Business Process Solutions

Business Process Management can be challenging. Every day people spend hours juggling emails, setting calendar reminders, looking for documents, and switching between applications to enter bits of information. What if you had an application that displayed tasks due for that day, by user/department and allowed you to enter information for that particular task? What if you didn’t have to send someone an email to let them know its time for their task? What if you didn’t have to set a reminder or call a vendor to order supplies or products? A solution exists, BPM.

Business Process Management software comes in a few flavors. IBM has their BAW, Bonitasoft has their BPM, and some companies prefer to build their own applications to manage their business processes. We provide solutions and guidance for any of the mentioned approaches. View our products to learn more about our offerings.

Example BPM project

This is an example of a BPM project I worked on as Lead Engineer for Verizon. The real project was much more involved with multiple process applications and swim lanes.

USE CASE: The United States Postal Service has an agreement with the carrier to provide service and equipment at each postal site. They constantly shut down and open new sites across the nation. They prefer to send their requests to establish service via a web service.

Once the request is received there are several tasks performed to install service at the site.

1. Sales enters the required products, VOIP phones, gateways, cables, connectors, etc.
2. Sales sends an email to the vendor and gets costing for each device.
3. The vendor responds with an email containing the updated pricing.
4. Sales then gets their manager to approve the pricing, another email to the manager.
5. Once approved, the sales associate places the order with the vendor.
6. The sales associate then reaches out to the site for device programing options (music on hold, voicemail options, etc.)
7. Once the information is received, the sales associate reaches out to the installation department to get specific programming for the individual devices to make them work together.
8. After getting all the device information together, the sales associate then sends the programing to the vendor to preprogram the devices. At this point in time, the associate gets scheduling options.
9. Once scheduling options are received, they reach out to the site and coordinate the installation.
10. Once the installation dates are confirmed with the site, they notify the installation department.
11. The installation department looks at the available installation teams for the date scheduled by the site and determines what team will be assigned to perform the install.

For this workflow, BPM makes perfect sense. It did away with the manual processes of sending emails, making phone calls, and confirming dates. The vendor has an integration API that enabled the application to send orders and check status in real time. They also have an API that allowed for device programing. At a high level, this is what the process looked like.

How did this save money? As you see, the number of emails sent and received are close to 0. An email is sent to the postal contact if there is an error in the verification process. There are 10 human tasks, 9 that will be required and queued by department and due date.

These tasks provide the information necessary to make a decision or enter input. Example: the scheduling tasks provide dates that the technicians are available after the vendor communicates a delivery date. The end user no longer has to search around their email account to check / re-check emails, calendars, or documents sent. This saves several hours of work and frees the employees to do other things that are more productive. View our products to learn more about our offerings.

Contact Us to discuss your project today!