With Claromentis 6.2 the ability to report graphically on the use of any business process in the company just got a lot more powerful.

The on demand, interactive and always up to date graphs provide summaries of :

User submissions into the business process

Provides information over time of the top 5 users of the process. See who is generating the most requests and provide additional assistance as needed.

The Status breakdowns of all current requests

Gives a snapshot of the current process loads by the status of each request in the process.

A status map as a snapshot

InfoCapture allows the creation of as many individual states as you need for any individual business process. The status map allows you to group these granular and precise states into meaningful sub groups that have a meaning when loking at reports – for example pending manager’ and ‘pending supervisor’ might be successive and important workflow steps, but for reoorting these can both be regarded as ‘In progress’ or ‘Awaiting Approval’

A Status breakdown over time

See the loads in the process by status groups over time. This allows you to allocate resources to make the mot impact to the efficiency of the process, especially where the InfoCapture service level agreements and business timers are engaged, and time on any state is critical.

Combined with the interactive flow charts that are already available from 6.1, these interactive graphs provide a visual representation of even the most complex of processes. They enable managers to predict loads, optimize resources and understand the requests of the users in the most proactive way so as to provide additional assistance wherever needed.

Prod-Process, Services BPM, Business Process Management

Carbon Trust – a company providing specialist support in cutting carbon emissions, saving energy and commercializing low carbon technologies – came to Claromentis to find the perfect Business Process Management solution to control the use of their brand.

Top of their list was a quality product, followed by seamless integration within their existing public website and a tight deadline.

On the surface, the project seemed simple – an approval process to determine the eligibility to use the Carbon Trust branding logos. But  Carbon Trust required a process that was undemanding and self-managed, a process which would automatically identify whether or not the requester was eligible to use Carbon Trust branding logos – focusing time consuming manual intervention only on those cases where it was genuinely required.

The application process starts

If the application is approved, the requester receives a notification containing a download link to the appropriate set of logos for their requirement, depending on the details supplied within the application.

Application in progress

The only manual input required is if the application pushes the request to review – this is where a member of Carbon Trust staff must decide on the eligibility of the application.

Carbon Trust required two interfaces: a public facing form to integrate within their website, and a portal for the staff to review the applications.

Business process reporting

Both of these were generated using completely core functionality of Business Process Manager.

In the words of the Carbon Trust project lead,

the Corporate Branding Inbox began life as reams of flip chart paper, stacks of post it notes and 2 tubs of lemon cheesecake! Claromentis then followed to take our ideas and make them into a reality that was beyond anything cheesecake thinking could imagine!

The project was implemented by Hannah Voice from the Claromentis support team who said

This project was a pleasure to work on from start to finish. The client knew what the business needed, provided well thought out workflows from their own workshops and answered all my questions with energy and a passion to get the job done under very tight deadlines. Great fun!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Services BPM, Business Process Management

We are really pleased to see InfoCapture ( AKA Business Process Manager ) make huge leaps forwards with the new release of Claromentis 6.1

In this short post I just want to highlight the new flowchart representation of workflows. This has been something customers have discussed and prioritized, but it was a challenge to decide the best way forwards – because the workflow of any ticket in BPM reacts to so many factors – principally the available statuses, the permissions of the user viewing the ticket, and the values of various fields in the e-form.

The solution has two parts – firstly a project landing page that now allows any decription of the process to be added – for example a video explaining the workflows, or an image of a graphical representation of the chart.

Secondly the ticket itself will present a dynamic, real time view of the previous status, and all possible next statuses.

This is a great pleasure to use and a significant evolution of Business Process Manager as we continue to drive our products forwards.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process, Workflow Services BPM

I was reviewing a business process management based home page that we delivered for a client today, and an article I had been reading by Lynda Gratton at the London Business School really hit home.

Basically Linda was discussing that in some ways modern technology is replacing the job description of middle managers – since it can provide reports and summary information for instant review – which used to some extent be exactly the role of middle managers.

I can certainly agree that a BPM landing page, and of course the processes themselves – do indeed provide exactly the reports, summaries and graphical components that are suitable for executive review – and they are always available and always up to date.

BPM Home Page

As the image shows –

•    Key processes are summarized – how many issues, how many I reported, how many assigned to me for action
•    Fast access to the reports for each individual process
•    Graphical summaries – Incidents per month and a pie chart in this case of issues according to current status

Live data feeds are also possible, as well as any customer graphs required.

All of this information is of course presented through the permission engine, so each user sees the most important processes that they have access to.

When combined with the notification functionality that it provides, I can indeed understand that this page is providing a significant amount of information that before such technology was available would have certainly required a significant amount of time to prepare and analyze – and that would have been the contribution of middle management.

My own perspective is that deciding what processes to implement in an organisation, and making sure that the value is delivered over long enough to make a real difference does certainly require the skills of a management team. Designing informative and beautiful presentation layers is our job but understanding the clients business rests reassuringly with our clients management teams.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process BPM, Business Process Management, Intranet Components

We regularly post  about our permissions that enable rights to be allocated according to any combination of Groups, Roles, Extranet areas and individual users – as well as special permissions such as the public.

We have frequent workshops and implementation discussions around these concepts as we work with new customers to map these ideas onto their organizations and objectives. To elaborate using groups and roles – we will have many customers where groups and sub groups map to some kind of departmental or functional structure and roles cut across this matrix to provide a cross functional equivalence – “I am in a different department but I too am an engineer or a manager” would be simple examples.

As Claromentis continues to establish a strong solution in Business Process Management we are now intersecting this permission model with the concept of Business Process Owners : people responsible for implementing a process that cuts across this two dimensional layer with a form based workflow that touches many – and unpredictable – individual users as the process continues from end to end, across groups and roles according to the status and requests of the relevant process.

For any one process organizational groups, users and functions are given various rights at various stages in a process, and according to who requested the start of the process and to whom it is currently assigned.

We are currently implementing 8 processes for a global company and during a call today I was reminded as to what a challenge this is for any company to successfully implement. Such processes can indeed be effectively implemented using our BPM technology – but the company still has to establish the process and deal with all of the reasons that make such cross-company processes difficult to maintain. This cultural and organizational challenge for any business, large or small – is a subject that is well summarized by Brad Power at the HBR.

We greatly enjoy the collaborative nature of working with companies to analyze and implement such cross matrix processes – and have the greatest respect for companies that have the vision and staying power to ensure that once implemented  they are sustainable through all of the political, external and internal challenges that any business faces.

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Process BPM, permissions

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy