Shell found that TeamWorks, the BPM software from Lombardi Software, could handle the enterprise application integration capabilities found in many middleware products but didn’t require extensive coding?the application was up and running within three months. And because the team could quickly prototype business processes with the tool, financial analysts and IT people focused more on evaluating how they worked, rather than the technical underpinnings of the software.

"The key is the business process," says Antaki. "The effort is in deciding which area of the business process you want to automate and finding the bottlenecks that have the greatest challenges."

Shell recouped its $1 million investment in fewer than six months and helped derive more value from its $1 billion SAP investment, Antaki says. Now the company is looking to roll out BPM software in other operations, including exploration, refineries and financial services, he says.

Beyond automation, examining business process in a BPM implementation is also a significant benefit, according to users. "The tool and method force you to look at processes and understand how they work," says Philip Parker, CIO and vice president of Addison, Texas-based United Surgical Partners, a chain of surgical facilities. "As a result, you tend not to automate what exists; you tend to ask, What does the process need to do?"

United Surgical has implemented one BPM application using software from Fuego that normalizes data from multiple financial reports. Going forward, Parker expects his IT and business analysts will spend 80 percent of their time documenting and analyzing processes for new applications, with the remaining effort to be split between tuning existing processes and creating new components for the BPM system.

Old Wine, New Bottle?

Business process automation in software, of course, is nothing new. But the convergence of many vendors around BPM is creating a hotly competitive market.

A flurry of pureplay BPM startups have cropped up, such as Fuego, Intalio, Lombardi Software, Q-Link Technologies and Savvion. Workflow products from companies such as FileNET and Staffware, originally oriented toward document management and end user workflow, are now beefing up their wares with better connectors to enterprise applications.

Meanwhile, integration middleware vendors, such as Tibco Software and WebMethods plus Java application server vendors IBM and BEA Systems, are eyeing BPM as a growth area. Even enterprise application vendors, including SAP and Siebel Systems, are introducing workflow engines into their suites.

The crowded playing field makes vendor choice tricky for CIOs. A supplier’s pedigree?end-user-oriented workflow or back-office application-to-application integration?will help determine how appropriate a technology is for a given application, analysts say. Often, IT executives need to choose between a best-of-breed product that connects well to third-party software or go with a BPM product from an incumbent vendor that integrates tightly with a company’s existing architecture, says David McCoy, vice president and research area director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.