Before Kirkham could automate anything, though, the call centre employees had to come up with a completely new business process model. While Kirkham met extensively with the call centre workers to explain the project (how it would change the way they served customers and why it was important to capture best practices), it wasn't his job to come up with and document these processes. That role fell to Zeb Miller, the company's assistant vice president for health administration. Kirkham jokes that it didn't hurt that Miller is 200cm and 113kg.

Now when a customer calls with a question about his or her health insurance, the BPM software prompts the service rep to confirm the caller's social security number and address before getting access to the insurance information. Since this BPM application can enforce workflow rules, the call centre employees know what types of services they are allowed to provide based on who the caller is.

Call centre workers are now able to solve customers' problems faster, which in turn allows them to serve more customers. Since putting the system in place, ANICO has experienced a 71 percent reduction in caller abandonment and a 61 percent improvement in the average time it takes to answer the phone. Furthermore, this type of project is easily repeatable. While Kirkham started small - just putting the system in the health-care call centre - it is now being used to support other ANICO insurance products as well.

ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION TOOLS Large enterprise application vendors and system integrators have used the fact that BPM has application program interfaces (APIs) that extract information from a company's existing systems to push it as an enterprise application integration tool. In other words: If you are going to integrate your systems, why not take it a step further and use BPM as the user interface that connects to your middleware, regardless of what that middleware might be? IBM, Tibco and other integration vendors have bought existing BPM software companies and adapted their applications.

The BPM technology used with EAI isn't substantially different from the monitoring or workflow varieties. For example, Tibco acquired Staffware, a workflow vendor. And the way companies use BPM for integration isn't all that different either. In this case, BPM supports larger projects. Forrester principal analyst Ken Vollmer warns that combination EAI/BPM suites are capable of supporting larger projects and are generally more expensive than either stand-alone EAI or BPM products would be. "Using an EAI/BPM suite in a situation that could be handled by a stand-alone BPM product could add another $US300,000 to the cost of the project," Vollmer says.