Managing business processes
Since its initial release in 1999, BizFlow has been the leading BPM Suite for delivering process-driven solutions. Business Analysts and IT Developers alike have the ability to model, simulate, execute and optimize powerful, feature rich applications designed to streamline and automate business processes specifically addressing their unique requirements.
BizFlow enables users to seamlessly automate and integrate dynamic tasks with structured process. Customers hail this functionality as critically important to meeting their dynamic business application requirements.
Consider the following:
Enables Dynamic BPM
Dynamic BPM holds that business processes constantly evolve due to both organizational change (e.g., changing workforce, business objectives, and competitive realities) and technological change (e.g., new applications and new capabilities), and that organizations should do everything in their power to align people with process to measurably enhance worker effectiveness. As a result, organizations need a ”business process platform” that supports rapid change and creates agile applications.
Designed for both business users and IT professionals and built to support dynamic business environments, BizFlow® moves beyond the flat, one-dimensional feel of traditional process management solutions. It offers vivid drill-down capabilities, sound critical path identification and analytics, as well as enhanced dynamic process automation. Each of these key, next-generation capabilities provides users the ability to deploy business processes that adapt to and evolve with an organization’s ever-changing business environment.
Delivers “Dynamic Business Applications
In the high performance workplace of today, users need business applications that meet their needs for flexibility, agility, management visibility, process alignment, and a rich user experience.
With BizFlow v11 Series, we truly offer the marketplace a BPM Suite for creating dynamic business applications. Users can build applications for rapid modification and execution, variable conditions, and short-lived situational needs. They can also conceptualize process information for real-time executive monitoring and decision-making. And only with BizFlow® do users get to seamlessly automate and integrate dynamic tasks with structured processes to drive visibility, control, and productivity across all work that happens within an organization.
Delivers ROI
Hundreds of organizations worldwide use BizFlow® to create dynamic business applications that deliver value measured to date between 50% and 500% ROI. For example, Samsung uses BizFlow® within their heavy industries and insurance operations. Within two years of implementation, Samsung Heavy Industries saved $845,000 in management oversight, increased outsourcing production volume by $2,520,000 and reduced material selection time by $338,000.
Combines All BPM Capabilities on One Platform:
BizFlow® is a full featured BPM solution platform. Everything needed to create a process-driven application is included. Functionality and their underlying capabilities include:
Process Modeling
Business Rules
Process Monitoring
Dynamic Tasking (Ad-Hoc Routing)
Business Application and Forms Development
Flexible User Interfaces & Collaboration for Global Workforce
SOA Integration
Process Monitoring
Business Activity Monitoring
Security & Administration
Process Modeling Capabilities
Process discovery and modeling should go hand-in-hand. As Project Managers and Business Analysts collaborate with Developers, the BizFlow® modeler will help capture and illustrate workflow with corresponding business rules.
Users can model process and sub-process. For example, users can easily define a sub-process such as Quality Review where all of the paperwork associated with the upfront origination and underwriting is made available to a worker or team for review. A collective or singular approval/forward or reject/rework sub-process can all be defined via a point and click interface.
Process Modeling with Embedded BPMN
Business Advantages for Modeling:
Enables virtually anyone to create a workflow, maximizing time to value
Supports team collaboration and efficiency through reuse and developer models
Provides drag-and-drop interface to reduce training time and costs
Uses what-if-analyses to quickly determine bottlenecks and risky events impacts
Documents all work for compliance and reporting
Technical Advantages for Modeling:
Provide collaborative development platform between Business and IT
Ensure effective process/policy communication
Design using clearly understood BPMN and swim lanes
Manage the process revision lifecycle
Manage both process instances and archives
Propogate changes in real-time for long running processes
Produce process documentation to improve process requirements and policy communication.
Maintain an auditable historical record of process changes.
Business Rules Capabilities
What separates BizFlow® as a BPM Suite from common workflow tools is the integrated business rules environment. Right from the process modeler, users can double-click activities to add business rules to each activity or process definition.
In a codeless fashion, Process Modelers can add business rules affecting:
Policies
Procedures
Roles & Responsibilities
Routing
Security
Deadlines
Ad-hoc Tasks
Application integration
Business advantages for business rules:
Reduces costs by using one platform to manage all characteristics of work
Makes changes quickly and efficiently without coding; safeguards investments, saving time and money
Maximizes collaboration among Business Analysts, Developers, and Users
Technical advantages for business rules:
Use point and click design to apply business rules into your business processes
Works with 3rd party business rule engines over service oriented
architecture (web services or native EJB integration) to deliver a
single application and/or multiple applications
Enables intelligent participant selection by delivering work to
individual, group of people, or an individual with least work (workload)
Process Monitoring Capabilities
Every HandySoft customer mentions the value of visibility. It is the first benefit of many that stems from a BizFlow® solution. Visibility coupled with business analytics provides a mechanism to monitor and report on business performance and risks.
With BizFlow®, users can see process status – who is doing what, what has been done, where are the bottlenecks, and bottleneck causes. Managers can understand what they need to do to improve productivity. Users can be more collaborative because they have instant access to attachment and comments and understand what ad-hoc routing has occurred.
BizFlow goes beyond simple graphic displays of in-process work items. Workers and managers can easily drill through a process diagram to discover important process details such as time elapsed, deadlines pending, and total processed instances.
BizFlow now takes monitoring a step further in providing users Critical Path analysis. Critical paths are those requiring the most time to complete. BizFlow® monitors critical paths in real-time and flags those reaching assigned thresholds so that workers can respond to bottlenecks or exception handling policies. This capability helps customers to ensure transactions meet deadlines while supporting SLAs, regulatory requirements and other critical business objectives.
Process Monitoring and Status Checks
Critical Path Analysis
Business advantages for Process Monitoring:
See business performance in real-time according to self-made metrics.
Measure operational performance based on key performance indicators.
Sense problems as soon as possible.
Know what is causing bottlenecks.
Capture a complete audit trail for regulations and compliances in your business area.
Technical advantages for Process Monitoring:
Click once to get et all details of a particular process instance.
Accumulated data can be used for more detailed analysis and problem solving.
Places zero burden on IT to tracking process instances and tasks.
Dynamic Tasking Capabilities
Tasking is a common workflow activity. BizFlow® enables process participants to initiate actions or punch out of formal processes to task and collaborate with others. Like email, this ad-hoc routing capability supports parallel processing. But unlike email, BizFlow provides complete visibility into task status as well as control over task distribution.
Today, BizFlow has become the industry standard tasking solution. Expanded capabilities include tasking templates, group tasking, tasking modification post approval, and more. BizFlow provides a complete tasking and action tracking solution.
Dynamic Task Initiation, Routing, and Monitoring
Business advantages for tasking:
View the real-time status of an entire task’s life-cycle. Know who is involved, their tasks, status, comments and deliverables.
Act on information quickly to create, cancel, suspend and restart
tasks. Modify tasks, add assignees or reassign work upon acquiring new
intelligence.
Build a culture of organizational and personal accountability by
tracking and auditing employee turnaround time and quality of responses.
Immediately initiate actions in response to changing market conditions, competitor news, or company goals and objectives.
Technical advantages for tasking:
Provides users out-of-the-box capabilities to initiate, elevate, copy, change, postpone, delegate, re-route, and cancel tasks.
Initiate tasks directly from Email with automatic email content scraping technology.
Initiate tasks directly from Web-based forms such as Adobe LiveCycle.
Use a single, centralized, pictorial view, clearly illustrating the
journey of a task from creation to assignment to sub-delegation and
completion, including all individuals involved, all comments and
collaboration, all attachments and all status information.
Business Application and Forms Development Capabilities
Human-to-human processes largely revolve around forms, a reason why BPM naturally dovetails with document management and records management platforms.
BizFlow® delivers forms development capabilities as part of its integrated business application development environment. Customers can use BizFlow® forms or integrate with other form technology such as Microsoft Office, Adobe’s PDF, ASP and JSP. Furthermore, anyone allowed access to a web-posted Adobe LiveCycle form or Microsoft InfoPath form can now initiate processes within BizFlow. The data captured by these forms is submitted to BizFlow for processing. In this way, BizFlow® delivers ROI quickly through ease-of-access, ease-of-use and reuse.
Forms Development
Business advantages for forms development:
Use electronic forms exactly like paper forms to give users what they already understand.
Quickly and easily design forms that include logos, tables, scripts, complex spreadsheets, and more.
Present material in an easy-to-use, simple-to-follow format.
Save money by re-using existing business form templates and applications.
Technical advantages for forms development:
Provides integrated forms development environments
Supports common Web forms and client forms, such as JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, HTML forms, Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe Forms
Strings multiple forms in one process instance
Flexible User Interfaces & Collaboration for Global Workforce
BizFlow® is widely known for its extremely configurable end user interfaces. Unlike systems that require customization through coding, BizFlow® configuration is completely point-and-click and wizard-based. That means non-technical people can make changes they need when they need them and that customizations are ‘upgrade free.’ There is no need to expensively re-apply changes when a new version of BizFlow® becomes available.
BizFlow® can be directly-accessed or dropped into almost any JSR-168 compliant portal environment. Customers can separate out BizFlow® portlets (aka “BizCoves”) into different portal areas. And each area within the UI is configurable to individual user or user group needs. Plus now anyone can initiate processes from the Web through forms from Adobe LiveCycle and Microsoft InfoPath. No licenses required.
BizFlow® also provides many collaboration features both in the development cycle and during process run-time. BizFlow® enables, captures, and tracks commentary, tasks, documents, and attachments associated with each process instance and makes that available to each contributor.
User Interface and Portlets
Business advantages:
Let your team access their processes in common business settings.
Create easy-to-understand work spaces quickly.
Modify work area based on user requirements.
Configure portlets with common user vernacular.
Reduce your cost for end user friendly work space development.
Technical advantages:
Provides configurable views, “Portlets” (aka BizCoves)
Worklists
Process Initiation
Report and Report Lists
Monitor Views
Dashboards
Comes Global Workforce Ready
Multiple Calendars for groups in different time zones
Deadlines in User time zone
Access work directly from email
Localized in many languages
Drop into Portals
BEA AqauLogic(formerly Plumtree)
IBM WebSphere
Integrate with EDMS
Documentum
OpenText LiveLink
OpenSolutions DDS
BEA
SOA Integration Capabilities
Finding and entering data to documents makes up a large part of the average work day. Through integration, process-driven applications can pull data into forms, automating workflow steps such as data entry, data validation, and data changes.
Whether through adaptors or Web services, BizFlow® excels at getting at this data and introducing it into the workflow. With BizFlow® users can create or reuse web services to link application forms to data records. And using out-of-the-box adaptors BizFlow can harness document management systems to enable document imaging, versioning, and archiving.
SOA Integration
Business advantages for integration:
Improves productivity by automating data entry, data validation, record changes, and document versioning.
Supports agile change management.
Rapidly incorporates external data into processes without the high cost of customer development.
Technical advantages for integration:
Provides and leverages an Service-Oriented Architecture through standards-based integration: XML, XSL, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.
Creates business services compliant to SOA. Publish a process as a
Web Service, allowing other applications to invoke a business process
through Web Services.
Incorporates Web Services into interactive BizFlow® Forms to automate data entry, validation .
Registers a Web Service in BizFlow® and use this as a step within
the workflow (e.g., execute an external rules service and access that
rules service through a Web Service).
Extends BizFlow®'s application integration capabilities further with
ESBs by enabling multi-step, multi-system transaction management in a
SOA orchestration environment.
Supports business process execution language (BPEL).
Business Activity Monitoring Capabilities
Process visibility and control is based on underlying rules governing workflow. Each rule – deadlines to maintain service levels, parameters for effective business policies, participants for best expertise– creates a performance indicator that can be monitored and analyzed for positive feedback for continual process optimization.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as the foundation for process optimization. KPIs include:
Turn Around time
Lead time
Throughputs
Customer Satisfaction
Delivery Time service level agreement
For example, turn around time is a measure of efficiency. Faster turn around means better performance. In some cases, however, there is no set turn around time. Thus identifying and eliminating lead time becomes critical. With BizFlow®, organizations can standardize these metrics. With BizFlow® BAM, they can monitor them. The result is a proactive system that provides real-time awareness helping organizations to not only better estimate production but also find and reduce bottlenecks – a boon to productivity and efficiency. Finances must be tied to goals and objectives.
UUsing BPM and BAM organizations can track and measure goals and
objectives by tying them directly to KPIs. This technique can drive
tremendous productivity improvements. Gains made in visibility and
control result in dramatically higher levels of organizational agility,
customer awareness and conservation of critical resources.
Business Activity Monitoring Capabilities
Business advantages for business activity monitoring:
See, monitor, and respond to business performance in real-time.
Provide rapid decision making execution through pre-defined KPIs, alerts, and proactive decision responses.
Quickly identify bottlenecks for process recalibration and optimization.
Transform alerts into pre-determined actions .
Track and assess risk based on critical factors to resolve problems before they become headaches.
Technical advantages for business activity monitoring:
Provides point-in-process monitoring of KPIs and SLAs
Creates and manage static thresholds and rule-based alerts
Triggers actions and responses
Conducts current state impact analysis
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