Put Business First

Part of the reason for Wyeth's success is that its BPM projects have been defined with the emphasis on the business process rather than on the technology. They are driven by a business mandate, either born out of a regulatory requirement or an internal need, Keisling says.

"Our business partners have absolutely no bias in terms of the tool we use, but they have a strong bias toward seeing that we deliver results," he says.

Wyeth's BPM initiative aims to fill in the gaps between systems, promoting smooth hand-offs from one to the next, and shifting more of the responsibility for defining processes to business analysts, rather than programmers. Although the emphasis is as much on the business processes as the technologies to enable them, products such as the Metastorm BPM Suite (which is used at Wyeth) help by offering a combination of visual process modeling, process modeling, workflow, automation and integration tools. The BPM software can orchestrate processes that cross multiple computer systems, taking advantage of Web services and other integration technologies to route transactions from one system to the next.

Another important goal of implementing BPM is to identify parts of a business process that aren't automated. Often, these are choke points where an employee is responsible for taking the information from one system, performing a manual task or analysis requiring human judgment, and then kicking off a process in another system. In these cases, the BPM tool itself can provide e-mail notifications and reminders, in combination with Web-based forms, to prompt workers to perform those tasks and keep things moving.

This layer of workflow automation also provides visibility into processes that otherwise would occur away from the watchful eyes of corporate information systems. Since Wyeth is in the highly regulated drug development business, having better documented processes and auditing of how they are carried out could help the company in its dealings with regulators.

BPM is also helping Wyeth improve the efficiency of routine administrative processes. For example, one of its BPM initiatives is related to research projects that Wyeth conducts with the help of physicians. Rather than dealing with regulated medical data, it is focused on improving the interactions between Wyeth Medical professionals and the clinicians they work with around the world. The BPM solution provides significantly improved levels of management, collaboration and timeliness of managing these clinical research studies. Previously, Wyeth R&D personnel used a variety of systems and tools to track the activities of clinical investigators, including the number of patients seen and whether their reports on those patients met the requirements of the research protocol. Clinical grant payments were also handled in multiple ways by the research teams at Wyeth, leading to a payment request in SAP. Using the BPM tool, Wyeth can now introduce business rules to initiate the workflow for seeking approval for payments.