We've heard about business process reengineering for more than four years. A new breed of affordable applications can help managers analyze and automate businesses.
John Vacca and Dave Andrews
Ever since Michael Hammer's article about BPR (business process reengineering) appeared in the July-August 1990 issue of Harvard Business Review, numerous articles, books, and seminars have discussed BPR's potential for reducing costs while increasing productivity and quality. Process-mapping applications for Windows, such as Analyst from Action Technologies (Alameda, CA, (510) 521-6190), Maxim from KnowledgeWare (Atlanta, GA, (404) 231-8575), and ABC Toolkit from Micrografx (Richardson, TX, (214) 234-1769), help business managers visualize an organization's work flow and quickly ident
ify areas that need improvement.
Process-mapping programs generate diagrams that resemble flowcharts. But unlike typical flowcharting programs, process-mapping programs let you attach data such as number of units processed, cost/resources consumed, required time, and other information associated with an activity. Once you map out the processes, the programs let you generate reports and charts that summarize the data captured in the process maps. These programs range from $250 to $500.
Programs like Maxim and Analyst that let you capture a business's process logic (e.g., central purchasing handles orders only above $500) also let a business manager deliver process maps to developers using higher-end development tools such as KnowledgeWare's Application Development Workbench or Action Builder to create actual work-flow applications. Logic captured at the up-front process-analysis stage can be preserved in a work-flow routing application.
``People are moving toward the integration of design
and implementation,'' says Bob Flanagan, director of software services at the consultant firm WorkGroup Technologies (Hampton, NH). ``Senior-level managers using these tools may use some of the analysis tools just to see the impact of any changes. But it's still nice to have the process map and work-flow engine coupled.''
Just creating the process map can provide useful insight into a business, however, and it's an essential first step in a proper BPR project, say analysts and developers. ``Trying to figure out what happens in a complex organization is the big challenge,'' says Barrett Williamson, director of groupware development at Beacon Application Services (South Natick, MA), a consulting and development firm that helps companies automate their business. ``Our goal is to help our clients satisfy their customers and do it for less money. But sometimes in a large organization, people don't even know who the customer is. Action's model forces you to ask these questions and makes everything explicit t
hat you might not even think about in a business. Once you've done that, it's not a hard road to get from all those maps to automated business processes.''
Where the Action products tie into Lotus Notes or SQL Server to provide their work-flow engines, KnowledgeWare tapped Object Design's ObjectStore database to provide Maxim's engine. The benefit of using an object database is it lets you reuse portions of a process map, says Mike Mandatto, product marketing director for Maxim at KnowledgeWare. As you modify processes in Maxim, you can save different views of the same process. ``One of the things we're hearing is that an organization needs to constantly revisit its business process reengineering effort and hone it down. Maxim's semantic model lets you inherit processes and their attributes from one model and apply them to another model.''
IBM uses ObjectStore as the engine for FlowMark, available currently for OS/2, and for AIX (server and client) and Windows (client) versions, which should be
available now. Officials at IBM Software Solutions (Somers, NY, (800) 426-3333) say a benefit of FlowMark is that managers are creating the application as they map processes and don't have to transfer process maps to a developer. FlowMark starts now at $12,000, but IBM says it may unbundle FlowMark's process-mapping module and sell it separately at a lower price. Likewise, UES (Dublin, OH, (614) 792-9993), developer of the KI Shell work-flow process management program, also plans to make a process-mapping tool available as a stand-alone program.
In the past four years, BPR has become entrenched in the culture of many businesses. ``The world of work is changing,'' says Marlene Martin, assistant vice president of Associates Corp. of North America (Dallas, TX), a financial services company. ``Processes are expected to be of concern to everyone in the organization, and tools have to be in everyone's hands.''
Illustration: Graph: Delay Statistics
Illustration: The process-an
alyzer module of Micrografx's ABC Toolkit for Windows ($495) lets you map business processes and attach data such as cost and delay times for each operation. Micrografx officials say that version 1.1 of ABC Toolkit, slated for release this fall, will support ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) and OLE automation.
Illustration: Once you've created a process map in ABC Toolkit, you can paste information into the program's data analyzer or an application like a Windows spreadsheet to visualize bottlenecks. Future versions of ABC Toolkit will add rules-based logic and will integrate with work-flow engines like Lotus Notes.
Illustration: Students at Babson College (Wellesley, MA) will soon be able to register for classes, pay tuition, and track financial-aid applications over their PCs, thanks to an application that Beacon Application Services is creating. Beacon developers spent several weeks assisting Babson managers in mapping out the college's business processes in Action
Analyst before they used Action Builder to generate a working application.
BPR Tools Help You Work Smarter
