Press Release

print Print

Lombardi Announces On-Demand Business Process Management (BPM) With Lombardi Blueprint

Lombardi Blueprint™ Delivers Software as a Service (SaaS) Process Discovery and Collaboration

AUSTIN, Texas — February 12, 2007 — Lombardi®, the leader in Business Process Management (BPM) suite software for Global 2000 companies, today announced the Public Beta availability of Lombardi Blueprint™ (www.lombardisoftware.com/bpm-blueprint-product.php), an entirely new 'on-demand' process improvement tool that is used to collaboratively map an organization's business processes, identify problems, and prioritize improvement opportunities. Blueprint, the latest addition to Lombardi's business process platform suite, is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). The innovative Web 2.0 application allows customers to immediately begin mapping their processes without having to download or install any software.

"Blueprint opens up process understanding to a much bigger audience because it is designed for any business user to use, but powerful enough for business analysts and process designers too," said Phil Gilbert, EVP and CTO at Lombardi. "Most importantly, Blueprint helps to quickly drive agreement on the parts of a process that matter the most. This aspect of prioritizing specific BPM projects from all the possibilities is one of the most challenging aspects of enterprise-wide BPM programs. It's not about drawing pictures; it's about connecting those pictures to the people and the business strategies that make you money."

Lombardi Blueprint is being previewed as part of an interactive webinar in conjunction with ebizQ on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. ET (17:00 GMT). The one-hour webinar, entitled "Are you ready for On-Demand BPM," features Colin Teubner of Forrester Research and Jim Rudden of Lombardi. To register for this complimentary webinar or for more information, please visit the following link: www.ebizq.net/to/lombbpmfeb13.

Current process analysis tools on the market are expensive to deploy and hard to use. Lombardi Blueprint allows everyone to focus on the business, not the tool. Alternate approaches, such as Visio and PowerPoint, result in more unstructured drawings lost in the file system, making it impossible to guarantee consistency and quality of process information from one team to the next. Lombardi Blueprint solves these problems through a browser-based, shared workspace that ensures everyone contributes to the most current picture.

Since there is no new modeling language to learn, Blueprint is easy to use and requires no training. However, Blueprint also supports detailed workflow modeling using the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) for more sophisticated modelers. This eliminates the need to download and install complex modeling applications for most users. Because of this, Blueprint is easy enough for anyone to use, powerful enough for sophisticated modelers, and all of the information is consistent across processes and projects.

"Blueprint is the best tool we've used to discover and document processes. We used it during one of our process transformation engagements," said Stephen Hamilton, Executive Vice President, Gordian Transformation Partners. "It complements our methodology and gives us a new and better way to collaborate with our clients on process discovery."

Lombardi Blueprint offers real-time collaboration capabilities. Business process improvement teams can easily work together on processes, from anywhere in the world, and include additional participants at any time as needed, regardless of where they are physically located. Blueprint captures and manages detailed information such as a process' participants, input and output data, documentation and known problems.

"Collaborative tools like Lombardi Blueprint make process discovery and modeling easier for a much wider group of people," said Sandy Kemsley, principal, Kemsley Design Ltd. "The more you collaborate on design, the more BPM is going to be accepted by the organization."

Blueprint also gives users the ability to identify key process problems and analyze their potential impact on the strategic goals of the business. From this analysis, workers can create a prioritized list of improvement projects. Blueprint also helps teams to assemble and present a project's value proposition, by automatically exporting it to PowerPoint — simplifying the communication of improvement projects goals, teams and scope to executive management.

"We need to get all participants in a business process to collaborate on the high-level process goals so we can prioritize and determine the ROI of our projects, even if we end up deciding not to automate them," said Jeff Ward, Manager of General Financial Systems at Lee Memorial Health System. "One really great feature of Blueprint is that people can get started right away defining a project, without having to install software and hardware and learning technical modeling tools."

Lombardi Blueprint provides two different levels for representing processes — mapping and modeling. The process mapping view is targeted to business users who need to describe activities and responsibilities and want to identify potential problems. The process modeling view is Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) —based, and gives more sophisticated business analysts or IT users the ability to model detailed flow, business rules and events. A central repository maintains a history and audit trail of every process change.

These models are also executable since they are built on Lombardi's unique Shared Model technology. The BPMN models can be transferred back and forth between Blueprint and Lombardi TeamWorks®, the award-winning BPM suite for designing, controlling, and optimizing business processes.

"Blueprint makes it easier for companies to get started in BPM by bridging the gap between process discovery and modeling," said Bruce Silver, principal, Bruce Silver Associates. "The tool lets process teams collaborate to quickly identify their best opportunities for innovation and improvement."

This ability to "round-trip" process deployment provides the direct linkage from high level strategy and goals all the way through to execution of specific activities. Since Blueprint is standards-based, the round-trip communication is based on the Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) specification, currently working its way through the Object Management Group's (www.omg.org) standards process. Blueprint models can be utilized with any BPDM-enabled process modeling tool or deployment environment.

Additionally, these standards are critical to delivering useful Software as a Service itself, because they insure that information isn't locked in to proprietary, non-portable formats. Blueprint solves this issue by incorporating the most aggressive use of BPM standards of any product on the market.

"OMG is developing a suite of business process standards to enable the agile enterprise with Model Driven Architecture," said Richard Mark Soley, CEO of the Object Management Group, the worldwide standards organization. "Lombardi plays a leadership role in these activities and we are delighted that they are the first to announce these in the 'Software as a Service' world. Combining on-demand access with standards-based power and portability is a compelling story."

"BPM is only now beginning to touch the 99 percent of the people that make up every day businesses," said Rod Favaron, President and Chief Executive Officer at Lombardi. "Blueprint expands Lombardi's process platform to touch more of these mainstream business users that are involved much earlier in the process discovery and analysis efforts."

High-level capabilities of Lombardi Blueprint include:

  • On-demand browser-based access, delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) format
  • Interactive process discovery and mapping collaboration with shared workspaces
  • Prioritization of problems based on severity and frequency
  • Opportunities ranked based on an impact score
  • High-level map and detailed workflow modeling (BPMN-based) views of processes
  • Complete history and audit trail for all changes for compliance purposes.
  • One-click creation of the project overview presentation and business case
  • Round-trip integration with Lombardi TeamWorks
  • Compatible with Windows Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox

Lombardi is offering a free Blueprint Personal Account for a single process and up to two users. For unlimited collaboration and process capabilities, a ten-user Team Account for Lombardi Blueprint is $500 per month.

The Lombardi Blueprint Public Beta Program is now available. To participate in the Public Beta, submit an application at www.lombardisoftware.com/blueprint-lombardi.php.

About Lombardi
Lombardi is a leader in Business Process Management (BPM) software for Global 2000 companies as recognized by both Gartner and Forrester Research, in the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites, 2006, and Human-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q1 2006 research reports respectively. Lombardi offers award-winning BPM technology, know-how and services to help its customers become Process-Driven. Lombardi Blueprint is the only on-demand process improvement tool that enables companies to map processes, identify problems and prioritize improvement opportunities. Lombardi's TeamWorks® is built on open standards and provides ongoing visibility and control of business processes, increasing the speed and flexibility with which organizations can manage their business process activity and decision-making. Lombardi for Office™ makes it easy for anyone to participate in BPM using the familiar Microsoft® Office System products. The company is a Gold-Certified Microsoft partner, with an "Information Worker Productivity Solutions" Competency.

Lombardi is behind some of the largest, most successful BPM implementations in the world. Our customers include Allianz Life, Aflac, Dell, Hasbro, ING Direct, Maritz Travel, Reuters, Renault F1 Team, Sprint, T-Mobile, The UK Insolvency Service, Universal Music Group and the U.S. Government. For more information, visit www.lombardisoftware.com.

Lombardi, TeamWorks are registered trademarks and TeamWorks Process Optimizer, TeamWorks Portal, TeamWorks Rule Service, Lombardi for Office 2003 and Lombardi Blueprint are trademarks of Lombardi Software, Inc. All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.



For more information:
Wayne Snell
Sr. Director of Marketing
+1.512.382.8200 ext. 377
Wayne.Snell@lombardi.com