To date, few companies have taken BPM to the level long-promised by vendors, in which BPM tools orchestrate end-to-end processes across a wide swath of the business. Not only were the tools missing some important attributes until recently but also, most companies applied BPM in niches. That’s starting to change.

The Workflow Automation Trap
While BPM leaders such as Motorola and AmerisourceBergen conceive of BPM as a way to orchestrate processes, most companies view BPM more narrowly, says Bill Swanton, a research VP at AMR Research—typically as document routing and approval tools for what is more accurately called work­flow automation.

Workflow automation certainly delivers benefits, including reduced labor costs and greater consistency in how processes are executed. “Automation is attractive because it is cheaper in the early stages,” notes Robert Sheesley, a director at the consultancy Alvarez & Marsal.

For example, First American Property & Casualty Insurance started with a focus on document workflow, mostly to automate repetitive processes. But it also wanted to handle rapid growth without growing its labor force as rapidly, says CIO Jim Court. “We wanted to manage processes based on business events, not just documents,” he says. The company’s desire required integration with external data sources and applications, but more importantly, required an analysis of the current process and of proposed improvements.

Business unit experts and the IT group’s business analysts worked as teams on that analysis. Using Handysoft’s BPM tools, Court chose a pilot project involving policy endorsement requests; since the process flow is not linear, and there are several points involving human decisions, the project was truly about business process management rather than workflow.

Chester County Hospital, in West Chester, Pa., has also implemented BPM in a midlevel way. Although most medical management systems handle processes within them, they rarely handle process flow across application boundaries, notes Ray Hess, vice president of information management. These systems typically rely on staff to know all the possible steps to take based on, for example, a patient’s infectiousness or treatment plan. “That’s asking for trouble,” Hess says. So he’s deployed Siemens BPM tools to tie medical systems to databases, housekeeping systems, e-mail and so forth: Appropriate processes are triggered automatically based on entries in the medical records or results from lab tests.

For example, if a patient has been treated previously for an infectious disease, the new system ensures that certain steps relating to tests and isolation beds begin. The system also tracks the results of triggered processes. “We ‘listen’ for the actions, and in some cases if we don’t see them occur, we issue an alert,” Hess says. “The difference with BPM is that I can define the process to run based on our criteria, not necessarily on the application’s defined workflow.”