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Thriving in a Downturn through Process Innovationby Amy Larsen DeCarlo
Tough economic times call for smart decision making and solid business execution. But how well a company performs in a difficult competitive landscape depends largely on how effectively executives anticipate shifting market dynamics and refine corporate business processes to meet changing priorities. Organizations are coming to understand that these underlying processes, which facilitate key operations such as order fulfillment and customer support, are an intrinsic part of what distinguishes them from their rivals. However, given the credit freeze and precarious financial forecast, businesses can’t afford the expense or the time required to overhaul their existing application environments to optimize processes. Instead, companies are increasingly looking to business process management (BPM) enabled by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help them improve efficiencies while preserving legacy software investments. BPM enabled by SOA provides the mechanism to connect existing applications that support discrete business services in order to optimize business processes. Organizations also look to SOA as a development environment that promotes software development efficiency through component reuse. But businesses are still struggling with the fundamentals: Identifying exactly where and how to make process improvements and implementing these changes. To help on this front, IBM recently introduced a number of substantial new software and service offerings, along with enhancements to existing solutions that are designed to assist enterprise customers in translating good ideas into process improvements. The new offerings include:
Updates to existing products in the IBM Business Process Management suite include:
These new elements strengthen the IBM BPM Suite, providing capabilities developers and business users need to turn innovative ideas into transformative change. Ball State University is one of the organizations employing IBM software to help them turn concepts into results. The Muncie, Indiana-based university needed to streamline the cumbersome registration process for distance learning classes, both to improve student satisfaction and limit the amount of manual intervention required of employees. Ball State accomplished both goals by documenting its current processes and then building a new process model for Distance Learning registrations using WebSphere Business Modeler. The university employed WebSphere Integration Developer to build the services defined in its new process model, and then implemented them through the WebSphere Process Server on z/OS. Ball State University pulled all this together, including application performance and stress testing, in just five weeks. The result: a faster, more effective registration process which makes it possible for students to resolve issues such as unpaid fines which had previously interrupted the process, and left the university’s customers – its students – frustrated and dissatisfied. Like Ball State, many organizations are realizing that responsiveness to customers assures longevity. As a result, more companies recognize the crucial role business processes play in the competitive equation. Efficient and effective business processes translate directly into customer satisfaction and client loyalty, essential factors in a business success in good times and bad. By finding room for improvement and then making the right changes, organizations are laying the groundwork for their future success. Back to homepage »
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Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo