MyProcessAnalyst Blog

 Scanning technology made huge strides over the last 20 years. Scanners are now often present in people’s homes much like appliances. As a result many of us take for granted the ability of companies to replace paper based business process with managing digital records in a streamlined way. This question always comes up when we get to the doctor’s office and witness paper files being moved around. So why is it that we do not see paperless offices everywhere yet? 

I have been around process automation and digitization technologies for some time. I often find that when businesses decide to digitize their records they are often ill prepared for the effort that goes into it, both in the design and development process and in the actual day to day operation.  Here are several factors to consider.

The saying “A picture’s worth a thousand words” isn’t always true. It’s certainly not true when it comes to process modeling.   Why?  

In 2006 EMC acquired ProActivity Inc. a Newton MA based software company that specialized in business process lifecycle management solutions. One of the products called ProActivity became EMC Documentum Business Process Analyzer or BPA, now part of xCP product family. This post offers a review of existing BPA capabilities. If you are in the business of mapping or analyzing business processes, preparing processes for automation in BPM or package implementation scenarios, you will find this post useful.

The term Business Activity Monitoring, or BAM was coined several years ago and since that time acquired multiple meanings and connotations. In simplest terms, BAM represents a reporting mechanism that presents the data about the business as it happens in real time. However, as always with any concept created by vendors of software applications we have any number of BAM packages that do things in a very different manner. I want to get down to the basics and talk about the initial value proposition offered by BAM.

Huh? What are you talking about? That’s an expected reaction from many people. During the last 30 years there was a huge investment into creating applications for all needs and purposes. Packaged applications like ERP, CRM, SCM and host of other vertical and process specific solutions were developed to address the all important data flow in corporations. All of these deployments are based on solid understanding of the company business processes and ability to ease the application into the specific process environment.