Business Process Management (BPM) is a multi-faceted technology that impacts a variety of roles within an organization. Developers, IT Architects, Analysts, Business Users, and Process Managers all are involved and impacted by the automation of a business process. The challenge for BPM vendors is to find a way to meet each individual role’s needs within their BPM platform, which can be a tall order to fill.
Last week Metastorm announced a new version of its flagship BPM suite, e-Work 6.0. Scheduled to ship August 18th, e-Work 6.0 has a series of enhancements across the board that seek to make the lives of developers, business managers, and business users easier. Specifically, e-Work 6.0 includes the following enhancements:
– For Developers: Metastorm has created Form Segments and Map Segments, which enable developers to save a certain portion of a form or process map that is used repeatedly. The segments support universal updates, so only one instance needs to be updated. This greatly enhances productivity and consistency. In addition, Metastorm created e-Work Libraries, which enable developers to store a collection of Form Segments or process Map Segments they use repeatedly and assign that library to a specific process.
– For Business Managers: Metastorm has added out-of-box reporting capabilities that enable managers to track the business activities in a process. Metastorm has always collected all process and business data in a relational database, and with the new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) companies can now track business-level and process-level metrics without having to use external reporting packages.
– For Business Users: Metastorm has enhanced the features of its e-Work client, adding new usability features such as Most Recently Used forms lists and opening extra windows for certain functions to enable users to more easily complete tasks.
– For IT Managers: Metastorm is increasing the productivity of the e-Work v6 Engine, increasing the hourly transaction capacity by 50% and doubling the number of users handled per hour. In addition, it has created an Open Authentication model, which enables companies to configure how they want to handle authentication, facilitating single sign-on and the ability to sign in through complementary applications.
Version 6 of e-Work aims to make all users’ lives a little bit easier and a lot more productive. Initial customer feedback has been positive, and many of the enhancements are a result of customer requests. The BAM reporting and e-Work Library functionality will be an important factor for some companies, as well as advancing the range of ways that BPM vendors are delivering business reporting and monitoring.
