President, Action Industry for Adonix tells us, "Adonix X3 Action is the ideal band-aid for companies bearing aliment and cooler items (dairy products, preserved fruits and vegetables, atom comminute products, bakery and cake products, beverages, fats, oils, dressings, flavors and sauces) and chemicals (paints and coatings, automated chemicals, lubricants and adhesives, petrochemicals, cosmetics, plastics and constructed abstracts or specialty chemicals.)

Adonix is entering the awash mid-market action market. Although today no assured baton has emerged yet, added vendors are added accustomed in this bazaar including:

* Invensys Production Solutions (formerly Marcam Solutions and Baan Process, see Invensys Production Solutions - Can Celebrated Strengths And The 'Protean Boost' Affected Its Liabilities?)

* Agilisys (formerly SCT's Action Accomplishment & Administration Business, see Agilisys Continues Agilely Post-SCT)

* Ross Systems (Ross Systems Shows Poise in 'Big Easy')

* Ramco Systems (see Ramco Ships Technology And Products. Is This The Approaching Of Action Applications?)

* SSA GT (Is SSA GT Betting Infini(um)tely On Acquisitions?).

In addition, acceptable Tier 1 one vendors like J.D. Edwards, Oracle, and SAP as able-bodied as ample Tier 2 vendors like Intentia, IFS, QAD or SYSPRO are attempting to access this market. We aswell see Microsoft Business Solutions and Best Software acceptable alive in this amplitude either via accomplice solutions or acquisitions. With little or no name recognition, how will Adonix accretion a ballast adjoin this competition?

For abounding the CIMPRO name is a additional and a minus. CIMPRO is accustomed as a action affluent artefact but has a acceptability for old technology. Can Adonix account from the functionality after adversity from the technology atramentous billow even admitting the new artefact has been rewritten in the Adonix toolset? The ever-important abstruse clearing aisle for CIMPRO users will accept to be appear too, and it will accept to be abundant above archetypal abstracts about-face tools, and a consistent basic reimplementation if they advancement to the new product. A mitigating agency in this attention should be Adonix' artefact openness, and its antecedent ability in assimilating articles with disparate technologies.

Also, while CIMPRO supports batch-oriented accomplishment decidedly able-bodied with appearance such as adjustable packaging, adapt scaling, adapt administration and chancy abstracts reporting, it has been beneath able in a accurate continuous-flow ambiance and is best ill-fitted for alone rather than multi-site environments with interdependencies. Adonix has yet to adjudge whether to accompany the regulations from the US Aliment and Drug Administration (FDA) such as 21 CFR 11 Part 11 or the пїЅcatchweight' functionality (mandatory for some industries such as meat-packing), which its above-mentioned bounden action ERP competitors accept continued exhibited.

Adonix has congenital a able centralized and third affair approach to advertise its products. However, this approach is after action accomplishment acquaintance or ability in a bazaar advised by abounding to be actual ambitious in its admiration for abreast humans and companies. Not to acknowledgment the charge to apprentice the approaching absolutely chip artefact blueprint, and the approaching accomplishment of cross-training the accumulated absolute sales and amount added resellers (VARs). Can Adonix catechumen this approach to serve the action market? Should it try to body a action alone channel?

Product Activity Aeon Administration (PLM) in Process Part 3: Action PLM Requirements

2009-08-18T04:07:00.000-07:00

In Allotment One of this series, we discussed Artefact Activity Aeon Administration as a accurate abstraction in the detached industries and as a growing abstraction in process. In Allotment Two we advised the motivations for a action aggregation to undertake a PLM project. In this part, we analyze the requirements for PLM in the action enterprises.

In Allotment Two of this series, we declared that a absolute access was appropriate in adjustment to accommodated the time-to-market requirement. Key to that absolute access is a axial athenaeum that absolutely defines the advice bare for the activity aeon of the product. This athenaeum have to abundance the advice to abutment the absolute cycle, from idea, through R&D, through commercialization and into the abounding revisions and closing retirement of the product.

Some of the abstracts stored in the athenaeum is accepted with the needs of detached PLM systems but abundant is altered to the action industry. Accepted abstracts includes activity advice such as workflow, basal activity administration information, approval information, and high-level artefact concepts. The abstracts altered to the action industry includes artefact advice such as blueprint (ingredients only) and compound (formula additional processing procedures), packaging specifications, processing steps, analysis procedures, and bulb absolute assembly requirements.

A absolute access aswell agency that abounding organizations and individuals have to coact in the process. Because this accord spans altered levels of the organizations, the band-aid requires seamless affiliation amid the activity advice and the artefact advice in adjustment to acquiesce for a coordinated, collaborative business process. The organizations and individuals are both centralized (marketing, legal, commercial R&D, production, etc.) and alien (testing labs, outsourced production, ad agencies, etc.).

Specific Action PLM Requirements include:

* Web-Based Deployment

* Action Specific Tools

* Global Standards

* Centralized, Integrated Activity and Artefact Information

* Artefact Portfolio Management

In today's environment, these centralized and alien entities are generally accumulated into anytime alteration basic teams to accommodated the requirements of a specific artefact or project. Today, this is actual accurate in detached accomplishment and a growing trend in process. . Therefore, the PLM arrangement have to board rapid, all-around deployment of the system. This charge drives a claim for web-based deployment in adjustment to abbreviate both the start-up and the abiding amount of affairs of the system.

Process Specific Tools

The abundance of the assorted collaborators have to be addressed with a array of tools. R&D cadre crave action specific accoutrement to body and seek actual blueprint to accredit them to locate candidates that are agnate to absolute articles or ingredients. A array of blueprint assay and acclimation accoutrement will acceleration the adding accelerated action of blueprint development, arch to both greater abundance and the adeptness to appraise added alternatives. Some of these accoutrement are specific to an industry, like comestible assay and characterization development in the aliment industry.

To acceleration the artefact commercialization phase, the abstracts athenaeum have to accommodate abutment for assembly calibration up and accoutrement to accredit the ability alteration to assembly facilities. Since these accessories are more outsourced locations, a bulb absolute and alluringly standards based (SP88) access have to be supported. To baddest assembly accessories that acquiesce for the access of accumulation beyond the continued action (including outsourced location) accoutrement have to be accessible to intelligently bout assembly requirements with the accessible capacity.

To always drive out cost, the PLM arrangement should accord to the all-around acclimation of recipes to abate back-up and all-around acclimation of accommodation to access the appulse of the affairs ability of the action and drive down the investment in bombastic inventory.

Centralized, Chip Activity and Artefact Information

Since the development of a new artefact or the afterlight of an absolute artefact is conducted as a project, the PLM arrangement have to accommodate activity administration capabilities advised for the needs of PLM, for archetype automating the stage-gate processes accepted in artefact development processes. Much of the allowances of a PLM arrangement appear from synchronizing the business action that companies use beyond departments and enterprises. This synchronization needs to cover both activity and artefact information, for archetype the automatic acquisition of new recipes for approval beyond assorted departments. This drives the charge for centralized, chip activity and artefact information.

Another key breadth of affiliation is portfolio management. The administration of the artefact portfolio represents an added akin of requirements. The aloft requirements accord with alone projects or products. Portfolio administration manages the adverse objectives of abounding projects and products. Portfolio administration have to acquiesce a authoritative appearance of all articles and projects in adjustment to accomplish antithesis with the company's cardinal objectives. For a admired allegory of generally disparate activity to be made, it is actual important that the abstracts acclimated for accommodation authoritative is acerb angry to the absoluteness of the project, acceptance key accommodation makers to assignment down into the all-important abstracts of the projects as required.

Product Life Cycle Administration or PLM is a accurate apparatus in accretion competitiveness. Action companies who accede artefact development a amount adequacy should investigate PLM anon to advance their administration in this area. Other companies should see PLM as a all-important claim to advance adequation with others.

In adjustment to accomplish the allowances declared in the aboriginal two locations of this series, it is important to baddest the actual technology partner. There are several key factors to accumulate in mind. First, it is important to apprehend that there are cogent differences in the way articles are authentic in the action and detached industries, and accordingly cogent differences in action and detached PLM systems.

Look for vendors with cogent history in the action industries. Avoid vendors whose band-aid is advised to serve too abounding industries alfresco of process.

Second, it is important that the arrangement handle a ample appearance of the artefact in adjustment to advance cross-departmental use, afterimage and collaboration. Systems that are too focused on any one administration may alienate abeyant users.

Third, it is important to admit that applications advised about affairs and structured abstracts are not congenital to handle the aggregate of structured and baggy advice archetypal in artefact lifecycle processes. Avoid ERP and Supply Chain vendors re-packaging absolute transactional solutions.

Finally, it is important to bethink that Artefact Lifecycle Administration is by its attributes a collaborative solution. Look for vendors who abutment current, web based technologies today to acceleration both centralized and alien accord efforts.

Product Activity Aeon Administration (PLM) in Process Part 2 Action PLM Motivation

2009-08-18T04:03:00.000-07:00

In Allotment One of this series, we discussed Artefact Activity Aeon Administration as a accurate abstraction in the detached industries and as a growing abstraction in process. In this part, we analyze the business motivations for PLM in action enterprises by reviewing business strategies. In allotment three, we will attending at requirements for Action PLM decisions.

The business strategies advised are:

* Accelerating Time-to-Market

* Accretion the success amount of new products

* Accretion the advantage of products

* Accretion acknowledgment on assets

Time-To-Market is the adjournment amid an idea, from the business administration or a customer, to the accepted availability of the product. The compression of this time leads to greater admiration to bazaar demand, greater bazaar allotment and greater profitability. Time-To-Market can be torn into two periods, abstraction to final artefact architecture and the accommodation to commercialize the artefact to its availability on the market. Dispatch Time-To-Market encompasses both time periods.

Time-To-Market is not alone important for new products. The Director of R&D of a arch aliment aggregation tells us that 50% of her R&D efforts are for new products. The actual 50% are on changes to absolute products. These changes are accepted from a array of affidavit including amount abridgement programs and reacting to changes in raw actual supply.

To acceleration Time-To-Market, a absolute access is required. The business processes complex cover abounding centralized and alien organizations. Centralized organizations generally cover marketing, R&D, production, superior and others. Alien organizations may cover third affair R&D, testing facilities, customers, suppliers, outsourced accomplishment and others. These abounding organizations have to be managed as a individual article administration in a individual action with a individual appearance of the artefact and activity (with the adapted aegis concerns.)

Speeding Time-To-Market requires accouterment the artistic aggregation with adapted abundance tools. Accouterment the chemist, flavorist, aliment engineer, nutritionist, and others with the adapted accoutrement increases abundance and speeds Time-To-Market. These accoutrement cover the adeptness to analyze absolute abstracts or articles with adapted or agnate characteristics, blueprint assay and acclimation accoutrement that advice to added calmly advance the optimal formula, characterization bearing accoutrement to accede with authoritative labeling requirements, and more. In addition, the affiliation of authoritative functions into the processes can abbreviate bootless authoritative workloads.

Once the final artefact is accustomed for commercialization, the assignment of appointment the artefact from R&D to abounding bartering activity is required. Much of this assignment is a alteration of technology. The artefact and processes have to be transferred to the adapted arrangement or organization, be they centralized or external. The adapted bulb or plants have to be called for assembly and the artefact abstracts and processes transferred and implemented. This includes bulb and accumulated akin systems like ERP, SCP, quality, MES and others. Automating the technology alteration is a key weapon in dispatch Time-To-Market.

In some markets, like CPG and food, the abortion amount of new artefact addition is actual high, one antecedent places it a 70%. A above action for Action PLM is abbreviating the amount of abortion or accretion the amount of success.

The a lot of accessible way to access the success amount is to not accompany the failures to market. Actually, killing off articles or projects that are bedevilled to abortion as aboriginal as accessible is a key to abounding objectives. This requires a administration access that looks at all projects and articles as a portfolio to be managed together. It requires accoutrement to appraise the aggressive projects and articles objectively.

These administration accoutrement have to abode the development action itself. Which projects are abaft schedule? What are the accomplish to be accomplished already a accurate footfall in the action is accustomed and who approves. These administration processes have to be automatic anticipation workflow approaches to ascertain and ensure best practice, abate handoff times and to acquiesce for bright accountability and connected improvement.

To be successful, a artefact have to accommodated the needs of the customer. The business alignment or chump defines these needs as a set of requirements. These requirements can cover final artefact cost, concrete or actinic specifications, chump perceptions and others. These requirements have to be acclimated always to activity the success of the product. A key is the aboriginal identification of "losers" to aerate the absorption spent on the closing "winners."

Estimates accompaniment that up to 95% of the activity aeon amount of articles are bent in the artefact development cycle. Therefore, amount abridgement have to be a focus on this cycle. Action PLM allows humans and processes to focus on those data that enhance profitability. Some examples include:

* Least Amount Compound and Packaging - Recipes and packaging can be developed with optimal costs or absolute articles can be re-designed to abate costs. Since abounding industries appearance packaging amount to beat the compound cost, an integrated, absolute amount access to compound and packaging is required.

* Actual Substitution and Consolidation - By accouterment the adeptness to annihilate bombastic abstracts and suppliers companies can abate artefact costs; access superior and lower all-embracing account investment.

* Architecture for Manufacturability - Absolute assembly amount can be optimized through absolute artefact architecture that includes assembly issues.

The acknowledgment on assets cold requires the able and able use of those assets. Where a artefact is produced impacts the acknowledgment on accomplishment assets. The alternative of the centralized or alien plants requires an compassionate of the assembly needs of the product, the assembly adequacy of the plants and an able analogous of these two. With trends appear outsourced production, this adeptness becomes a key accommodation authoritative tool.

Product Life Cycle Administration (PLM) in Process Part 1 Accurate in Discrete, Ready to Blossom in Process

2009-08-18T03:59:00.000-07:00

Product Life Cycle Administration is a alternation of business processes, enabled by appliance software, which has accurate to accomplish business valuein a array of industries. Discussion with end-user companies reveals a constant account of allowances including bargain time to market, assets in engineering productivity, added revenue, added reuse, abridgement of redesign action and more. A assay of bell-ringer web sites supports this cessation with a amount of case studies about companies that accept apparent cogent advantages from implementing PLM processes and software solutions. Abounding of the vendors are now alms accord solutions that acquiesce assorted enterprises or locations to participate in a single, accommodating architecture action for abundant benefits.

The advance of a ample amount of software suppliers targeting the PLM needs of the detached industries prove that the PLM bazaar aural detached companies is hot. The "Discrete PLM" vendors are abundant with added abutting the list. These vendors primarily appear from a accomplishments in Computer Aided Architecture (CAD) and Artefact Data Administration (PDM).

Searching for users and reviewing the accessible case studies shows that few adventures are accessible that reflect the PLM amount accessible to action companies. Some of the case studies that focus on action companies appearance the PLM articles acclimated to accredit packaging architecture or bulb engineering but few cover the development of the basal recipes for products.

The development of a food, chemical, biologic or added action artefact is a circuitous and cher process. Action industry companies could account from abounding of the PLM concepts that accept accurate to bargain time to market, assets in engineering productivity, added revenue, added reuse, abridgement of redesign action in the detached industries. But PLM has had minimum assimilation into the action industries. Why?

As in abounding appliance areas, the requirements for action companies are altered from those of detached companies. Action companies defective the advantage to buy accepted PLM packages, accept been affected to body their own solutions. These solutions accept generally been congenital by alone departments and don't abode the action beyond departments or enterprises.

Discrete PLM suppliers accurately accommodate a apartment of articles that abutment the needs of detached companies, for example, Computer Aided Architecture (CAD), agreement management, locations and artefact structures and more. However, the action companies accept altered requirements. Their artefact development processes crave altered functions, for example, formulation, blueprint management, comestible analysis, test/analysis procedures, processing procedures, accumulation accomplishment deployment, packaging and more.

In addition, the hotlink into accomplishment aural a action aggregation is circuitous with the role of PLM addition into the bulb environment. Action companies crave a accepted action blueprint (based aloft S88 and S95 standards) in adjustment to actualize constant artefact worldwide. While there appears to be overlap amid some PLM functionality amid detached and action vendors, a lot of PLM articles are based on basal detached assumptions that don't plan in process.

The Detached PLM suppliers abide focused on the all-encompassing needs and opportunities provided by the Detached PLM market. The Detached PLM vendors do not accommodate the action functions and therefore, their articles accept not been accustomed able-bodied by action companies. Industry experts adumbrate that the Detached PLM vendors will be either apathetic to abode the actual altered needs of the action industries or added acceptable not attack to abode the action needs at all - or possibly accomplish alliances with the action PLM players.

The bazaar is now seeing new PLM vendors focused on the action industries or "Process PLM" vendors. These companies are not alive on the needs of the detached companies. The Action PLM vendors are alive appear suites of PLM articles that abode the specific needs of action companies. The founders of these companies appear from a altered accomplishments than their detached PLM counterparts.

The action PLM vendors appear from a class or accomplishment beheading background. Their angle of the business requirements for a PLM appliance are different. The Action PLM bazaar has two vendors with absolute and all-encompassing solutions accessible today, Formation Systems (www.formationsystems.com) and Sequencia (www.sequencia.com). With a absolution of its Recipe Manager product, SAP (www.sap.com) has abutting the bazaar with a amateur artefact and all-encompassing vision.

Business Action Assay against Business Action Management

2009-08-18T03:47:00.001-07:00

Talking to end users reveals that there is abashing in the bazaar apropos business action assay (BPA) and business action administration (BPM) suites. Vendors use the appellation BPM in a absolute ample way, but what are absolutely the differences amid BPA and BPM, and area does BPM appear from?

BPM in the Early Stages

In the 1980s, organizations acclimated business action redesign (BPR) to advance productivity, superior of service, and amount capability by authoritative desperate changes aural the processes of their organizations. Information technology (IT) solutions for these above redesigns were beheld as generally consistent in above agent cuts, due to the actuality that abounding businesses acclimated BPR to restructure their company. Because of this, abounding organizations today are afraid about implementing business action changes. This is decidedly accurate if it comes to accepted BPM solutions, which focus mainly on blurred amount and accretion productivity, just as the focal credibility of these solutions in the 1980s were on desperate authoritative changes.

In retrospect, the BPR access of aggravating to change aggregate at already seems a bit extreme. Therefore, accepted BPM band-aid providers bazaar a added attenuate approach, in which changes are incremental and beneath desperate than with the old BPR tactics. Nonetheless, there are times if a added abolitionist access to action clay and redesign is alleged for in adjustment for an alignment to position itself abnormally in the market. Moreover, businesses accept a addiction to change assertive processes rapidly. This is not a problem, as the new BPM solutions are able of adjusting the action architecture accordingly, after accepting a huge appulse on the aggregation structure. Thus, even admitting the BPM action operates through incremental changes, businesses will apprehension the absolute appulse these changes aftereffect aural an organization.

Another huge aberration amid the BPR of the 1980s and the BPM of the present is the actuality that BPR complex hard-coded action changes. Organizations not abandoned bare programmers instead of business users to apparatus these changes, but they were time-consuming. Technologies for action automation, certificate management, etc., were absolute of anniversary other, and could abandoned be chip through coding. This fabricated affiliation added difficult than it is now, consistent in it generally not getting acclimated at all.

When pure-play BPM vendors accustomed on the scene, they created a artefact whose apparatus were already chip with anniversary added to anatomy one adamant solution. These vendors focus on the business ancillary of the organization, creating a convenient interface, and involving business analysts in the absolute aeon of action clay and implementationвЂ”not just in requirements acquisition and user accepting testing. This agency that business users can administer changes added calmly after relying on the IT department, because changes are not hard-coded and usually do not crave programming skills.

What Is Business Action Clay and Design

Before an alignment starts the architecture or clay process, it needs to accept what its business processes are. In general, a business action is a set of logically accompanying business activities that amalgamate to bear something of value. A business action can be apparent as altered accomplish aural a business cycle, but aswell as a set of accomplish or activities that run throughout the organization, and which are generally congenital to the requirements of the customer. In this case, the chump is a altered department, the absolute end user, or a artefact in the next action aural the workflow.

When it comes to specific business processes aural an organization, business analysts should attending above departments. Departments are generally capacity or silos aural an organization, but business processes lie on top of these departments. For example, affairs to a chump is about beheld as a individual business process, but several departments, from the sales administration to the administration and accounts departments, are complex in this individual process.

There is a acceptable acumen why BPM solutions handle processes in this way, as accumbent rather than vertical or "functional" processes. If an alignment angle its processes angular based on functions, the action is isolated. This can could cause delays, added costs, and duplication of tasks, as able-bodied as accident of superior control. Accumbent processes, on the added hand, cantankerous the boundaries of departments. They focus added on human-centric processes ("who does what," in added words) than on task-centric processes (which yield things footfall by step).

In agreement of clay and designing these processes, the capital drivers for a lot of organizations are optimization, effectiveness, authoritative growth, and chump satisfaction. In fact, the a lot of accepted account abaft business action clay and architecture are as follows:

* achievement improvement

* amount reduction

* business action automation

* business action integration

* business befalling creation

Business action clay and architecture is added than just accession action for an organization. Organizations should see business action clay and architecture as an absolute business change that will advice it to accommodated or alter its scope, and to continuously accommodated its customers' requirements and expectations. Business action clay can cover authoritative changes, abstruse changes, or frequently a aggregate of both.

Besides vendors that accommodate abounding business action administration suites (BPMS) as discussed below, there are vendors that focus added on the clay and assay than the absolute beheading of the processes. Their solutions are alleged BPA tools. BPA solutions apply on action architecture and the associated business archetypal analysis. Integration, performance, support, and affluence of use are important for BPA solutions, as are the two modules declared below.

The business archetypal artist is a bore that enables business users to anticipate the business processes aural an organization. This permits the identification of bottlenecks, tasks, and opportunities, so that business users can automate these processes. Bore appearance such as graphical action design, validation of processes through checkpoints, and the admittance of icons in the processes, advance action afterimage for business users. Moreover, with the business archetypal designer, it is accessible to yield a top-down access to action clay by starting with a high-level business action and conduct down to added abundant processes aural the organization. This bore aswell provides a advice adjustment for business users to allocution to humans in added abstruse departments, such as arrangement integrators.

The business action assay bore enables business users to accomplish added adult assay than is accessible through beheld assay of graphical designs alone. Unlike BPM suites, this bore can backpack out financial, risk, and amount alternation analyses. In addition, this bore lets business users assassinate changeless analyses, activating simulations, and ability appliance analyses. Through these analyses, business users can clue the advancing process, assay bottlenecks, optimize the process, and even advance these accomplishments through into the active process.

In adjustment to conduct these analyses, a BPA band-aid integrates with a array of altered solutions. For instance, business users generally will alpha by creating models in a band-aid such as Microsoft Visio, back the BPA apparatus needs to be able to acceptation the consistent diagrams. Then, to accomplish the business action analyses, the apparatus will accommodate with a business action ecology (BAM) band-aid that monitors the active processes. The BPA band-aid aswell needs to accommodate with business rules engines, beheading models, or pure-play BPM solutions, as the BPA accoutrement themselves don't assassinate the processes.

A BPA band-aid should appear with a solid alignment to ensure business users are as able as possible. The band-aid will acceptable appear with a accepted business action methodology, and abutment all-embracing standards such as Six Sigma and Rummler-Brache (for diagrams). Often, best practices are congenital in as well.

BPM Suites

BPM suites are added absolutely chip solutions. They amalgamate key technologies into one alms to accredit business users and administration to ascendancy and administer business processes, after heavily relying on the IT department. These technologies cover business action modeling, BAM, a business rules engine, business action optimization, and appliance integration. Such technologies, as able-bodied as the functions and controls congenital in BPM suites, can be acclimated to complete the BPM activity aeon (to appearance the activity cycle, see amount 1 or Gartner's November 18, 2005 commodity Business Action Administration Suites Enhance the Ascendancy and Administration of Business Processes).

BPA vendors are accretion their capabilities after affecting the beheading allotment of BPM suites. BPA vendors, such as Proactivity, IDS Scheer, and Proforma, are developing and carrying best-of-breed solutions. These vendors focus on the user bazaar area business rules or beheading models are already in place. Through affiliation with added best-of-breed products, these vendors action a abounding BPM solution.

The claiming for BPA vendors is to acutely accompany their band-aid bulletin to the user market. There is currently too abundant abashing in the bazaar a part of end users apropos the aberration amid BPA and BPM. BPA vendors should acutely accompaniment the account for the alignment of authentic business action assay after workflow or beheading modules.

BPM suites, on the added hand, are acquisition the bazaar with an access that focuses on affiliation amid functionalities and technologies that are already in place, and on alms organizations a broad, absolutely chip solution. The bigger BPMS vendors accommodate pre-defined, industry-specific models and frameworks to abutment the vertical market, bartering a solid abject as able-bodied as customization to an organization's specific needs.

The claiming for BPM suites will be to change processes, and the metadata included with these processes, after arresting the deployment of accepted processes. This metadata-driven access is something that not all vendors accept baffled as of yet. Organizations searching for a BPM apartment should accomplish abiding they yield into application the approaching affairs of BPM vendors in adjustment to ensure that a vendor's action matches the needs of the organization.

Process Accomplishment Software: A Primer

2009-08-18T02:55:00.000-07:00

Process accomplishment has altered requirements appropriate it from added types of manufacturing. If selecting software for the action industry, appropriate absorption and accent should be placed on these requirements to ensure that a aggregation can accomplish at optimal levels, constant with how it does business and not on how the software lets the aggregation do business. Be acquainted of both ample software vendors, who try to be all things to all companies, and alcove vendors, who abridgement the abysmal pockets to abide the artefact band and accommodated approaching needs. This commodity defines action manufacturing; discusses its formulation, packaging, and appraisement issues; talks about interfaces; provides cautions and caveats. Furthermore, these characteristics should be at the top of any software appraisal list.

Formulation is a adequately simple abstraction but don't anticipate it is the aforementioned as a bill of materials. And be careful of the bell-ringer who says you can. Conception specifies the capacity and their accommodation (i.e. pounds, gallons, liters) bare to accomplish the product. The aboriginal affair that you apprehend is that abstracts are different. To be able to plan with a formula, you charge a adjustable assemblage of admeasurement about-face engine active beneath the ERP software covers. Furthermore, you accept to be able to specify your own about-face rules to annual for the altered requirements of your business.

Proportions of capacity in a blueprint aswell highlight the charge for addition feature, namely scalability. Recalling that band about the Army baker who can alone accomplish meatloaf that feeds 500, a blueprint to accomplish 500 liters of a actinic accept to be scalable to accomplish 250 liters or 1,000 liters. Addition aspect of scalability is the adeptness to accomplish based on what you have.

An archetype will allegorize this point. If you are authoritative a car and you alone accept two of the appropriate four tires, you cannot accomplish bisected of a car. In added words, you accept to accept all of the locations in their appropriate quantities to accomplish the accomplished product. What would you do in action accomplishment if you wish to accomplish 1,000 gallons of soda but you alone accept 500 gallons of the appropriate 1,000 gallons of carbonated water? You accept the advantage of authoritative bisected of the 1,000 gallons of soda. In action accomplishment you can accomplish the a lot of of a accomplished artefact based on the atomic abundance of an additive in stock. Furthermore, ERP software should account this for you and acquiesce you accomplish "what if" analysis.

So what's the big deal? What would you rather acquaint the customer, who needs the 1,000 gallons of your chemical, as ascribe into their accomplished product? "I can't accord you the 1,000 gallons for two weeks" or "I can accord you 500 gallons today and the antithesis next week."

The capacity and if they are added into the accomplishment action accept to be chip with the acquisition and accumulation resources. Ingredients, decidedly in the actinic industry, are not added at the aforementioned time. Typically, there may some milling, added ingredients; blending, added ingredients; and actinic reactions, added ingredients. You would apprehend that the ERP software would accommodate the act of abacus an additive to the action with the station/step/resource in the process.

Finally, there is the amount of abstracts conversion. Regardless of whether you are converting from action or detached accomplishment software, about-face can be a daunting, time-consuming task. While this about-face can be automated, the programming and testing will apparently yield best that a chiral conversion. Accordingly, if searching at ERP software for action accomplishment industry, yield the time to actuate how your absolute artefact and formulas will fit into the vendor's structures

A packaging compound is agnate to a blueprint but describes how the accomplished artefact goes through its final assembly. A packaging compound addresses such things as containers, labels, corrugated, and shrink-wrap. In action manufacturing, the accomplished artefact usually is fabricated in aggregate but is rarely delivered in aggregate anatomy to the customer. For example, the cooler architect makes soda in batches of bags of gallons. However, as a consumer, if you buy soda, you can buy it in 12-ounce aluminum cans, 16-ounce artificial bottles, or 1-liter bottles. If you are restaurateur, you may accept the advantage accepting a 5 or 50-gallon metal containers that accumulate the cooler in abstract anatomy so that carbonated baptize can be added later.

Why is this abstraction important? How generally do you anticipate that Coke Cola changes the blueprint for Coke? On the added hand, how generally do they change the packaging to advertise a appropriate promotion? It would be easier to accumulate clue of the acclimate than promotions. If the blueprint and packaging recipes are combined, every time the packaging changes, aliment of the blueprint would be required. Likewise, if the blueprint is changed, all of the recipes would accept to be changed. This increases the aliment and affairs for error. In action manufacturing, the blueprint to accomplish the artefact and the compound to backpack the artefact should abide in abstracted structures to abate the advancing aliment function.

In the accumulation cycle, a plan adjustment is issued to accomplish the artefact in bulk. Abstracted backpack orders are issued to advertise how the aggregate actual is to be containerized and alien to the customer. This is important in action industries which accomplish "brite" banal or clandestine labels. For example, ample grocery chains advertise products, such as soups, soda, and meats, beneath their own cast names, appropriately clandestine labels. Don't think, however, that these chains accept their own accomplishment plants. Chains arrangement for these products. In the case of soups, action manufacturers actualize and barn non-descript, non-labeled aluminum cans of soup, appropriately "brite" stock. (Since the cans are filled, sealed, and, then, adapted beneath pressure, their shelf activity can be bidding in months.)

By amid the artefact blueprint from a packaging recipe, a accumulation adjustment can be issued to accomplish the cans of soup and, if the chump is accessible to accept the soup, a plan adjustment can be issued to characterization the cans according to the chump specifications. Hopefully, you can see why the allegory of the blueprint and backpack compound works calmly and finer in the apple of action manufacturing.

Even with today's all encompassing ERP software, alien interfaces are assured now or in the future. Authoritative this claim added analytical is the movement aback to "best of breed" software. Consequently, acceptable user needs alfresco the borders of ERP software will become added commonplace. Typical interfaces, that should be considered, are a basic alphabet soup of systems. Barn administration systems (WMS), accomplishment beheading systems (MES), action ability administration (ERM), avant-garde planning and scheduling (APS), computer aliment administration systems (CMMS), cyberbanking abstracts altering (EDI), accumulation alternation administration (SCM), chump accord administration (CRM), and radio abundance (RF) are just a few.

While the amount of interfaces appropriate for action accomplishment is not necessarily greater than those for discrete, the aforementioned cannot be said for amount of complexity. Consequently, it is analytical that you can comprehend, at atomic at a conceptual level, the abstracts archetypal and structures. If assessing action accomplishment software, it is important to acknowledge what is circuitous in designing and installing interfaces. Even if you are planning to use bell-ringer or third affair consultants, the advancing aliment costs may not be trivial.

Including interfaces in this album does not beggarly to betoken that alone action accomplishment software has this characteristic. However, it does betoken that action accomplishment interfaces are usually a way of life. These interfaces are complicated and usually go through a coil of abstracts mazes and awning maps. Mix in what we talked about aloft пїЅ formulas, scalability, backpack recipe, assorted units of measure, circuitous appraisement algorithms, and adhere on for a aflutter ride.

To provide the adaptive discovery for the industrial process control of businesses �

2009-07-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

To automate processes by solutions of the industrial process control of businesses (BPM) is not where the advantages of the solution finish. Since the change of use of people of process internally quickly, the solution of BPM should adapt its processes consequently. The capacity of the solution of BPM to adapt to the environment always changing in organizations provides to the advantage of providing the increased productivity, and to faster durations of cycle little of errors.

The solutions of BPM generally follow one of two approaches: human-exchange, or system-intensive. The continuations of BPM which must treat processes and practices changing of work are often solutions which have high the human-power station participation. BPM Human-exchange comprises the work carried out by people while acting one on the other strongly with the economic databases, applications, and the fundamental documents. the systems Human-exchanges concentrate thus on processes such as complaints treating, of approvals of mortgage, and the service to the customers. the processes System-intensives, on the one hand, often comprise the reiterated transactions with strong flow and which require not or the minimal human interaction. These transactions take place between various applications. This article concentrates on the solution human-power station of BPM, and how it adapts to the changes of process.

To automate processes

The automated processes represent the first stage in BPM, and provide the primary savings in businesses. Captures and initial documents of legwork entries and exits of the current courses of operation in the organization. After documentation of the processes, the organizations should analyze the processes to determine what should be eliminated, which should be automated as is, and which would owe reengineered to improve of the processes and the courses of operation in the organization.

The description of the processes in detail, rather than automating them, is the challenge. Discovering all the rules, flows, and the exceptions takes one good moment and much effort, having for result of the delays to the deployment. Though the aspect of automation is not unimportant, once the processes are defined (as well as the rules, the roles, the events, the conditions, and the scenarios), the automation of process is relatively frank. The difficulty comes afterwards, when the solution becomes part of the organization of 'culture of S and of its people 'of practices of S. the processes need the capacity to adapt to the change, thus so that a solution from BPM meets these conditions, it should incorporate the flexible functionality of outside-of-the-box which answers the agility of businesses and the environmental changes.

To automate processes often requires qualifications of programming. The solutions of BPM have already the integrated function, the functions of outside-of-the-box and the devices which allow the automation of the processes, and these simple courses of operation require minimal technical qualifications, which makes it possible analysts of businesses to create courses of operation without interference of the departments of technology information (IT). This has like consequence the deployment accelerated in the organizations.

Diagram 1 shows how reduced BPM of the costs of inefficiency and businesses, having for result the saving. The vertical axis shows the cost to make deals, and the horizontal axis represents time. At the beginning the cost of businesses is high, but after the process of automation and the deployment of these processes, the costs of businesses will fall significantly, because of a better effectiveness of process, which in their turn will have like consequence the direct saving.

Diagram 1.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

There are complex processes which take more time to develop, optimize, and to be carried out in the organization. A longer time of development for complex processes, and paralysis of analysis of the long period of discovery will carry out to slow down the deployment of these specific processes in the organization, having for result a longer phase of adaptation and a longer time before the saving is carried out, because diagram 2 shows.

Diagram 2.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

What occurs after the deployment when the processes are in place and the solution of BPM is application? While the deployments of BPM take typically less than six months, the life cycle of the solution of BPM after the deployment will be much longer. The organizations will have to thus see how the real users will adapt to these changes, time after the deployment becomes a significant element of the life cycle of BPM.

Deployment of a new solution in an organization to optimize processes, effectiveness of increase, and to reduce rather simple noises of costs. Unfortunately, these doesn 't always reflect reality. The human part of the processes is extremely important in the phase after the deployment, as the real people carrying out the tasks must employ the new manner of work, by the adaptation to the solution and the course of operation. The courses of operation should reflect normal manners to carry out tasks, to take care of the employees really to employ them. Otherwise, the results are skirtings, poor execution, and low rate of adoption for the solution of BPM (this is represented on diagram 3).

Diagram 3.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

The organizations of adaptation want to accelerate the deployment and the adaptation of the automated processes of businesses. The challenge is that the processes in an organization frequently change. As soon as a process is deployed, people will change the process, increase the process, or overcome exceptions to the processes as found. Consequently, the systems of BPM must be strongly adaptable. The systems should be able to satisfy the requests for change of the businesses. Otherwise, of the employees will be forced to work around the system. The users often will develop skirtings of the process automated to meet their needs, or even will turn over again to their old manner of carrying out the tasks, having for result the poor adaptation of the processes, decreasing by this fact the potential saving. Diagram 4 shows the effects of the poor adaptation.

Diagram 4.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

About Ultimus

Concern relating to SOA

Behind in day when the procedures and the sub-routines were all the fury, there was a preoccupation with an execution: With do fact the use of the sub-routines, with all its junction in the two directions and going beyond of the data, degrade the execution in opposition to reproducing the code in the jet? The same concern with the telephone traffic in orientated architecture towards services (SOA) is expressed by some stores of technology information (IT). The suppliers reduce the value of this concern, explaining that today 'speeds of treatment of S more than the interventions and the use of the generalized routines compensate for. The problem is that you must compare apples with apples. Improved speeds of processor will profit SOA and environments from non-SOA. Insurances must be made that the time when it takes to treat a complete transaction in environment of SOA is not appreciably slower than which companies test today. This is why alarms previously mentioned of execution are critical with the success of SOA.

Reigning IT culture can prevent SOA. Traditionally, IT makes shopping are measured by the produced lines of the code. It is contrary with the advantage of reutilisability of SOA. The paradigm must be shifted to reward for the fast and nimble achievements rather than the size and the complexity of the programs.

The cost to apply SOA will not be cheap. In addition to reengineering your existing technology of architecture, SOA will require a significant investment in the human capital so that the analysts of businesses can define finished processes of businesses; the systems analysts can convert these processes into characteristics; and the technicians system and the programmers can translate all into functional and handy services.

To miss with this stage of its deployment, but quickly the correction, are third tools to be contributed with the monitoring and the improvement of the execution in a SOA-definite environment. The first adopteurs of SOA must build their own resources or work in common with suppliers to examine btas versions of the tools. This is why, for example, cutting through a path of the companies employ all the assessments of Excel to the simple databases like deposits for services. By using the internal tools, the companies on the occasion to examine the landscape of technology for the best solution for their infrastructure.

Although there are different opinions on the subject, much services of Web regard as obligatory element of SOA. For those which share this point of view, of the services of Web must be applied correctly to create an environment full with SOA. While some companies can adopt an approach of waiting, now be a good time to obtain your house of services of Web in the order.

While the achievements of SOA start to proliferate through a company, the traditional and manual solutions of government, which include go-with through design 's, pilots of conference room, and report of after-the-fact, can be unsatisfactory. Consequently, of the elements of the approach of life cycle of the system will have to be last in review to incorporate a proactive strategy of government. Serious the thought which your life cycle of application served of your organization well during much of years can have by missing the mark of SOA and by carrying out its advantages envisaged.

Now you 'about excited about SOA. You bought in the advantages and can 'waiting of T to obtain started. Not also quickly!

SOA is a hard sale with the managers of company. SOA helps your company to be more flexible and nimble. However, it is difficult to make a case of businesses or to develop economies based on flexibility and the agility. Except in the rare cases where the answer can mean the profit or the losing market share, the justification for a change of technology is established on solving commercial problems or gaining a competitive advantage. You point out that Y2K caused important levellings of systems not because of a more effective use of technology, but rather because of its threat of the companies of stop.

As was stated above, the reutilisability of service is an important point of diagram of SOA. Manufacture this concept of a reality easier than is made known as. We could not do it for objects and us couldn 't let us make it occur for components. What encourages us to think that SOA will be different? Ah, the government yea-with corporation will make the turn. Even if the corporative government could impose the policy of SOA, we add another layer of management and probably of personnel. Large-now we are responsible for the expenditure and the overheads of work increased.

SOA can be explained like calculation of company, reusable services, and faster methodology of construction. While SOA can be a frank and comprehensible concept, it requires a stiff learning curve for companies wanting to embrace this technology and to derive the advantages envisaged. The traditional lotisseurs, who adopt the great approach of image towards the integration of application, will have to divide flows and processes into smaller bites if the reutilisability is to open out. Developing a central group of HIM the professionals to be with the avant-garde the effort will limit not only your exposure to the minor retreats, but will also create a framework of the disciples of SOA to draw aside the mot.

Another paradigm which must be shifted is the traditional image of IT professional. The image of has little-and-bytes hermit which saw some share in a cave of technology and speaks in the Three Letter Acronym gained 't cut it. If IT of the professionals are to work indeed side by side with their counterparts of businesses to model finished processes, the two groups must speak a common language. This language must be in the language of the user. While you can say that your company already surmounted this obstacle, try to corroborate this with the community of user. Surely buses of service of company (ESB), deposits, and the directories are important for the unquestionable success of SOA; they do not need to concern the user and not only muddy water.

But is million question of the dollar, how make apply itself SOA? Some suppliers would propose a progressive deployment. BUltimus, sat in Cary, North Carolina (US), is a chief in the adaptive discovery for solutions of BPM. Indeed, Ultimus developed a patented technology called Adaptive Discovery. This technology simplifies the effort of discovery, shortens cycles of deployment, and makes it possible the changes of process to be applied quickly and easily. The adaptive discovery shortens the effort required to deploy a successful solution of BPM without interruption while improving and by adapting processes.

Ultimus started with a module of course of operation, but created a broader functionality than other companies such as the software of lotus, and offers at small companies (and even at large companies) a solution automated on the scale of the organization of course of operation. Founded in 1994, Ultimus developed of a solution of course of operation in a complete continuation of BPM. It created its solution completely on an environment of .NET, and is one of the chiefs in solutions of .NET BPM.

Ultimus 'world business transactions are composed of a network of more than 85 associated in 60 countries, with more than 1.500 customers. Its solution is localised in twenty languages, with the local offices everywhere in the world, and a group of support 24x7 is available. With its solution, Ultimus is the only supplier of solution of BPM with a hearth human-exchange approaching the automation and the cycle of adaptation.

The adaptive assistances of technology of discovery discover when a change occurs in a certain process of businesses. It is the majority of big part of the adaptive process of discovery.

The continuation of Ultimus BPM is a ripe application of company-class of seventh-generation. The continuation provides an environment of collaboration easy to use which includes all the components of BPM (see the industrial process control of businesses: How to orchestrate your business). Ultimus architected the product to add the value through the whole life cycle of BPM, to allow fast automation and integration, as well as innovating adaptive technologies which ensure it can easily adapt to the change.

The continuation of Ultimus BPM comprises the originator of process of Ultimus for modeling and the design, the studio of Ultimus BPM for the development and automation, the director of Ultimus for the management of rules, the administrator of Ultimus, and the adaptive reports/ratios of Ultimus. Ultimus worked hard to create a distinctive proposal for a value with its adaptive discovery, but now it will have to work with its marketing to sell this value.

The adaptive discovery allows processes automated to be deployed without charts of process complete and definitions. The initial stage of the project of BPM remains always the same one, however. The businesses and THIS of the representatives belong to the team, defining the processes of businesses (tasks including, of the conditions of data, the entries, and the exits) as well as of the user interfaces (UIs) and the interactions. Advantages of time are seen in more dynamic processes, because the adaptive discovery is employed with the capacity to define the details while a process is carried out (as in the handling of exception). With the adaptive discovery, the real deployment of the process can be faster in the whole range of project, having for result the time and the reduction of the costs. These advantages are shown on diagram 5.ut it is equivalent to draw aside the legs a boat with a foot on the boat (environment of SOA) and other on the dry ground (the current infrastructure of software). While the boat further derives and promotes far, your resources are stretched with their limits. You fall inside, and your future current and states start with patauger. While this can be made, you should be a good swimmer and to have somebody on the qualified personnel in CPR-quest, ressuscitation of basic program.

According to the age of your existing applications, it can be difficult to find the application program interfaces internal and external with a simple program, much less than in a company 'a whole library of application of S. to employ a service, the current interfaces must be torn outside or neutralized. Think that. Take the control of solvency/updating the service, for example. This could be employed in the fascinating standard order, returns treating, generation of quotation, orders above, promotion sales, discounts taken, and which knows where differently. Now pass by each one of these programs or modules, trace the logic of interface, and determine which modifications must be brought. Not an easy task. While you can have access to the source code, you cannot have the technical resources to play this game of technical skin of 'N 'of research. While the supplier of software can offer the assistance, can you allow yourselves?

While we are speaking technical resource, to benefit SOA 's agility, the services can have to be modified or, challenge which we say, being increased. Still, unless you have the technical resources to carry out this type of modification, you can be with the pity of the supplier of software. If you discuss the case of agility for SOA, ensure you that your company can support it or, at least, to pay it.

Unfortunately, SOA can be Y2KAOA-that is, Y2K once again. SOA is not a case of migration; it is a case of tear outside and demolishes at the base of technology, and replaces on a basis on the level of the company. While the large companies can have the luxury of the choices, small and medium-size companies (SME) do not certainly make. To employ an analogy, SOA is similar to the era when the automatic transmission was offered the first time in cars. It made the drive easier and less stressing. But you probably did not travel by your car of shift of stick to your local mechanic and to have the manual transmission replaced. While your current car could not have been more late and largest in technology of the motor vehicles, it was functional and achieved a valid goal. In the same way, your software running of company is most likely achieving its mission indicated. Just because new technology is espionne by suppliers of software does not mean that you will reinforce what you have. Not, you will wait until you can establish a case of businesses to replace the software such as more quickly treating to follow increased orders; better algorithms of r3flchissants evaluation of your company 's practical; or tools improved for the financial analysis and decision making. When you can make the case of businesses, you will want to determine which solutions of software are established on the technology of SOA and incorporate this advantage in your evaluation and choice.

You can indicate, can 't this author to compose his spirit? Is it in favour of SOA or not? As we saw, it is hardly doubtful that SOA could offer truths, real advantages in reusable terms of services and faster deployment of application. If we can realize these favour this time remains around to see. Without worrying, SOA is not a technology which can be application of a fashion by increase or fragmentary. You can 't right obtain your large wet toe; it requires a complete immersion. When you can make an argument in a convincing way to your management to improve your booklet of company, SOA can be enough ripe to be considered a reasonable alternative. In this moment department heads of information (CIOs) the best to be served the observation of the touchlines and by detecting the developments of SOA while the conservation of their management informed. Like the first model of year of a new line of car, it can be imprudent to apply the first version of the software using SOA. In conclusion, which is particularly interesting is that few suppliers offer even a solution SOA-based, however speak to us already about SOA 2.0 and advanced SOA.

Diagram 5.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

The adaptive discovery makes it possible the organization to put pursuant to the processes based on the information which it has already current. In other words, the adaptive discovery does not require an organization to know the unknown of the beginning. While the process evolves/moves, the waiter of BPM detects when the doesn information required 't exist. On this event, the waiter of BPM informs the expert of process. The expert of process adjusts the process of course of operation, creating the rules and the exceptions based on the furnished informations, and defines the real course of operation to supplement the process. The director of Ultimus defines, modifies, and examines these rules graphically. Once the rules are defined, the director of Ultimus publishes information with the waiter of BPM, and the process continues, the good deeds attached to these rules. When this event reproduces, the process will have these rules available automatically. Naturally, the expert of process can create new rules and delicatessens of exception constantly, not simply on incident-all changes can still be made by the director of Ultimus.

Advantages of employing the adaptive discovery

The adaptive discovery reduced the time of deployment, increases courses of operation easy to use, and reduced costs. IT of the departments, of the users of businesses, and the organization itself will carry out the advantages of this approach. The participation of IT of the departments with defining and automating processes is limited, because IT department only must concentrate on the infrastructure, the elements, the forms, integration, etc For decision makers of businesses, the time of design is plastered clearly, because not all the rules or exceptions must be in advance defined to deploy the processes. The decision makers, or the experts as regards process, have the capacity to change processes directly, as well as the capacity to adapt to the procedures changeantes in daily routines of businesses as the need is felt. IT of the departments and the departments of businesses can function together on applying the comprehensive solution of BPM, but in a way in which allows the two parts to do what they do better.

Conclusion

Ultimus 'continuation of BPM gets for users to handle exceptions, to control the change, and to allow collaboration by its continuation human-power station of BPM and its adaptive possibilities of discovery. The organizations should realize that not all the processes can be carried out by experts as regards process of businesses, particularly when there are basic connections of data in courses of operation. IT shouldn of department 't make it possible contractors to change fields or to make modifications in the databases. Moreover, though the adaptive discovery seems ideal with regard to a faster deployment of the processes of businesses, the organizations should realize that the initial phase to define processes should not be taken slightly. The processes simply of replanning can already reduce costs. Since the doesn of design 't cause the same conditions as the adaptive discovery, all the elements and information should be known to the analysts.

Ultimus has trademarked the limit , adaptive of discovered but this doesn 'average of T that no other company can adapt to the environments in the course of evolution. Principal companies such as Pegasystems, Lombardi, and Appian have the capacity to adapt economic processes and even principles to the environments in the course of evolution. The various companies have various solutions, with their own vision on the way in which to adapt to the environments always changing, in terms of process and economic principles.

For organizations choosing of the solutions of BPM, you remind that it there the life after deployment. Take into account how easily the solution can adapt to the change, as by automating right draft the isn 't sufficiently to draw benefit from all the possibilities of BPM. The adaptive discovery should help of the organizations with a faster deployment, and an adaptation to the changes in environment-all of which organizations of advantages in terms of effectiveness, reduction of the costs, and improvement of process.

SOA of a prospect for management: Part two

2009-07-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

Concern relating to SOA

Behind in day when the procedures and the sub-routines were all the fury, there was a preoccupation with an execution: With do fact the use of the sub-routines, with all its junction in the two directions and going beyond of the data, degrade the execution in opposition to reproducing the code in the jet? The same concern with the telephone traffic in orientated architecture towards services (SOA) is expressed by some stores of technology information (IT). The suppliers reduce the value of this concern, explaining that today 'speeds of treatment of S more than the interventions and the use of the generalized routines compensate for. The problem is that you must compare apples with apples. Improved speeds of processor will profit SOA and environments from non-SOA. Insurances must be made that the time when it takes to treat a complete transaction in environment of SOA is not appreciably slower than which companies test today. This is why alarms previously mentioned of execution are critical with the success of SOA.

Reigning IT culture can prevent SOA. Traditionally, IT makes shopping are measured by the produced lines of the code. It is contrary with the advantage of reutilisability of SOA. The paradigm must be shifted to reward for the fast and nimble achievements rather than the size and the complexity of the programs.

The cost to apply SOA will not be cheap. In addition to reengineering your existing technology of architecture, SOA will require a significant investment in the human capital so that the analysts of businesses can define finished processes of businesses; the systems analysts can convert these processes into characteristics; and the technicians system and the programmers can translate all into functional and handy services.

To miss with this stage of its deployment, but quickly the correction, are third tools to be contributed with the monitoring and the improvement of the execution in a SOA-definite environment. The first adopteurs of SOA must build their own resources or work in common with suppliers to examine btas versions of the tools. This is why, for example, cutting through a path of the companies employ all the assessments of Excel to the simple databases like deposits for services. By using the internal tools, the companies on the occasion to examine the landscape of technology for the best solution for their infrastructure.

Although there are different opinions on the subject, much services of Web regard as obligatory element of SOA. For those which share this point of view, of the services of Web must be applied correctly to create an environment full with SOA. While some companies can adopt an approach of waiting, now be a good time to obtain your house of services of Web in the order.

While the achievements of SOA start to proliferate through a company, the traditional and manual solutions of government, which include go-with through design 's, pilots of conference room, and report of after-the-fact, can be unsatisfactory. Consequently, of the elements of the approach of life cycle of the system will have to be last in review to incorporate a proactive strategy of government. Serious the thought which your life cycle of application served of your organization well during much of years can have by missing the mark of SOA and by carrying out its advantages envisaged.

Now you 'about excited about SOA. You bought in the advantages and can 'waiting of T to obtain started. Not also quickly!

SOA is a hard sale with the managers of company. SOA helps your company to be more flexible and nimble. However, it is difficult to make a case of businesses or to develop economies based on flexibility and the agility. Except in the rare cases where the answer can mean the profit or the losing market share, the justification for a change of technology is established on solving commercial problems or gaining a competitive advantage. You point out that Y2K caused important levellings of systems not because of a more effective use of technology, but rather because of its threat of the companies of stop.

As was stated above, the reutilisability of service is an important point of diagram of SOA. Manufacture this concept of a reality easier than is made known as. We could not do it for objects and us couldn 't let us make it occur for components. What encourages us to think that SOA will be different? Ah, the government yea-with corporation will make the turn. Even if the corporative government could impose the policy of SOA, we add another layer of management and probably of personnel. Large-now we are responsible for the expenditure and the overheads of work increased.

SOA can be explained like calculation of company, reusable services, and faster methodology of construction. While SOA can be a frank and comprehensible concept, it requires a stiff learning curve for companies wanting to embrace this technology and to derive the advantages envisaged. The traditional lotisseurs, who adopt the great approach of image towards the integration of application, will have to divide flows and processes into smaller bites if the reutilisability is to open out. Developing a central group of HIM the professionals to be with the avant-garde the effort will limit not only your exposure to the minor retreats, but will also create a framework of the disciples of SOA to draw aside the mot.

Another paradigm which must be shifted is the traditional image of IT professional. The image of has little-and-bytes hermit which saw some share in a cave of technology and speaks in the Three Letter Acronym gained 't cut it. If IT of the professionals are to work indeed side by side with their counterparts of businesses to model finished processes, the two groups must speak a common language. This language must be in the language of the user. While you can say that your company already surmounted this obstacle, try to corroborate this with the community of user. Surely buses of service of company (ESB), deposits, and the directories are important for the unquestionable success of SOA; they do not need to concern the user and not only muddy water.

But is million question of the dollar, how make apply itself SOA? Some suppliers would propose a progressive deployment. But it is equivalent to draw aside the legs a boat with a foot on the boat (environment of SOA) and other on the dry ground (the current infrastructure of software). While the boat further derives and promotes far, your resources are stretched with their limits. You fall inside, and your future current and states start with patauger. While this can be made, you should be a good swimmer and to have somebody on the qualified personnel in CPR-quest, ressuscitation of basic program.

According to the age of your existing applications, it can be difficult to find the application program interfaces internal and external with a simple program, much less than in a company 'a whole library of application of S. to employ a service, the current interfaces must be torn outside or neutralized. Think that. Take the control of solvency/updating the service, for example. This could be employed in the fascinating standard order, returns treating, generation of quotation, orders above, promotion sales, discounts taken, and which knows where differently. Now pass by each one of these programs or modules, trace the logic of interface, and determine which modifications must be brought. Not an easy task. While you can have access to the source code, you cannot have the technical resources to play this game of technical skin of 'N 'of research. While the supplier of software can offer the assistance, can you allow yourselves?

While we are speaking technical resource, to benefit SOA 's agility, the services can have to be modified or, challenge which we say, being increased. Still, unless you have the technical resources to carry out this type of modification, you can be with the pity of the supplier of software. If you discuss the case of agility for SOA, ensure you that your company can support it or, at least, to pay it.

Unfortunately, SOA can be Y2KAOA-that is, Y2K once again. SOA is not a case of migration; it is a case of tear outside and demolishes at the base of technology, and replaces on a basis on the level of the company. While the large companies can have the luxury of the choices, small and medium-size companies (SME) do not certainly make. To employ an analogy, SOA is similar to the era when the automatic transmission was offered the first time in cars. It made the drive easier and less stressing. But you probably did not travel by your car of shift of stick to your local mechanic and to have the manual transmission replaced. While your current car could not have been more late and largest in technology of the motor vehicles, it was functional and achieved a valid goal. In the same way, your software running of company is most likely achieving its mission indicated. Just because new technology is espionne by suppliers of software does not mean that you will reinforce what you have. Not, you will wait until you can establish a case of businesses to replace the software such as more quickly treating to follow increased orders; better algorithms of r3flchissants evaluation of your company 's practical; or tools improved for the financial analysis and decision making. When you can make the case of businesses, you will want to determine which solutions of software are established on the technology of SOA and incorporate this advantage in your evaluation and choice.

You can indicate, can 't this author to compose his spirit? Is it in favour of SOA or not? As we saw, it is hardly doubtful that SOA could offer truths, real advantages in reusable terms of services and faster deployment of application. If we can realize these favour this time remains around to see. Without worrying, SOA is not a technology which can be application of a fashion by increase or fragmentary. You can 't right obtain your large wet toe; it requires a complete immersion. When you can make an argument in a convincing way to your management to improve your booklet of company, SOA can be enough ripe to be considered a reasonable alternative. In this moment department heads of information (CIOs) the best to be served the observation of the touchlines and by detecting the developments of SOA while the conservation of their management informed. Like the first model of year of a new line of car, it can be imprudent to apply the first version of the software using SOA. In conclusion, which is particularly interesting is that few suppliers offer even a solution SOA-based, however speak to us already about SOA 2.0 and advanced SOA.