Bluespring BPM Suite: Friendly Business Process Management with a Microsoft Slant

	Bookmark This Page Email This Page Format for Printing Submit an Article Read More Articles
	Related Tools & Articles 10 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Business with BPM Right Now AccuData: Leveraging BPM To Optimize Sales Efficiency 5 Steps to Choosing The Right BPM Suite
	Discussion Forum "I would definetly go the generic route as a BPM solution along with your company's business processes should be viewed as an enterprise solution that spans across multiple opertional teams and silos..." Contribute to this Discussion

By Lou DiToro

If you're searching for a people-centric business management process (BPM) solution to increase your company's agility, BPM Suite, Bluespring Software's contribution, deserves to make the shortlist. Why? Because it's incredibly user friendly and has a really nifty technique for demonstrating what its product does for business users who may not know what BPM really is about. More on that shortly.

BPM Suite rivals solutions from Lombardi, Appian and Metasoft – particularly if you're in a Microsoft-heavy company. It has almost all the features you'd expect from a BPM suite, including ease of use, extensive out-of-the-box capabilities, real-time reporting and more. It's built on a rules-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA). It integrates with Microsoft technology to extend enterprise applications. And it offers a host of human worker interaction capabilities.

Founded in 1998, the Cincinnati, Ohio company first entered the process management space with solutions for helping telecom providers manage their customer acquisition processes. In 2004 Bluespring relaunched itself as a "pureplay" BPM vendor. In 2006 it sold its solution to companies as diverse as control valve maker Masoneilan (Dresser, Inc.); innovation advisory firm NineSigma, document management producer Westbrook Technologies; and corporate housing provider Bridgestreet Worldwide.

In January 2007, Bluespring introduced BPM Suite version 4.5, adding features that beefed up its capabilities and allowed it to work with Microsoft's newer releases. The new features include integration with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office Sharepoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007. These additions let users create Excel 2007 files, Word 2007 documents, and InfoPath 2007 forms dynamically, and then allow data entered on them to move through the process. Also new to 4.5 are support for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, expanded "in flight" process editing capabilities and PDF forms support, which allows companies to dynamically populate or extract information from PDF forms.

Geared for Non-technical Business Analysts and Process Owners

Bluespring's BPM Suite is in its 16th iteration. Built on the .NET Framework with an SOA architecture, the set of programs is designed for use by process owners and business analysts. Once the process is designed, that becomes the working application, cutting out much of the need for IT staff intervention. It features an intuitive graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities. An executive dashboard provides real-time process visibility, and the software offers extensive out-of-the-box capabilities. The products adhere to the standards you'd expect, including BPMN, LDAP, ODBC and so on.

A real advantage of Bluespring is in how it integrates with Microsoft Office tools to enable users to work with the applications they're most familiar with -- Excel, Outlook and the others. You can set up a process, for instance, to submit expense reports using Excel to get input from the user, and then email it to the appropriate person via Outlook. At each step, humans interact with the process through the interfaces they're always working in. To monitor the process, the user can go to a Web page to see its progress.

The Bluespring BPM Suite Programs

BPM Designer

BPM Designer, the face of the suite, allows you to model executable processes without writing code. That's a major advantage. The design of the process also becomes what is executed during the process. For example, if you put together a model that shows an email being sent to a specific role in the organization, when the process runs, that activity will, indeed, send an email to that role.

The Designer includes 67 activities that the user can plug into the process by dragging over from a palette. These are comparable to programming functions or components in that they handle specific technical jobs. These include automated activities such as Delay, which allows the user to pause a process for a relative period or specific time; Get User Profile, which retrieves specific information from a user profile and stores it in a data item for later use; and PDF Converter, which converts common Microsoft file formats into PDFs. Other activities pertain to specific Microsoft technologies, including Active Directory, SQL Server, Office applications, CRM and Live Meeting. A final group of activities work with Web and Web server functions, such FTP, HTTP and SOAP.

BAM

Available within Designer, the business activity monitoring tool does what it's supposed to do: It gives you visibility into the status of processes and alerts users when a predefined activity, threshold or other defining factor occurs or is reached.

BPM Web

BPM Web is an interface for managing tasks, viewing processes and accessing the Executive Dashboard, which provides tools for viewing real-time process metrics and reports. The customizable BPM Web lets users manage their own and subordinates' tasks; access task lists from any computer with a browser and Internet connection; view, reassign and escalate tasks; and customize task hierarchies with sorting, filtering and group options. Its online user profiles let workers manage their work, including setting preferences for e-mail addresses, notification methods and availability.

BPM To Go

This mobile solution is designed for task management on the run. It features a simple user interface for small screens and lets users manage tasks and processes via Pocket PC devices, including PDAs and cell phones with WiFi and GPRS capabilities.

BPM Engine

The heart of Bluespring's suite, BPM Engine coordinates the work that goes on within and between the other parts of the suite. It manages the state, process logic and execution of tasks and invoked applications, supporting multiple concurrent, parallel and sequential paths of execution, including execution of sub-processes. It also handles the communication chores for integration with external applications via Web services and administration APIs.

BPM Reporting

BPM Reporting lets users analyze and manage processes while they're running, debug processes using dynamic process reporting, track information passed between processes and define process management capabilities by a user's role. The company said the reporting tool includes 60 pre-built reports. Its BPM Executive Dashboard features process metric reporting with drilldown capabilities. It also lets users create custom reports using Crystal Reports and customize its interface for viewing key reports immediately after logging into BPM Web. Role-based security determines report availability.

Solutions Builder Program

Bluespring Software works with developers who want to create their own solutions, a Bluespring Activity Development Kit. The idea is to allow solution providers to bring domain expertise to the use of business process management in the creation of applications without having to create the BPM engine behind their solutions. Bluespring even offers financing of the tools, training and professional services to help partners get up to speed.

BPM in Action

BPM Suite can help you streamline and optimize general business processes (employee on-board training, billing and credit management), technology processes (dynamic content creation, IT asset management and business process analysis systems) and vertical processes (regulation compliance management, Six Sigma efforts, e-procurement programs and product design lifecycle). Other process candidates include loan origination and writing, inventory and supply chain management, structured collaboration and enterprise application and desktop integration.

A good example of BPM Suite's capabilities comes from Cincinnati Bell Telephone (CBT). While the process volume at CBT is low, with only about 1,000 processes executed per month, the complexity of the processes illustrates the solution's ability to manage enterprise wide processes – from enterprise account quotes and cash process through network to engineering feasibility studies and financial analysis of deal probability. CBT also uses it for legal contact generation and collaboration and deal approval and sign-off. The complexity of Bell's product line means that the solution spans 750 steps, across 70 process modes, nested seven levels deep in some cases, with over 2,500 embedded business rules.

Grocery retailer Kroger uses BPM Suite to consolidate over 500 Oracle workflows into fewer than 10 Bluespring processes. These processes manage employee access to the company's line of business systems by orchestrating approval of access requests and integration via Web services with the provisioning systems that control access (such as Novell's directory service, eDirectory). The suite manages over 26,000 add, change and delete access requests per month, with each request consisting of about 50 process steps.

You can't actually see these latter examples unless you work for the organizations that have put them together. But there is one example you can view up close -- the cool demo we mentioned in the first paragraph. Bluespring runs a weekly demonstration online in Webinar format so you can see the product in action. (The link is below in "Useful Links.") What's neat is that you can click a button to see the process that signs you up and communicates with you as it goes through its steps (calculate time to delay reminder, create lead in Microsoft CRM 3.0, save attendee information and so on). On the day the Webinar takes place (currently, that's Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific time), you can see how the process status has evolved all the way through receiving an email reminder about the demonstration. This is a great way for BPM newbies to learn what business process management is all about in a simple, friendly manner. Below we've included two screenshots to show you what you'll see when you sign up for the demo.

Figure 1: Bluespring's BPM Suite Webinar registration process in action, step one...

Figure 2: ...and so on. As a process moves along, you can track its progress through a Web browser.  in

Of course, as with most of these solutions, you can't introduce BPM to your organization on the cheap. The average cost of a Bluespring BPM Suite application is $150,000, with specific applications from its partners ranging from $60,000 to $750,000. The company says a first implementation can be up and running in 60 days.

Only one of three applications featured in the Microsoft Office 2007 Launch Kit, Bluespring BPM Suite is a serious, yet friendly contender among people-centric business process management solutions.

What's Next for Bluespring

Currently, BPM Suite doesn't include a simulation tool. If you need to perform what-if scenarios to analyze the impact of process modifications, you'll have to wait until Summer 2007, which is when the company expects to launch its next version, nicknamed BPM Suite Five-O. According to a blog posting by Jeff Mills on BPMEnterprise, besides simulation capabilities, the next version of the software will also include logic for determining "people availability." This will be based on peeks into calendar entries, Microsoft Live Communication Server status and Microsoft Location Service status. It will also introduce some geography-based modeling capabilities and support for newer standards, including BPMN, BPEL 2.0 and XPDL 2.0.

Useful Links

Bluespring Software
http://www.bluespringsoftware.com/

Sign up for a weekly demonstration of Bluespring's products here:
http://www.bluespringsoftware.com/bpm-suite-webinar-registration.aspx
As a bonus, when you sign up, you're invited to watch the process you initiated.

A Web page describing the next release of BPM Suite is here:
http://www.bluespringsoftware.com/products/bpm-suite-5.0-preview.asp

Read Bluespring's Jeff Mills blog postings for BPMEnterprise.com here:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/blog/index.asp?ui=Jeffrey%20Mills&s=bloggers

About the Author:

Lou DiToro is a freelance writer who specializes in writing about business processes and competitive strategy. He welcomes feedback on his articles for BPMEnterprise.com. Contact Lou DiToro at louditoro (at) hotmail.com.

Rate This Article:  Current Rating: 4.43   Poor    Excellent                1    2    3     4    5   View all top-rated articles

Copyright © 2003-2008 – BPMEnterprise.com, CTQ Media LLC. All Rights Reserved
Reproduction Without Permission Is Strictly Prohibited – Request Permission

---

Publish an Article: Do you have a process management tip, learning or case study?
Share it with the largest community of Business Process Management professionals, and be recognized by your peers.
It's a great way to promote your expertise and/or build your resume. Read more about submitting an article.