Corporate and enterprise architecture modeling have been standard practices for many years now. In recent years, companies have also focused on diagramming business processes using their modeling tools. Today, industry analysts have identified a market segment called Business Process Analysis (BPA) that involves modeling business processes and simulating their potential performance.

Most companies have been engaged in BPA for some time now using tools as simple as Microsoft Visio and as advanced as Casewise Corporate Modeler. While these tools are useful in documenting processes, they only solve one part of the big business process management picture. For this reason, companies with significant BPA practices are now selecting BPM platforms to deliver the process execution, measurement and management capabilities that they lack.

BPM Opportunity

After designing better processes using BPA tools, many companies are eager to put those processes into action. However, choosing an execution platform is challenging as it must be able to handle a diversity of process types. Companies are selecting BPM for execution because of its unique capabilities:

• Process orientation simplifies integration. Since BPM tools also have a process orientation, integration with process model assets exported from a BPA tool is simplified compared to EAI, ERP and application development environments.
• Enable collaborative solution development. Users of both BPA and BPM can use a common process model as a point of collaboration — facilitating roundtrip optimization of processes from design to execution and back to design.
• Process execution without boundaries. BPM solutions can orchestrate processes across any number of systems and organizations — they are not limited by functional scope.
• Deploy solutions faster. Leverage the built-in human interaction capabilities of BPM tools to deploy process centric solutions faster than custom development with EAI.

Lombardi In Action

A multi-billion dollar telecommunications provider deployed an enterprise BPA tool to rationalize their processes across multiple operating companies into a consistent set of standards and procedures. Once completed, they selected Lombardi's BPM platform to implement key processes. In 90 days, the first executable version of the process for billing disputes was deployed. One quarter later, the solution had reduced dispute processing time from 2 weeks to 2 days and contributed a savings of over 3 million dollars.