Showing posts with label BPM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BPM. Show all posts

Friday, November 7, 2014

IT scenarios before & after OPEX BPM µBPO or from user dependency to control by the system



Although it is really heavy to accept, in fact everybody prefers better not to talk about, after enormous efforts that lasted not less than 30 years, one full generation, and veritable fortunes spent; the day to day operations of most of the traditional business depends, essentially, on what people is doing even manually or manually transferring information from one to another silo of information.

The following figure reflects this typical current scenario:




One could say, OK, no problem: “our competitors are more or less in the same situation”, “we have been very disciplined buying every single new miraculous tool that hardware and software vendors have recommended us, then, we are 100 % automated, really at the technological edge”, “why to change when we are leaders in our market, our sector, our segment, our town, our neighborhood or our “whatever”? 

Remember my words, one day these people will wake-up, have a look at the window and see a Google or Amazon drone knocking at the window glass trying to sell them at half the regular price the product they are so proudly and profitable selling in their close, protected, comfortable niche for years when not decades. 

This is not a nightmare, is just happening quarter after quarter in many different sectors they have been till now feeling fully protected forever with apparently indestructible barriers (distance, taxes, lack of information, human-local service required, language, regulations, size, excellent personal service or whatever, …). What happens that has destroyed this Arcadia? We could easily say: “Is the technology stupid”!

The question is: What do we have to do to compete with business born already 100 % automated? Surrender? Go on vacations? Retire yourself to the mountains? Just waiting this fashion will pass away? Change to another sector not yet under threat … for a while? 

The answer is very easy, innovate in business process automation, fight with the same arms, use your advantages being small flexible, quick deciders, imaginative … 

“But this requires very sophisticated knowledge out of our scope and supposes big investments affordable only for the biggest corporations, …

Excuses! Look at the next figure:
 



You need only to install an additional technological piece between your current silos of information and your users, the BPM Layer, and make an intelligent use of your business knowledge and innovation skills by continuously applying the OPEX > BPM > µBPO value chain to your operations reducing your indirect personal costs by a 70 % as we resume in this last figure:



“But Sir, to follow your recommendation we would need to buy the different software and hardware pieces, integrate it, contract consultants technicians to develop our BPM applications and support all this infrastructure on a 24/7 level of service but we can’t afford this!” 

Not at all! Go BPaaS (Business Process as a Service), everything served from the cloud paying a monthly fee just for the demanded consumption of the required resources. With no investment at all, no delays, no minimums, no complications, no short-mid-long term compromises, paying on a monthly basis not more than one fourth (< 25 %) of the tangible savings obtained. 

Does it sounds good? Go ahead now! Don’t lose time, remember, a drone is on the way to your backyard, if you allow it to invade your business niche by not drastically improving your operations now, with no delay.









Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Do we have to consider BPM/BPMS a threat against ECM, DMS, ERP, CRM, SCM more “traditional” applications?



Many discussions arise around the contest among what we could call the “traditional” registering and transactional applications (ECM, DMS, ERP, CRM, SCM, …) by one side and, by the other side, the new players, procedural applications, mainly represented by BPM Processes developed on BPMS platforms.  

This conceptual fight has been created and continuously feedback by several market strategy factors:

1.     As a reaction against the announced BPM tsunami, around five-ten years ago some software vendors of “traditional” registering and transactional applications decided to include workflow module as a procedural extension of their platforms. This strategy has failed.
2.     Most recently, some of these registering and transactional software vendors has decided to change the above strategy and extend the value of their offering by buying a BPMS software vendor company, and then incorporate their technology in its product scope but as a separated product, not trying to arrive to a real product integration.
3.     And last but not least, to even increase the complexity, some BPMS software vendors have decide to include registering and even transactional module in its originally only BPMS focused platform.


As a result of those tendencies and the contradictory messages of the software vendors, end customers as very confused about the new IT architecture paradigm and where to put every each available application piece in order to build a robust, well organized and resilient IT building. 
The confusion has even increased with the irruption of the new mobile and social groups of applications.

In our opinion, all the above types of applications have an important and necessary role in the new IT architecture paradigm. 

As we try to reflect in the following figure, ECM/DMS applications are essential to manage the content, ERP/CRM to keep records/transactions, like taking a picture of what has happen and, finally, BPM/BPMS drives the action.




A BPM Process, like in a movie, is allowing the different scenes (tasks) flow along the life of the process, permitting to the different actors (people, applications, systems, machines, sensors, ..) play their role at the right moment that the scrip (the process class) requires their contribution: 


  • In certain scenes from the movie, documents and other content is even required to be used, or to be created and recorded and then the BPM Process manages the automated interactions with the ECM/DMS
  • In other moments of the process, data from transactional applications is required to fulfil process requirements and then the BPM Process recovers and presents this data in an automated way.
  • In addition, finally, normally at the latest steps of the movie, all the necessary data to complete a transaction has been already collected, verified and approved and then the BPM Process is automatically creating the transaction against the transactional application(s).

In this cooperative model, all the pieces are required, have an equally important role for achieving a smooth, as much automated as possible business operations. In addition, a new player appears: the SOA layer, the main success factor in the interoperability among the different combined applications. 

Therefore, in our opinion, there is no discussion about the matter, no contest at all; BPM/BPMS is not trying to substitute the traditional applications but to orchestrate all them together to obtain a much more efficient support to the business operations the organizations are running day to day.

Indeed, we consider it is not possible a massive implementation of BPM with success without insuring a solid, well organized and performing registering and transactional IT layer.




Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Descubre Cloud BPM: BPMteca y Proceedit organizan en noviembre un seminario sobre la automatización de procesos desde la nube




El próximo 20 de noviembre en Madrid y el 26 de noviembre en Barcelona, BPMteca y proceedit,  organizan Cloud BPM Discovery Seminar, con el lema “BPaaS: La automatización de procesos de negocio desde la nube”, en el Hotel Holiday Inn de Madrid, donde  se explicarán conceptos como BPM, BPMS, BPaaS, Cloud, OPEX, ASM, SOA, mBPO... de forma clara y comprensible y se darán pistas metodológicas y tecnológicas de cómo abordar y conseguir el despliegue masivo, abordable y sostenible de Procesos BPM sin correr los riesgos ni cometer los mismos errores que otros pioneros han sufrido al intentarlo.  
“En este Seminario queremos ayudar a organizaciones como la suya a desvelar las claves de cómo la cadena de valor Optimización > Automatización > micro-Externalización de sus procesos de negocio puede contribuir a facilitar el que su empresa, o las de sus clientes, recorran el camino hasta conseguir alcanzar y mantener la Excelencia Operacional, que será la base de su posición de Ventaja Competitiva”, comenta Josep Cos, Director General de proceedit.
Pedro Robledo, editor de BPMteca, resalta que “El interés por la tecnología cloud computing en el mundo BPM (Business Process Management) sigue aumentado. Gartner indica que un 40% de las organizaciones con iniciativas BPM usan servicios en la nube para dar soporte al menos al 10% de sus procesos de negocio dentro de los proyectos BPM. El uso de Cloud BPM permite reducir drásticamente el riesgo y los gastos de puesta en marcha de las iniciativas de innovación”.
Toda la información del seminario se puede encontrar en:  http://bit.ly/10fdVXF