Process and document management vendor Global 360 has revamped its Business Process Management (BPM) offering with the release of Process360 10.0. The new suite is based on Persona-based BMP, which is designed to involve all people within a process.
The design of the suite was heavily influenced by consumer research that revealed BPM users felt current offerings on the market did not meet the needs of all the people involved in a business process. The company highlights process participants as an area where BPM was lacking, as applications for this are built generally only after process models are completed and often by enterprise developers unskilled in modern interaction design, the company said.
“Observing and interacting with our customers helped us pinpoint why so many BPM systems hit a wall in delivering on expectations for user productivity gains,” said David Mitchell, president and CEO of Global 360. “Our industry has myopically focused on process automation – how work moves through an organisation – and not enough on improving people productivity, which is how the work gets done.”
The result of the consumer research was viewPoint Applications, which underpins the Persona-based BPM. It contains a detailed list of what each type of user in a process needs to accomplish, and the user interface is custom-built for each user type. This view includes information, tasks and tools they need to do their job and can be personalised to each individual.
Global 360 says that the viewPoint applications are ready to use out-of-the-box, reducing the need for extensive configuring or custom coding.
“ViewPoint applications increase the productivity of people who design and use BPM systems by 40% while cutting BPM system deployment time by 50%. In large enterprises with complex business processes, that can add millions of dollars in ROI to BPM projects and shave years off the time it takes to achieve it,” said Mitchell.
Process360 10.0 contains a document viewer that enables users to access a document from within the process, rather than forcing them to leave the process to view a document in another application. Users can also add notes to a document as it passes along the process.
The new suite claims to make developers more efficient – improvements to its process modeller include more than 80 process tasks, auto-alignment and auto-connection of tasks on a map, automatic creation of sub-maps for sub-processes, and map tear-offs that enable developers to use dual monitors when working on multiple maps.
“Global 360’s Persona-based BPM is a dramatic departure from the BPM industry’s typical approach to process improvement initiatives,” said Mitchell. “Most efforts focus primarily on the productivity of the system developer, delivering tools that optimise the design and execution of process models.
However, our research shows that the majority of the ROI associated with a BPM system is tied to how productive it makes process participants – the people who use the system to get work done. Persona-based BPM allows our customers to meet the specific needs of process participants and bring the entire productivity equation back into balance, he said.
