Updates from March, 2010

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  BPM and creating efficiencies: Plan ahead, avoid time travel

  brian 4:57 pm on April 30, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  

  ZDNet ran a great article on what companies can gain from using business process management (BPM) properly.  It leads with an example of a mid-sized global retail chain which started out with ERP and POS software. Over a decade, the company grew to the point where its business and IT functions were distinctly separated, and its enterprise ERP application had passed its ability to handle processes despite a growing need for more.  During the time it took before thinking about implementing BPM, it had missed out on any efficiencies BPM would have brought in simplifying and linking processes.

  Integrating a BPM system to extend its management of key business functions would have allowed the company to increase efficiency and reduce costs produced by wasted IT assets.  

  It’s a no brainer: businesses of all sizes can benefit from having a BPM system to streamline the running of their business.  Small and medium businesses in particular have been slow to adopt BPM, but the smart ones that do see excellent returns.  No matter the size of a business, efficient running of operations generates savings.  Implementing BPM software creates savings in a scalable way: as business needs grow, so too can the functionality of your BPM.  In our view, open source software is particularly effective for this because not only are there cost savings by community development, and the associated innovation, but there’s an ability to customize the BPM software to tie together all of a company’s processes in other systems - for example ERP, business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM) – which is much easier than proprietary alternatives. 

  At Colosa we’ve seen each end of the scale, from those businesses that could have predicted and planned for future growth and those that didn’t.  The former do an outstanding job of planning ahead and understanding the cost savings, not to mention stress- and time-savings, related to building an efficient business.  On the other end, we see companies that need help to ‘step back in time’ and unravel complex people, processes, and technologies to understand how to simplify them and implement a BPM.   Proper planning is much easier than time travel.

   

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  ProcessMaker at Openbravo World Conference in Barcelona to announce Mashup

  brian 6:50 am on April 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: BPM (20), mashups (2), open source (6), openbravo (3)

  It is wonderful to be here in Barcelona, Spain for the Openbravo World Conference which begins today.  I had some free time yesterday, and I took full advantage by renting a bicycle and cruising around the city.  Barcelona is more magnificent than I remember, and this is definitely a great city to see by bike (I actually always prefer to see any and all cities by bicycle).  I was here in 1992 as a backpacker and had the added bonus back then of getting to see a number of events  at the Summer Olympics (including the original Dream Team play Nigeria) held here that year.

  Myself and our CTO, Fernando Ontiveros, are both here for the conference (and so are some of our Danish partners from Xcompetence - IB and Kathe).   I’ll be delivering a presentation in the Community Building section of the OBWC on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 pm where ProcessMaker will be officially announcing its integration module with Openbravo’s ERP software.   It took us a few months for Fernando and his team to really get their heads around the Openbravo software and how we should integrate ProcessMaker with it, but the results are fantastic!

  I will be talking about how Openbravo partners can expand their business by looking for BPM opportunities where ProcessMaker can be applied in existing and new ERP implementations.  BPM and ERP fit together perfectly and it is our experience that a company that is investing in ERP will almost invariably need custom workflow routing capability to enhance their ERP experience.  We have a number of customers that have integrated ProcessMaker with other ERP software including SAP and Great Plains.  Openbravo is a particularly great fit though because they use an open source license (they use OBPL a version of the Mozilla license) as does ProcessMaker (we use the AGPLv3).

  We will be doing a demo of an Expense Report and Time Sheet Custom Approval Process.  This is a classic case where many companies need advanced workflow functionality that their ERP software simply does not provide.  In Openbravo, for example, you can declare expense report expenditures and you can issue reimbursements, but you cannot manage a workflow which allows an employee to declare expenses, route them to his/her manager for approval, and then route it to finance for reimbursement approval.  So, in our integration with Openbravo, we begin the expense report by pulling in fields from Openbravo related to types of expense categories and other information already in Openbravo, then we route the form to a manager for approval, and then once it is approved, the expenses show up in Openbravo so that they can be registered for payment.

  We are proud to have the ProcessMaker-Openbravo listed as one of the first modules on the openbravo forge.   We are sure that this new forge is going to become very popular.

  Here you can see a video of how the integration works courtesy of our own Marketing Guru, Amy Wyron.

  Well, looking forward to the conference, some great seafood tapas, and of course a healthy (if not excessive) amount of Sangria (in the evenings, of course).

   
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  Colosa joins the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)

  brian 4:10 pm on April 7, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: BPM (20), wfmc, workflow management coalition

  At Colosa we are committed to our community and our customer base. We are also dedicated to furthering debate about the challenges facing data-driven organizations and the issues surrounding workflow and business processes. 

  Through the organizations that use our ProcessMaker solution, including banks, government bodies, non-profit organizations and retailers, we consistently demonstrate the many benefits of business process automation and improved workflow management. 

  With regards to our input to the debate around BPM and workflow, I am pleased to announce Colosa’s membership of the Workflow Management Coalition, or WfMC.  The WfMC is a global organization of adopters, developers, consultants, and analysts, complemented by university and research groups. It gives a voice to community members who develop and contribute process-related standards and acts as an authoritative, educational resource on process-related matters.  Formed back in 1993, the WfMC remains the only standards organization devoted entirely to process.

  With members from all sectors of the industry, the WfMC provides a rich forum for the exchange and development of ideas. Colosa’s involvement will enable us to have a stronger voice in the creation of standards for the workflow industry as they continue to develop. 

  Along with the rest of the Colosa team, I look forward to the opportunities that our collaboration with the WfMC will bring. As data continues to escalate in volume and complexity, it’s a challenging yet interesting time for BPM and workflow: there are so many opportunities for sharing our thoughts, and to further our contribution to the industry.  Watch this space for reflections on BPM, workflow management, and the way open source is changing the game.