Thanks to Howard Webb (formerly with BPMG) who lives in St. Louis. While I have been busy with a client, he has stepped up to drive the BPM User Group. The next meeting is September 14th at St. Louis University.
If you missed our last meeting at A.G. Edwards, we had two excellent presentations from Rich Phillips, COO of Maritz Travel and Jeanette Lynch, Business Process Management Lead at A.G. Edwards.
Location
The meeting will be in Room 253 a & d of the Busch Student Center. This is right on the corner of Grand and Laclede. Visitor parking is available in the parking garage on Laclede (there is a charge for parking, so plan accordingly).
Meeting
The meeting is shaping up to be another enjoyable and informative event with speakers from Lombardi and BP3. One of the topics of interest brought up from our last meeting was metrics. So, that will be our focus in September.
As usual we will begin at 7:30am and adjourn at approximately 9:00am. There will be some time before and after to allow for networking and catching up with colleagues.
If you are interested in attending this event, please RSVP to me via email at hwebb@stratisltd.com by September 7th if possible. Lombardi is providing the refreshments and we would like to have a close count by then. Please send any questions to may have to the same address.
Agenda
Lean Six Sigma and BPM: The Power of Two
Speaker: Lance Gibb, President & CEO of BP3
Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. www.bp-3.com
Lean Six Sigma (LSS) and Business Process Management (BPM) have much to contribute to each other. While Business Process Management and Lean Six Sigma can run successfully as parallel initiatives, companies that successfully connect these two initiatives will realize a competitive advantage. Lance is going to share real world examples of how Lean Six Sigma and Business Process Management can provide organizations with real value in the area of process metrics to better manage and optimize their business processes.
Common pitfalls in integrating Lean Six Sigma and BPM initiatives
How to leverage existing Lean Six Sigma practices and assets in BPM initiatives
How companies that are doing BPM can get started with Lean Six Sigma
How Lean Six Sigma practitioners can get BPM projects started on the right foot.
Business Process Management in Action
Speaker: Brandon Baxter, Senior System Engineer of Lombardi Software
Lombardi is a recognized leader by both Gartner Group and Forrester in the area of Business Process Management.
Brandon is going to follow up with a live demo of a customer implementation were you can see the capabilities of what BPM offers in action with a focus on the metrics of the process as well as the metrics around the people working with the process. You will learn how in using a Business Process Management (BPM) suite you can not only get control of your business processes but also get the visibility into your business process so as to make better business decisions and to be able to more quickly react to business events. Through the demo you will see:
How you can Define a business process
Measure how the business process is performing
Analysis how the business process is performing
Improve the business process
Control the business process
For those of you interested in following my blogging, I have moved to a healthcare specific blog at www.patienadvocate.wordpress.com.
George
Posted by: George | October 18, 2007 at 07:39 AM
Its quite interesting that established vendors are now entering the BPMS space via acquisitions. There are already so many vendors that it gets very confusing.
We are a Micosoft shop and almost all of our servers are running Windows. We evaluated several of the BPMS products mentioned here and finally selected the BPMS solution from Selcian Inc.
We looked at Ascent, Ultimus & Selcian. K2 was not considered due to some prior issues we had with them. Recently we had started a project with them and it went bad. In short, it was a case of Over Promise and Under Deliver (& the constant crowing of "Microsoft is going to buy us", which it turns out they are saying for 3 yrs now !!). This is our second attempt at BPMS.
Some of the findings are as follows,
PROCESS DESIGNER: Ascentn's designer is essentially a plug in to Visio. Limited functionality. Ultimus's designer is hard to use and based on a excel metaphor. Selcian's designer is developed on .NET platform. Custom steps can be added easily.
BPMS ENGINE: Selcian's BPMS engine has a built in state machine and state management facilities. Its multi-threaded and uses thread pool for resource management. I am suspecting that Ultimus's BPMS engine is single threaded and so tasks can fall behind if many are queued at the same time. Ascentn is very code based and does not have BPMS engine concept. This is an area where they are least mature.
USER INTERFACE: Both Ultimus and Selcian support InfoPath forms and custom .NET UIs. Ascentn only supports custom UI which you have to write and integrate directly in their framework.
INTEGRATION : Both Selcian and Ultimus offer excellent integration capabilities. Again this is an area where Ascentn lacks severly. Selcian had an edge over Ultimus due to its tighter integration with MSMQ and native support for pre=built adapters for ERP packages like PeopleSoft, Axapta.
So we have decided to go with the BPMS product from Selcian Inc. Can anyone else share their experience with Selcian ? They do have a blog site at http://www.selcian.com, but I would like to get in touch with people directly who are using Selcian BPMS.
Posted by: Dave Mullins | November 17, 2007 at 10:58 AM