You may recall my dinner bet with Ismael last month. He bet I couldn’t find 3 BPM implementations that met the following criteria:
- Complex process (e.g., “more than 100 steps”)
- Integration with transactional systems through WSDL
- Human workflow through web-based interfaces
- Modeling and skeleton design done by process analysts using BPMN
- Implementation done by IT people without writing code
- No vendor support through executable design and deployment. [He doesn?t say into production, just deployment.]
The BPMN part kind of narrows down the field, but I was pretty sure Lombardi, Cordys, BEA, and Savvion would be able to provide me 3 at least! I haven’t heard back yet from BEA and Savvion, but Lombardi and Cordys have provided 4, which I present below. Let’s see Ismael try to wriggle out of this one!!
From Lombardi (thank you Wayne Snell!):
- Allianz Life of Minneapolis, 2800 employees, $14B in premiums, part of the Allianz Group HQ’ed in Germany. At Brainstorm SF, Kim Kostelecky presented on their initial foray into BPMS with Lombardi TeamWorks. The first project was new account opening in their securities business. Project began November 2005 and went into production March 2006. Five additional projects are in development, with others planned. The process is complex process is complex, meaningful, has many subprocesses, BPMN-based, and even incorporates web services for integration. They mostly model and modify their processes without any vendor help, according to Wayne, ”unless they are resource constrained, at which we do help them occasionally.”
- Hasbro, Inc., $3 Billion leader in toy manufacturing. TeamWorks is managing the B2B RFQ process for more than 100 suppliers building out Hasbro’s toys, mostly out of the Far East. This is a very large process that they totally created and manage by themselves. it has been in production for more than 4 years now. It does not use web services, but does directly connect to SAP and other transaction systems. With BPM, Hasbro increased volume 250% with no increase in staff, and reduced cycle time from 12 days to under 2.
From Cordys (thank you Erwin Nooteboom!!):
- Bouwfonds (currently owned by ABN-AMRO bank), an international property company located in Europe. The application is a complex business process with human workflow to support the financial consolidation, Basel II and Economic Capital reporting. Cordys is completely SOA, service orchestration, ESB, the whole works, using BPMN for modeling and design. The nice thing in this case is that the business not only understands process modeling but actually runs, demos, and tests the implementation! To date there have been around 10 iterations where change requests were implemented within less than a week.
- De Amersfoortse (owned by Fortis bank), an insurance company located in Europe, uses Cordys Composite Application Framework (BPMS) in a complex solution to register new pension plan participants and adapt the plans of existing participants to conform to regulatory changes. The system also supports a new system of internal benchmarking, taking advantage of
Cordys BAM features to monitor business activity across the various divisions. The solution also supports management of third-party organizations such as employers through the seamless integration of business processes with web services and standards-based web portals. Cycle time for new pension enrollment has dropped from 13 minutes to 2 minutes.
According to Cordys, both of these implementations are in production, based on top-down (business model-driven) design, and meet the other criteria in the bullets above.
Ismael, let’s talk about dinner! I know a great place in Los Gatos…
Tags: BPMN
Congratulations, Bruce!
I thought this Dinner Bet was very exciting all the time. I am a fan of Intalio – and their recent transformation into open source bpms – as Ismael and others at Intalio already know. But also, I am really excited about these success stories, and I think and hope that they will be further documented.
BPMN always had two interpretations – a visual model being understood (and shaped) by business users (and understandable for a wide audience) , but also a visualization of BPEL. I think the first goal here is the most important one, and what the success stories are really about. Next, if you also can execute using BPEL, that would just add credibility to the story.
Steinar Carlsen
Computas
Bruce,
I’m glad to see that both Lombardi and Cordys have a BPMN product that has been used by at least two customers. But what about the other rules for the challenge? Can we have detailed information on this?
[...] Last but not least, I will report progress on the BPMS Challenge. Bruce Silver is running with it as official referee, and I got his assurance that he will thoroughly investigate the claims made by a couple of vendors who believe they won the challenge. Knowing the products in competition, I must express very serious doubts about it, but I would love to be proven wrong, as long as the game remains fair, and I trust Bruce that it will. In the meantime, Intalio is actively working on its product in order to participate to the challenge later this year. [...]