Ultimus BPM Suite Pushes SpeedyTime to Market

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By Lou DiToro

Accelerating time to market is one of the keys to successfully transforming business operations and becoming a real-time enterprise. It's what makes operations transformation so critical to today's companies. The faster you deliver products and services to your customers, the faster you see a return on your investment (ROI).

But not every business process management (BPM) software program focuses on time to market. Some prefer to prioritize their feature sets differently, such as addressing integration, ease of use or some other aspect of enterprise needs. If you prefer a BPM tool that puts time to market at the top of the list, consider Ultimus BPM Suite. (Full disclosure: Rashid Khan, Ultimus co-founder and chief technical officer, writes the "Practical BPM" column for BPMEnterprise.com.)

Ultimus BPM Suite enables users to launch and adapt business processes rapidly – without the need for complex programming. It provides sufficient out-of-the-box capabilities to handle exceptions and changes systematically. And it encourages collaboration among employees. In short, Ultimus BPM Suite speeds modeling, deployment, adaptation and integration.

Adaptive Discovery

How does the suite speed all of these elements? After all, when a team begins to map out an existing process, complexities inevitably surface that were previously absorbed by the workers performing that process. Employees know to handle a new customer quote differently from an existing customer’s, or to eliminate a certain step or do it manually when delivery time needs to be sped up. Capturing this into a software program is a challenge.

Ultimus' Adaptive Discovery (AD), a crucial distinguishing feature of the suite, lets users deploy processes without fully mapping them – and then change them after the fact to fit the circumstances. With AD users define the business rules, flows and work recipients dynamically. The process then adapts to those decisions. When exceptions surface, the process designer addresses them, the system learns those new routes and rules, and follows them automatically for future match cases. Users are able to define and enhance processes the same way they evolve – in response to real-world decisions. Once the flows and rules are captured, users can change them to either optimize processes or adapt them to new business conditions. If a process is well defined, AD can ease the effort in changing the rules as they change.

Also unique in the BPM Suite are Flobots – workflow robots – which address integration requirements with other applications. Flobots are middleware automation agents that can be trained, using graphical tools, to perform specific process tasks automatically, such as route data to, and extract data from, external applications. Flobots are available for Microsoft Exchange, Excel and BizTalk, as well as XML and database management systems. With Word, for instance, Flobots allow users to automatically generate letters, forms, printouts and faxes. The Exchange Flobot can write appointments and tasks for participants. For more complex integration situations, Ultimus provides the Enterprise Integration Kit, a set of APIs.

Flobot functionality is boosted by a FloStation, which hosts the Flobots and keeps track of the Flobot tasks lists and schedules. Since the FloStation communicates with the BPM Server (explained shortly) via HTTP, it can be located anywhere with Web access, including remote locations. It can be setup to deliver a specific task, or a group of them can be designated, thereby providing a form of load balancing for the Flobots. Also, a Flobot task can be routed to a FloStation based on runtime information. When an insurance inquiry comes in, for example, it could be routed to a specific company representative for a follow-up phone call based on the location where the inquiry originated.

Ultimus Components

The Ultimus BPM supports open industry standards, including business process execution language (BPEL) and business process modeling notation (BPMN), messaging and email protocols MAPI and SMTP, as well as the directory services standard, LDAP, and Microsoft's ADSI.

The tie to Microsoft is worth noting. Ultimus is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has built its software on the Microsoft .NET foundation. That latter point is important, because it means that developers can implement functions using .NET that can be linked into processes without being embedded in them. Business analysts can control the processes without having to touch the code. The software runs on Windows 2000 Server, as well as Windows Server 2003. The development and client environments run on Microsoft XP, Windows 2000 Professional and Vista.

Let's go over the major modules of the Ultimus BPM suite.

BPM Studio

The Ultimus BPM Suite provides two modeling environments. The Ultimus Process Designer, a stand-alone graphical process design application, allows business analysts and users to design, model, document and optimize business processes without help from IT. (See Figure 1.) Ultimus BPM Studio, oriented more toward IT teams, provides a check-in/check-out feature so that individual developers can work on specific components of the process application. This is also where the process is hooked up to other IT systems and databases in the organization. The Studio includes all the features of the Process Designer, including both modeling and building modes, enabling processes to be built from scratch or enhanced from designs built with Process Designer. Studio can import process models from Visio, IDS Scheer and Mega.

Figure 1: Credit Card Approval Process Example

BPM Server

The brains behind the suite, BPM Server controls process execution, coordinates and synchronizes responsibilities, and performs housekeeping, decision-making and routing functions. It manages "live" processes, keeps tabs on the status of each incident and controls the Flobots and FloStations. The Server includes a process orchestration engine and a separate integration agent, which manages connectivity to enterprise applications. (What it doesn’t do is manage business rules; that's the job of Ultimus Director, explained below.)

iBAM Suite

This tool, which performs business activity monitoring, provides users with real-time data about their processes. The iBAM Suite lets users create and visually modify key performance indicators (KPI) and place them on desktops and portals or in workflow documents. The component can display KPI data from processes as well as HR, CRM, financial and other business applications.

Ultimus Director

Ultimus took the business rules from the process logic and put them in a user-friendly environment. (See Figure 2.) The Director allows users to access, change, test and deploy rules without affecting the process itself. It uses a simple drag and drop interface that mitigates the need for programming. Of course, even the simplest environment can make a mash of complex rules. So when the rules engine can't figure out how to handle a rule because something about it is broken, the Director shows in a visual manner all of the steps taken, along with the accompanying data, presumably to help the person administering the rules figure out where the problems lie and to make changes where necessary. Business rules can reference process data in their definitions, allowing dynamic orchestration of different Web services to be performed at runtime.

Figure 2: Ultimus Director

Ultimus Administrator

This is a Microsoft Management Console snap-in that provides a mechanism for centralized administration of the BPM software. When a user logs onto the network for the day, then starts the application, the Administrator determines what operations the user can perform based on his or her access rights. When there's a question about the status of a process, the Administrator provides a picture showing who handled a particular task, where it's gone next and when it was (or was not) completed. The software allows for viewing each user's workload and reassigning tasks.

BPM Server Database

The BPM Server Database contains all the data needed to control the business process. This is where the BPM Server goes at the end of one task to get the next task. Chances are, most organizations working with Ultimus will also be running Microsoft SQL Server on the back end. But SQL Server expertise isn't required to interact with the BPM Server Database.

Ultimus employs what it calls a "distributed spreadsheet model," which enables process owners – typically, business users – to deal with application-specific information, business rules and routing assignments in an environment they're comfortable with. Used at the process level, this feature provides control over variables, form layout and field editing rules. It also can be used at the level of individual steps of the process. A main spreadsheet provides a superset of information on the process – the global data applicable to the entire process. A local spreadsheet exists at each step but can draw data from the main spreadsheet as needed.

Ultimus Reports

This report generation module allows users to evaluate and improve processes by providing the metrics – incident cost, user activity, workload and so on – needed for making informed decisions. Users can create and modify reports through a wizard and can be done and delivered online.

Additional Features

The Ultimus BPM Suite features a simulation tool that permits users to add cost and time data so processes can be optimized based on these key metrics. If you're wondering what processes to tackle first in a BPM initiative, you can download the Process Prioritizer, an Excel-based tool that help you make some decisions about the order. Finally, the software is available in 18 languages, including Simple Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Korean.

Pricing

Ultimus offers a value-based licensing model. Servers are licensed on a step threshold approach where the license is calculated based on the maximum number of process steps a server can execute. Ultimus also licenses Active Clients (the number of unique users in a process) and concurrent users of BPM Studio. A typical system goes for between $50,000 and $100,000. A pilot program goes for about $25,000 (software licensing).

Company Background

Ultimus has been in the BPM business for a long time. It claims applications in 1,600 customer locations worldwide. Headquartered in Cary, NC, it also has offices in North America, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, with a marketing presence in more than 80 countries. Key industries include financial services, healthcare, human resources, customer relationship management, manufacturing and telecommunications. Key clients are Citizens Bank, FNBA, Banco de Chile, Lancaster General Hospital, Dell and Horizon PCS.

At the time of this writing, the company expected to release version 8.0 in October 2007.

Useful Links

Ultimus whitepaper: "Adaptive Discovery"

Ultimus Process Prioritizer (registration required)

30-day trial version of Ultimus Process Designer (registration required)

Ultimus whitepaper: "Understanding Business Process Modeling & Analysis"

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.

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