Let Users Take Charge of Changing Work Processes

by Penny Lunt

When insurance giant Conseco of Indianapolis was looking for business process management (BPM) software, a key criterion was the ability to integrate with other systems. The chosen solution, BizFlow, from Handysoft, Vienna, VA, offered many APIs to other systems, including the e-mail and FileNet imaging systems in use at Conseco.

"The product's use of Java lets us connect it to most of our existing systems, because we frontend our back-office systems with Java Server Pages," explains James Such, vice president of information technology at Conseco.

Another factor important to Conseco's choice was flexibility. For a time, Conseco was on the acquisition trail, but the company is now focused on growing organically. This change in focus brought dramatic changes to business processes. Another source of change has been the company's Six Sigma program, a formal excellence program that constantly analyzes and tries to fix problems in processes. As an example, a process for completing agent contracts was recently reformed so that agents can be paid within days rather than the months it used to take when a mistake would crop up. In the future, BizFlow will be used to make such changes, on the fly if necessary.

"Our primary focus is to improve customer service," says Such, adding that the company intends to turn work around more quickly to gain cost efficiencies. While BizFlow hasn't gone into production at Conseco, three projects were headed into production in July, including claims payments and new business contracts.

"Our plan is to implement this over time for all the processes we do. For now, we're focusing on projects that touch the customer, including invoices, IT requests and financial systems," Such says. The company expects to have between 1,000 and 2,000 users on the system by the end of next year.

Although HandySoft has only offered BizFlow for 18 months in the U.S., the company is nine years old and in June released Version 8.0 of its software. In addition to offering integration ease and flexibility, the software also offers two essential components of BPM: a business-user friendly design environment and scalability.

According to Tyler McDaniel, application strategies director at Framingham, MA-based Hurwitz Group, one of the most compelling new features in BizFlow 8.0 is the ability to import Visio diagrams. "Visio is everywhere," McDaniel notes. "So many people in enterprises use Visio on a daily basis to build processes, process maps and document processes, yet none of these are executable. That's Visio's fatal flaw."

BizFlow users can import Visio diagrams as process definitions and map them into executable runtimes in BizFlow. "This keeps you from having to start from scratch all over again," McDaniel says. "Anything you can leverage out of the Visio work you've done already is a bonus, even if it's only 25 percent of the business process."

Visio support provides a transition to HandySoft's own graphical design environment. "Customers might start using Visio, then migrate to the HandySoft design environment," he explains, adding that for ease of design and use, BizFlow is comparable to BPM competitors including Fuego, Savvion, Metastorm and Qlink. "HandySoft's design interface is not overly technical; it's intuitive and logical to follow."

Ease of workflow design is critical because it enables business users to design their own workflows rather than having to rely on IT developers. If business users say, "it's too complex," then you've probably chosen a product that wasn't appropriate for you.

As for designing the forms that are typically routed in workflows, McDaniel describes BizFlow's forms features as solid, usable and readable, though not fancy. One plus is that BizFlow integrates with Adobe forms and Adobe Approval.

Another feature that's critical to BPM software is the ability to handle exceptions and ad hoc routing. "HandySoft has worked hard to improve on that," McDaniel notes. "The typical scenario is that you have to go in and script ad hoc routing, exceptions and errors. That requires specialized skill, it slows down development and it reduces the overall value of the solution. BizFlow's improved ability to handle ad hoc situations is a key strength."

The BizFlow ad hoc routing feature can send a work item to individuals, departments, user groups or roles in the middle of a process. The software also offers an event-driven mechanism that lets a user register external events such as a database change, file or e-mail arrival, message posting, HTTP request or data change in the LDAP or Active Directory. These watched-for events can trigger a reaction within BizFlow, such as the initiation or completion of a work item.

As the decision makers at Conseco recognized, integrating with other enterprise software is an important characteristic for BPM software. Like other BPM vendors, HandySoft views its software as a high-level, connective platform used to tie disparate systems in the enterprise together. In this way, information and processes can be shared among departments and systems.

BizFlow integrates with applications including Microsoft BizTalk, Microsoft Project, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Sybase and document management products from Documentum, Hummingbird and other vendors. The software has a generic EDMS adapter for those products it doesn't directly support.

HandySoft was one of the first vendors to support Web services and to provide a SOAP broker that accepts Web services from other applications, but McDaniel says this will be a short-lived integration advantage. "This is a check box for BPM vendors today," he says. "They don't have the luxury of differentiating on that layer for very long."

As for scalability and performance, BizFlow runs on a variety of Microsoft Windows, Unix and J2EE platforms and should scale to meet any technology infrastructure. It runs on IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic Web platforms. Conseco hired consulting firm Technical Resource Connection, Tampa, FL, to test the product for its needs. In a simulation of 600 users logging on to the system with 600,000 work items, there was no degradation of performance.