Monthly Column by Bruce Silver, Independent BPMS Industry Analyst
BPMS Watch: BPM and SOA: One Technology, Two Communities
read more
Applying a Business Rules Approach – When and How Much?
At its heart, a business rules approach involves delivering the rules of the business back to the business itself, not merely burying them in automated systems. This means separating business rules from process and data as distinct components of business system specifications and managing them as a new kind of business or technical asset.
Incorporating Domains into SOAs
Today, with an ever-growing base of standards surrounding it, Web services has evolved into a design philosophy for componentization of business services within and across corporate boundaries. This is what is now being identified as a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
“The Project Process” – Integration of the Big Five – Process Modeling, Project Management, Change Management and Organizational Change
The CUNA Mutual Group implemented a major integration project that applied standard methods of business process modeling, requirements management, project management, change management, and organizational design.
Peter Gilbertson is a Process & Quality Consultant at CUNA Mutual Group in Wisconsin . His primary focus is establishing corporate standards for process design and improvement methods as well as supporting large corporate strategic projects.
CUNA Mutual is the leading provider of financial and insurance product and services to credit unions and their members worldwide.
Developing a BPM Reference Architecture
Much has been written about the importance of having a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support both the development of BPM applications as well as to promote enterprise deployment of BPM.
Coors Brewing Co. Embarks on the BPM Path
This article originally appeared in the members only BPM Strategies Magazine. Join today to receive your own copy.
A determined group at Coors has demonstrated the real value of business process management to the executive team.
Coors Brewing Co., a subsidiary of the Molson Coors Brewing Co., is a major U.S. brewer. The parent company is the world’s fifth largest brewer, with revenues of $6 billion annually.
BPMS Watch: Agility and BPMS Architecture
In addition to the hard benefits of improving employee productivity and reducing cycle time, BPMS offers the strategic benefit of agility, meaning enhanced responsiveness to the continual shifts in both the competitive landscape and regulatory compliance environment. BPMS fosters agility by allowing new cross-functional process solutions to be developed and deployed quickly, and by enabling the rules that drive them to change with minimal development effort.
Case Study: Business Process Management – Applying Best Practices to Sales and Operations Planning
Polaroid was a company in recovery, needing to balance the Sales & Operations Planning functions in order to save money and resources. Ideally, planners could continually adjust SKU/sub-SKU demand and production while matching the business to marketplace realities. Polaroid with IBM created a solution to provide management with a continuous view of the future, enabling them to provide conscious, top-down direction.
Mark Payne is Vice President of Operations for Polaroid Corporation.
The Enterprise Service Bus
Suddenly every platform vendor worth its salt is introducing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). So, what’s going on and why is this important? Simply put, it represents the evolution of middleware from the era of “hub and spoke” and application servers to an abstracted model that is tailor-made for the movement to a service-oriented architecture. In our view, the only way to get the needed scalability and robustness in a world where we can’t predict outcomes is through this abstracted model.
In a perfect world, all vendors would implement this infrastructure in a common and consistent way.
Getting Started in BPM
While there is no one right way to get started in BPM, there are some guidelines that will make your life a lot easier. It should be remembered that getting started in BPM will be based on a belief in process oriented operational improvement and your ability to sell BPM to your management.
Although BPM may well become a strategic initiative in your company, the simple fact is that it is unlikely that many BPM efforts will get started at the enterprise level with formal strategies and aggressive adoption plans.
