BPM Implementation Study – ActiveVOS

Not only are today’s IT environments more complex than ever before, but the current economic climate is making it more difficult for IT organizations to easily and cost-effectively meet changing business requirements. What’s needed is a way for organizations to streamline business processes, increase efficiency, and empower business users, rather than IT, to be at the forefront of business process change. In many cases, this is where a good business process management (BPM) solution comes in.

Upside Research, Inc. recently interviewed a national government security organization that had a critical need to manage the security of files exchanged among users, screening out malware, malicious code, and viruses. In this ActiveVOS-BPM-Implementation-Study-Upside-Research, we’ll take a closer look at the organization, its challenges, and the solution, and the business impact from its BPM deployment.

Share

Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS BPMS – ENABLING DYNAMIC GROWTH

Click here to download the full Upside Research Report on Western Governors University BPM implementation.

Technology doesn’t exist for its own sake—it ultimately serves the needs of the business. But when business needs change rapidly and dynamically, it can be extremely difficult for a company’s IT infrastructure to keep up.

Yet when designed correctly, a good IT infrastructure not only keeps up with business change, but it enables greater, faster, and broader innovation.  That’s especially true when it comes to business process management (BPM). BPM solutions are one of the ways to automate, manage, and optimize business processes, enabling organizations to meet dynamic business needs effectively and efficiently.

Upside Research recently came across a good example of a company that has successfully adapted its traditional, statically-oriented IT infrastructure to meet more dynamic business needs through the use of SOA and BPM.

Western Governors University is an online university that was facing student management challenges as it continued to grow at a significant pace. Of particular urgency was finding a way to create a student change management system that could orchestrate the flow between legacy applications and new applications, and provide an online student interface where the students could enter their data via a web page. That data would then trigger different process-driven requirements for the university.

The university is in a rapid growth state, and was looking for a BPM solution, one that would be based on standards and could incorporate human tasks with automated processes. While many of the processes were student-management related, they reflect the types of problems that most organizations face as they continue rapid growth and have legacy and new systems that need to communicate. The broader issues this academic institution faced were: the need to convert manual processes, eliminate costly errors, reduce inefficiencies, and create flexible processes that reflected the changing nature of the online academic calendar, as well as reduce the manual resources and headcount required to manage the process.

The IT organization at WGU launched a search for a BPM system that was standards-based and supported a services-oriented architecture. WGU investigated multiple different tools but ultimately and quickly found ActiveVOS to be the only solution that came with the full set of functionality required out of the box. After considering several of the other solutions (including JBoss jBPM and coding a solution themselves), WGU selected the ActiveVOS business process management system (BPMS) from Active Endpoints. In this Upside Research Implementation Brief, we’ll take a closer look at the university, its challenges, and its decision to select a model-driven BPMS over a set of non-integrated tools as the foundation for its SOA architecture. We’ll also examine the business impact of its BPM deployment.

Share

Metastorm – Streamlining Critical Paperwork for Recruitment Services

A publicly traded company, MSB is a leading provider of permanent and contract IT, telecoms, finance, accounting and sales professionals. As it grew, MSB found that its sales people were spending more and more time getting new contracts and paperwork completed and approved, instead of spending the time identifying new opportunities. Its team of VB programmers couldn’t develop solutions fast enough, or change them often enough, to provide a viable and practical solution.

MSB chose Metastorm’s e-Work BPM Platform to implement its critical project initiation forms, reducing process completion time from hours to minutes, and achieving a complete ROI within six months.

Download the full MSB Implementation Study.

Share

3COM: Enabling Rapid, Custom and Adaptable Sales Processes Through Savvion BusinessManager

A leading networking products manufacturer, 3Com has an extensive, global staff and sales force. The company wanted to revise its special price quotes (SPQ) system to reduce lag time it was experiencing from the current Lotus Notes replication process. Since all special price quotes require rigorous and timely approval, 3Com needed to develop an integrated process for handling special price quotes (SPQs) that would expedite the process and enable the company to meet its customers’ needs in a timely manner.

3Com chose BusinessManager from Savvion to build a process for enabling its special price quotes. The resulting system connected a Siebel sales force automation application through to a back-end SAP system, providing the company with an end-to-end process that saved time and reduced human errors.

Download the complete 3COM Implementation Study.

Share

West Bend Mutual Insurance: Reducing Development Risk and Increasing Quality via Compuware CARS

All organizations doing application development face a series of risks and challenges: Will the application be released on time? Will the quality of the application be good or will there be unexpected problems? What about performance—will the application perform as needed when it’s released in real-world scenarios? Can the deployment and future changes be managed with minimal effort?

Download the full West Bend Mutual Insurance CARS Implementation Study.

Share

Using Intalio|n3 to Add Flexibility and Efficiency to Book Publishing

iUniverse is an independent publishing company that helps individuals self-publish fiction and non-fiction books. iUniverse was interested in finding technology that would enable it to build an infrastructure that could improve the efficiencies of the book publishing process as well as provide flexibility for changing business needs. The company turned to Business Process Management (BPM) as a way of automating some of its processes and eliminating inefficiencies that existed. After an extensive search, iUniverse selected Intalio|n3 and implemented the product. It has already used Intalio|n3 to assist its catalog export and several other processes, and iUniverse has a long-term strategic view of migrating all business processes to be orchestrated under the BPMS architecture over time.

Download the full iUniverse Implementation Study.

Share

Micro-News Network: Emergency Alert System Built with Compuware OptimalJ

Company: Micro-News Network
Industry: Emergency Notification
Challenges:
– Finding a development tool and technology that would leverage existing resources and enable the company to build a standalone application for clients that could scale to its operation center
Product Solution Components:
– J2EE
– Compuware OptimalJ
Results
– Saved 60-80% development time and costs with OptimalJ
– Project created high-quality code that eases integration
– Resulting application is now being demonstrated to first customers
– 90% projected savings on future application modifications

Download the full Micro-News Network Implementation Study for more information.

Share