Bringing Together People, Process and Content

Today's enterprises house many types of content, but few knowledge workers have easy access to all the content they need for their work.

Today's enterprises house many types of content, but few knowledge workers have easy access to all the content they need for their work.

Linking content from disparate sources and managing it centrally is key for content integration, argues Open Text CEO John Shackleton.

As business operations expand across multiple locations and lines of business, it becomes increasingly difficult to track people, products, processes and content at a global level.

Paper-based procedures that worked smoothly in the past have become inefficient and hamper productivity, and information that was previously stored in a single, universally accessible system now spans across multiple servers on different platforms and in varying formats.

The challenges of today's business world are now forcing many organisations to focus on improving business processes to shorten cycle times and bring products and services to market more quickly, while reducing operational costs, increasing quality and meeting regulatory compliance.

To stay competitive, many organisations are re-evaluating their approach to business processes and looking for ways to improve these procedures.

In today's global enterprise, numerous business processes occur each day -from managing customer complaints to filling out a purchase request to assigning documents.

The effectiveness of each one, and the overall efficiency of your organisation, depends on your business process automation tools.

Using electronic forms to automate business processes can reduce your paper-based processes, increase employee efficiency and minimise costs.

Integrated exception handling and data validation automatically verifies a user's submitted data, ensuring that valuable time is not spent confirming the accuracy of the data.

Once forms are automated, the work required to make updates is reduced and the efforts associated with manual processes are minimised.

Business process management (BPM) is successful because it understands that organisations, rather than technologies, define business processes.

BPM enables organisations to exploit and extend their existing technologies to support the processes that drive the success of businesses.

Furthermore, business processes are not isolated, one-time events within an organisation.

Each process is a connection of people and content, and as these connections span project teams, departments and entire organisations, we can see that BPM is a natural and indispensable component of an enterprise content management (ECM) solution.

BPM is a fundamental component of ECM.

It forces organisations to map their business processes to their business objectives.

Part of this process involves looking at how well an organisation's underlying content supports these business activities.

ECM solutions that provide document and records management, and full text search capabilities, integrate well with BPM systems to optimise business processes to improve performance.

In document-driven industries, such as Financial Services and Insurance, the goal is to find a solution that can handle high volumes of documents and provide accessibility to content with ease.

By linking process management with other components of ECM, such as image management, organisations can exchange transactional information and respond more quickly to new or changing business requirements.

Business processes refer to any process, both ad hoc and structured, that take place within an organisation to complete specific jobs or actions.

At a basic level, business processes are transaction-based.

When technology is added to automate processes, BPM describes how people interact with this technology, information and each other to get their jobs done.

In many cases, processes move beyond the firewall to involve customers, partners and suppliers.

To manage these cross-functional processes, organisations are considering BPM because it enables processes to be modeled, refined and modified as business needs change over time.

BPM is both a methodology and a technology that helps organisations continuously examine, understand and manage business processes that interact with people, technology and information.

The real value of BPM is that it gives organisations the ability to define and execute business processes independent of applications and infrastructure.

This transforms an organisation into a knowledgeable enterprise because it provides a detailed explanation of all the activities required to complete a specific business process.

An organisation "in the know" can better manage the flow of work across applications, people and departments.

Working on standardised business processes is characterised by excess paperwork that mirrors inefficiencies, errors caused by processing bottlenecks, media interruptions, delays, duplications and inaccuracies.

In fact, many administration employees spend up to 80 percent of their time retrieving, inputting and sending information, then waiting for follow up information.

BPM solutions automate key processes that drive the success of an organisation.

It shortens cycle times and brings products and services to market quickly, while reducing operational costs, increasing quality and ensuring regulatory compliance.

BPM provides powerful tools for defining and reusing business logic, simplifying business processes, and helping employees coordinate effectively with the organisation and one another.

BPM's integration capabilities allow organisations to liberate themselves from their legacy systems to define and execute business processes independent of application and infrastructure limitations.

From a content perspective, an effective BPM system enables organisations to eliminate paper-based processes.

In addition, organisations can lower their total cost of technology ownership by integrating existing systems with a comprehensive and consolidated BPM system.

Processes that once took days or even weeks to complete can now be done in minutes, which lowers the cost of filing, retrieval, storage and file maintenance.

Paper documents can be scanned upon receipt and quickly linked to corresponding account information and then stored in a centralised repository for employees to access.

As organisations grow, projects and corporate initiatives become more complex and critical.

It becomes increasingly difficult to track progress and curb administrative overhead - poor visibility of procedures leads to duplicated efforts.

If approvals are held up, they can cause serious delays in projects and impact time-to-market.

Organisations that have not implemented a BPM system are exposed to significant legal, corporate governance and compliance risks because of the inability to route decision-centric information to the right people at the right time inside the organisation, and the inability to reliably identify who performed a task or made a key decision.

BPM alleviates these issues.

Data retention regulations demand companies securely store every document that contributes to most business transactions and the entire process history, especially when it relates to accounting practices.

A BPM solution, with document management functionality, can import and store both documents and processes in a revision-proof format, while monitoring and logging the entire business process.

Successful organisations need to be knowledgeable enterprises.

Making fast, accurate decisions gives organisations a definite advantage.

The ability to make these decisions is directly related to optimising operations by improving business processes.

BPM is evolving from simply being a tool to solve tactical, departmental-level problems to providing a strategic contribution to defining the enterprise infrastructure.

This evolution means that the ability to cope with a wide range of different and often complex processes and the need for high availability and increasing scalability are becoming key requirements.

Open Text's Livelink ECM - BPM Server is an example of a product that can help minimise the costs and complexity of developing and maintaining your business process management system.

BPM Server's unparalleled automation, visibility, and continued process management of all business processes enables organisations to make faster and better decisions based on the most current information available.

Many enterprise applications revolve around the electronic business processes but fail to consider the role of individual users, limiting access to the process.

Since the workflow cannot be conducted exclusively in one environment, it must be manually forward to another system, making it easier for companies to lose control of the process and introduce inefficiencies.

An effective BPM solution can interface with enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) and office applications such as Microsoft Outlook, to let users throughout the organisation contribute to the workflow in a unified approach.

Meanwhile, remote users such as customers and partners can participate in the business processes and close the chain of the seamless workflow - simply by using a Web browser.

Legacy applications, such as claims processing systems, handle business processes for large companies but do so as standalone applications, which cannot integrate with other applications to jointly facilitate the process.

A successful BPM solution will have interfaces that work with legacy applications, enabling organisations to expedite their workflows by allowing transactions to be conducted across different applications.

Open Text's Livelink ECM - BPM Server has this capability.

When searching for a BPM solution, a few things need to be considered.

A BPM Solution should:.

* integrate with ECM, especially with Document Management / Content Management / Archiving technology.

* integrate with business applications to ensure seamless process flow.

* support the process lifecycle and continues process improvement.

* support standards like Web Services, XML, XPDL and for instance the WfMC interfaces (Workflow).

Business processes include people, content and enterprise applications.

Only when these components work together in an integrated environment can you maximise productivity and value chains.

Optimised business processes also allow organisations to comply with regulations and respond quickly to changing market dynamics and customer demands.

In turn, more efficient processes increase productivity and deliver competitive edge.

For more information on ECM and Business Process Management, request a copy of our book, Enterprise Content Management: Turning Content into Competitive Advantage at the Open Text website.

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