Communication Enabled Processes

There are plenty of examples of processes that involve human interaction, automation, application integration and document flow. But the list doesn’t end there. Communication processes are those activities where "the word needs to get out."

I recently did an interview with Avaya’s Vice President of Emerging Technologies, Gwynne Wade, as well as Jim Su, Senior Product Marking Manager, on their new software release, Avaya Solution for Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). That’s a mouthful, but it comes down to this: It enables a business process to trigger a communications event and manage that event to its conclusion.

Response services include:

• Advisory: Where the system contacts a set of users and delivers a message via phone, email or SMS; and the users confirm receipt of the message.
• Notify & Respond: Where a group of users is contacted; and they use a form or Web portal response to trigger additional workflows.
• Find & Call: To locate users by trying multiple devices, according to preset user preferences.
• Notify & Conference: Notify a set of users of an event and invite users to join an instant conference.
• Notify with Task List: Assign tasks to users and track their progress.

In the case of business, here’s how it might work. Say you run the supply chain for your organization and your ERP system has just reported a huge run on that new brand of Nikes at your stores in the Northeast. You want to get new supplies of shoes out and that’s going to require the efforts of 20 trucks in a six-state region. That alert could trigger an event that says, call this preferred list of truckers on their cell phones to report to the closest distribution centers in their area as soon as possible to pick up the load. The truckers who get the message and reply the quickest via their cell phone touchpad would get the business. Once that 20th trucker has responded, the loop is closed, and the process moves on along the process map.

Do you have a process that needs to schedule a lot of workers quickly -- say, for substitute teachers, store clerks or nurses? Your organization could instigate auto-calls until the required number of workers is reached.

Another example: Your company’s stock has just experienced a major run. A given threshold has been reached, of which currently only your financial tracking systems are aware. You could set up a business process that contacts every senior executive to participate in an emergency conference call to discuss what the company needs to do. That contact could happen by every means available -- cellphone, pager, Blackberry, email...

It could be simpler You could have your field people communicate with a system that tracks their tasks for a given job. Each time a phase is completed, they could call in via mobile device and punch a button to report that it’s done. That system could track time, move the process along to other participants, instigate billing procedures, and so on.

Whirlpool, an Avaya customer, is already experimenting with CEBP. One example of their usage is this: Avaya has integrated its software with SAP NetWeaver for supply chain management. Executives have dashboards that designate performance indicators with stoplight colors -- red, yellow and green. When something turns red, the system initiates calls among the people associated with the processes driving that given indicator.

As Su pointed out, "There’s no customer that can’t think of a use for it."

The software uses standards: Eclipse for designing the system; Web services are BPEL-compliant; SIP to integrate with other systems. This isn’t a boxed solution. You can expect to work with Avaya’s professional services team for the implementation, which means it’s targeted at medium to large enterprises. But who knows? Perhaps the company will find value in offering a hosted model at a future time.

I think this is a category we’ll hear more about with time. In the meantime, you can learn more about CEBP here.