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The Gartner-generated term bpmPaaS is being used with increasing frequency in the technology media and among analysts, but just what is bpmPaaS? On its surface, it seems like a logical part of the evolution in the realm of process management and services-based architectures. By combining them, organizations conceivably have a solution to apply and adapt processes to specific business needs as they arise. It’s a perfect way to deliver on the promise of BPM as it was first conceived - a way to create processes that make work more efficient, build reusability into those processes, and track the progress of the people, data, and assets involved with those processes. By invoking the power of the cloud and microservices, bpmPaaS now adds the advantage of on-demand development and delivery.

For almost any organization, this is the “a-ha” moment. IT managers have been looking for a way to empower business users to create and deliver processes, and to be the central hub for change management. When delivered as a service, BPM is more flexible and adaptable, which is key at a time when business demands change rapidly. The promise is big, and some organizations are already benefiting from this platform-based, services-based, BPM solution - these are the ones that are using Process Director.

Process Director as a Services-Based BPM Platform (bpmPaas)

Process Director was originally developed as an easy-to-use, low-code development platform to enable teams to build and adapt processes to changing needs, whether those changes were mandated from outside or inside the company. While the cloud was not as popular when Process Director was created as it is today, its developers recognized that BPM on a platform, especially one that is agile, is the only true way to provide organizations with the promise that effective process management can deliver. After all, if teams are stuck having to deploy, build integrations, update, and manage the engine that’s running their processes, it eliminates the ease and flexibility that BPM is supposed to offer in the first place.

Gartner, who has been articulating the concept of bpmPaaS, pointed out last year that Process Director was already en-route to capturing the essence of what the category is all about. They, and countless BP Logix customers, point to how Process Director is able to integrate new technologies like predictive analytics, process intelligence, and machine learning in a solution that is built to continuously optimize for organizational process efficiency. This optimization gives business teams a platform on which to create tasks, processes, and systems, while allowing more flexibility and human guidance to create truly intelligent business process management that assists not just in creating efficiencies, but also in effectively meeting customer demands.

To capitalize on the services model, Process Director is available through a variety of platforms, including the cloud. For those that take advantage of the cloud, companies can use Process Director as they evolve in their needs. As they grow from using a multi-tenant environment to a solution with customization applied to it, they are able to build an agile process machine with minimal capital, infrastructure, and IT expenses.

bpmPaaS Drives Transformation

Consider the entire concept of digital transformation. While organizations dedicate considerable time to planning the tools and behavioral changes they need to make to transform core to how they run their business, they never stop transforming once they commit to it. The tools that enable them to do that need to be foundational and provide the necessary functionality to operate as a solution-of-record that provides continuous innovation and change on-demand. Just as transformation never stops, the organizations that want to close the gap between concept and solution must look to the services-based model provided by the cloud that offers a path to process optimization.

Process Director uses inherent rapid application development, the concept of time, and a cloud-native approach to deliver on the promise of bpmPaaS. Specifically, it looks to improve users’ business conditions and efficacy of processes with these following elements that are optimized for cloud delivery:

• Built in application integration and database connectors that enable connectivity, on-the-fly, to any data source that can inform processes and deliver information to improve business outcomes. It must have the ability to access data directly through SQL and integrate that data directly into forms and workflow.
• Ability to build, pilot, and adapt applications that ingest and use data from a variety of internal and third-party sources.
• Operate on a process engine that applies rules and provides compliance management to ensure processes are working as intended.
• Identify and predict outcomes, and then use that time-informed intelligence to automate building of better processes.
• Coordinate and choreograph how various services work together to deliver transformative outcomes.

bpmPaaS solutions can be used across different types of environments. Process Director, for example, is used in cloud-native, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Ultimately, its flexible architecture enables a better approach to identifying the most optimal data, applying it in context, and giving end-users a faster path to decision-making. An effective bpmPaaS like Process Director gives IT departments and line of business managers a way to respond quickly to market changes and internal business demands. Because it is built to deliver processes in a services-based environment, team members can emphasize their expertise in implementation, uptime, security, and getting the processes created the right way.

Arbiter of digital transformation, or early adopter regret? This is the question many enterprises are asking as they look back on their efforts to move into a more modern approach. But with the luxury of perspective, many have discovered that their early digital transformation intentions were either short sighted or totally missed the mark. The promise was attractive, but the ultimate goal not yet totally understood. This resulted in these early digital pioneers frequently shuffling their way through half-baked ambitious projects that never completed or took companies in misguided directions that ended up costing them dearly.

The Early Digital Transformation Promise

Walk the show floor of any technology event and you’ll find all kinds of vendors who promise to be “next generation”, “emerging”, or “built for a new [fill in the blank].” While they may be truly developing something innovative and exciting, organizations can only implement a certain amount of new technology before they overwhelm their IT teams and end users to the point of adoption fatigue. Many of these early adopters become rigidly beholden to making a nascent strategy work, and in their attempt to use that strategy to move ahead of their competition, often found themselves married to technology that wasn’t actually ahead of its time and didn’t offer any of the benefits of continuous change.

A Bridge is not the Path Forward

Originally, enterprises became enamored with the promise of digital transformation because it was the bridge from legacy tools to an environment that made more productive use of technology, employee resources, and data. Though building this bridge should not have been the end-goal, it is nonetheless where many early adopters stopped. They invested heavily in tools and software solutions, but now find that they are now saddled with systems that don’t talk to one another, are not agile, and cannot support the speed and scale required by modern enterprises.

The real value in transforming a business has to begin with a clear vision for how it can boost productivity and efficiency while being an enabler for organizational change. Early attempts were often derailed because they lacked a roadmap and neglected the inevitable need for streamlined automation and integration with multiple applications. These organizations typically fell into traps around the following issues:

No Clarity on Digital Transformation Ownership

The advent of digital business often looked like an attempt to be more inclusive - that inclusivity was supposed to extend to people, data, and technology sources. But in order to deliver on those goals, transformation processes require distinct ownership of design and implementation processes. Successful optimization always demands some level of executive sponsorship and top-down control, but it’s especially the case when a project includes such a far-ranging set of activities like digital transformation. To keep the project in scope and prevent overwhelming implementers, organizations needed to solidify operations and management around key decision-makers. In the absence of that type of ownership, many projects simply became too unwieldy, or veered off in directions that didn’t adhere to original goals.

Over-Emphasis on Replacement

Many saw ‘transformation’ as replacing existing tools or processes, rather than being a way to improve overall operations. This made the project easier to manage, because it only demanded 1:1 mapping of old too new. But this totally neglected the importance of why a company would embark on digital transformation in the first place. The idea was to build processes into a company that could rely on digital methods for implementation. Doing so meant that the organization could benefit from automation, a faster way to develop applications, and the reduction or inefficiencies. Being so tactical in their approach prevented many companies from truly taking advantage of becoming a digital business.

Wrong Endgame

The whole notion of transformation is that it never truly stops. Once a transformation begins, it is supposed to pave the way for continuous evolution and enablement of other things that transform and change as well. But many organizations sought an endgame that was narrowly focused - maybe they just wanted to integrate key applications, or perhaps they wanted the ability to pull data from internal sources and deliver it to customers through forms. In that light, the transformation project ends once the goals are achieved, but as we now know, the ability to apply digital methods for process-oriented outcomes, and to continuously improve on those processes, never ceases. Companies that sought the former approach were rewarded with new solutions, but they still lacked a foundation that was enabled continuous innovation.

Today’s organizations have access to more data, more connections, and an ever-expanding list of new technology. For these organizations to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace, they must evolve from previous models to ones that engage more stakeholders and make better use of data. But they must also be able to support the need for rapid development of new solutions and subsequent delivery through all necessary channels.

A business is, among other things, an assortment of activities that are intended to produce profit-generating products and services. To arrive at the successful goal of delivering those products and services, a company has to rely on a myriad of actions, events, resources, and decisions. As economic demands require companies to move faster, and as technology creates a more efficient way to adapt, organizations need a way to coordinate and manage the different, but related, recurring tasks that form the foundation of a business. The vehicle for these management efforts often come in the form of a workflow engine.

Workflow Engines vs Intelligent Process Modeling Engines

At its core, a workflow engine is the technology used to apply logic and rules to move operations toward completion. At BP Logix, the thinking is that while that is all fine and well, generic workflow is far different from applications driven by an intelligent process modeling engine— one that uses automation, can adapt to changing business needs, and is able to apply the concept of time to help users predict a path for better outcomes.

Those are precisely the reasons for developing Process Director. With organizations operating in a continuous, non-linear world, Process Director employs a process modeling engine that goes beyond workflow to unify different business elements into models that can be executed to derive more efficient processes.

Legacy Workflow Systems: The Enemy of Productivity

The enemy of productivity isn’t just lack of action, it’s waste. It comes in the form of wasted time, wasted effort, and unnecessary resources that don’t apply to the intended solution. Legacy workflow systems hand information and documents from one actor to the next, all with the presumption that each decision point was arrived at with all the necessary data needed to make an actual decision. As workplaces and systems have gotten more complex with multiple digital input channels and a working style that prizes collaboration, old style workflows cannot rely on the standard style of handoff. As a modern solution for transformative enterprises, Process Director uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to incorporate predictive analytics and create not only seamless processes, but ones fueled by informed, data-fueled decisions.

A Workflow Engine Heading Where?

Popular author and researcher Brene Brown uses a concept called, “what does ‘done’ look like” to emphasize that there are many ways to arrive at the completion of a task, but it requires all parties to be on the same page about what they’re trying to accomplish. Process Director uses Process Timeline™ to enable the aggregation of different viewpoints and methods, and arrive at an agreed-upon goal. We get a sense for this through the element of time, a major component missing from the standard workflow engine, that is heavily leveraged by Process Director customers in a variety of vertical markets.

Traditional BPM focuses on quality and business process governance, but adding a modeling engine with business process automation capabilities (along with the predictive element of time) gives the user the ability to see how later process stages will be affected by the previous ones. This adds huge value to the managed process by allowing the earliest possible notification of potential delays to allow intervention before timeline problems arise.

Beyond Review and Approval

In most workflow engines, there is a review and approval step in place, but it doesn’t answer questions about the specifics of completion. These questions are of huge importance to management, because while it may be great to know you are on track to hit a specific goal, it is still important to know what is currently happening. It is similar to comparing the act of looking at a transaction in a register to discover errors, rather than simply looking at a monthly profit and loss statement. This is where Process Timeline within Process Director can establish a continuous assessment of, and application of actions for, the direction of where the process will move in its effort to guide processes forward.

With a process modeling engine that uses predictive capabilities, simple models can be created to help businesses go from discovery to full automation faster, yet more intelligently. Process Timeline gives each activity with its duration estimate to create faster processes. Activities can run at the same time, without complicated coding to configure parallel behavior. The status of the entire process, as well as sub-processes can be determined at a glance, which allows for proactive response and the earliest notification of potential delays to allow for quick intervention. When confronted with similar ‘tasks of parallelism’, standard workflow engines tend to stumble.

A Predictive Workflow Engine?

The predictive nature of Process Timeline is such that it identifies potential problems in the course of the process, and can trigger actions to the changing circumstances. This results in obstacles being overcome before deadlines are missed or production halts. Process Timeline records predicted execution versus actual time, every time the process runs and adjusts the time estimates for even better management. Process Director stores every aspect of the process for audits, internally or externally, for improved compliance.

Today’s workflow engine takes a very different form: with a foundation that combines IT process automation with BPM software solutions, Process Director provides a codified way to deliver timely, effective processes for organizations of all types.

We all know that as technology has become more accessible, it’s also created more data and more connections that users must manage. According to ZDNet, the average medium-to-large enterprise uses between 300 - 400 different software applications. The irony of this proliferation is that it creates a gap between the data we should use versus the data that’s most accessible to us. In the past we used the term ‘workflow tools’ to describe the bundle of amenities used by organizations to tackle these issues, but is ‘workflow tools’ still an appropriate fit?

Intelligent Process Automation vs Workflow Tools

‘Intelligent process automation solution’ has replaced ‘workflow tools’ in many spheres, but a process-driven approach still embeds a mindset within organizations around how to develop and deliver better data, be more agile, and ensure that approvals and requirements are addressed according to expectations. What has changed is the scope available in the modern BPM solution, now workflow tools are just a component of a larger whole.

When business (and thus processes) were simpler, workflow simply looked like a series of lines and shapes that veer off into multiple directions. And this worked, for the most part. Workflow tools streamlined a goal-oriented task, and was a critical tool that made life easier. But the modern organization is hardly linear, and workflow tools have hit the ceiling of enabling communication between disparate people, data, and decisions. For the modern solution to be successful, it must allow processes to be easily centralized and distributed.

Process Director: The Way Forward For Workflow Tools

Serving these widespread needs was the reason we created Process Director in the first place, with its unique Process Timeline process modeling engine– a replacement for the standard workflow tools of the past. At the time we first developed it, we couldn’t have known how rapidly and completely digital transformation would change the nature of business and technology. Yet, part of our mission was to give organizations a foundational structure that they could use to adapt and grow their business.

But Process Director is so much more than a workflow tool, it was also created with the mindset that those closest to problems are likely the ones best equipped to solve for them. Rather than building a complex application development solution that demands highly skilled coding capabilities, Process Director allows for non-programmers to build robust, comprehensive process-driven applications. Additionally, it helps organizations reduce complexity and enhance results through these advantages, which could be considered tools for your process tool box:

Workflow: A Part of a Greater Whole

1. More collaboration: Whether through more access points (mobile, Internet of Things), communication channels (social media), or platform (on-premise, cloud, hybrid), a solid workflow management software solution gives everyone involved with your processes—both inside and outside of your firewall—the appropriate level of access along with the BPM tools to make a difference.
2. Insight through analytics: Process is a facilitator, but it delivers additional value when it provides insights about your operations. Process Director uses analytics to deliver regular insights into what is occurring within your processes, the people involved, and a sense for how effectively your organization meet its deadlines.
3. Moving from paper to digital: Even in the digital age, so much data is collected and transacted through paper-based documents. It’s hard to process and requires dedicated manual effort to store and retrieve. Process Director enables the digitization of documents as images so they can be included as assets within workflows. This delivers relevant data directly to decision-makers and ensures relevance throughout the process.
4. Maximize skill sets: Process Director can automatically assign tasks to people based on their strengths and skill sets. By giving people the most appropriate tasks, you can improve productivity and keep employees more engaged.
5. Avoid redundant behavior: Process Director views workflow tools as an organized, automated way to eliminate unnecessary steps. It does this by initially identifying the critical points of activity, enabling teams to define specific actions, participants, and results that should occur.
6. More inclusive: Process Director applies rapid application development capabilities that enable and encourage non-developers to build, adapt and manage process. Non-technical employees can apply their knowledge directly to workflow solutions that will both reduce the IT burden, and deliver solutions in context.
7. Enable rapid validation through digital approvals: Process Director enables non-developers to rapidly create eForms , which enables fast approvals (including executives on the go) and the reduction in time lost as a result of waiting for paper-based signatures. This is where workflow becomes a critical factor in supporting speed and real-time action.
8. Automation: Automated workflows allow you to set up processes, then let them run. The majority of work that occurs within processes can be automated, freeing up time and allowing you and your team to focus on more strategic activities.
9. Adapt the concept of time to processes: Business activities are deadline-driven. Process Director provides triggers that keep processes moving according to a timeline, enabling participants to see precisely when and where input is required.
10. Tracking provides historical data: Every activity in digital workflow is tracked. Whether you need information for compliance purposes or to review how your organization operates, the ability to quickly see the ‘who, what, where and how’ of your processes provides important insights.

Is Your Digital Transformation Toolkit Ready?

To produce anything meaningful in today's market requires discipline, repeatable actions, and a foundation that will help conduct ideas from inception to desired outcome. The pace of today's business demands that traditionally time-consuming tasks like collaboration, reviews, and approvals all be done with incredible rapidity and yet still be brand compliant and impactful. Workflow tools have traditionally been proven to be the most effective way of achieving that, but the tool box has expanded to include so much more. The very foundation on which agility and transformation needs to take place rests on the shoulders of intelligent process automation.

All businesses rely on financial transactions between buyers and customers, with partners, and investors. But financial relationships also exist with staff who pay for certain expenses out of their own pockets and must be reimbursed. Without a consistent invoice automation process for tracking and funding these transactions, however, organizations cannot operate efficiently and meet their financial obligations to their most valuable resource -- their employees. Invoice management is a critical part of all modern organizations, and it requires a process automation foundation that ensures employees are repaid, and that also gives companies insight into the accounting and tracking of finances.

Invoice automation processes can be complex— approvals and reviews are performed through the work of multiple people, and timeliness is a critical factor. Companies tax the trust of employees when they’re left holding the bag for out of pocket expenses because of delayed reimbursement. Process automation must be simple so that employees can adhere to a repeatable process, comfortable in the knowledge that they will be repaid. But every invoice management process must also be rigorous so it is not abused with illegitimate claims.

Invoice Automation

Modern organizations, therefore, must balance these different needs with a solution that gives their invoice processes the flexibility and agility to adapt as needed. At its core, invoice process automation is a combination of capturing, tracking, approvals, and transactions. Process Director addresses all of these aspects as a comprehensive solution that enables an organization to automate, track and report on all review and approval processes. Process Director invoice management solutions ensure that proper approval process will be created and followed, and it also allows for historically lengthy, sequential, manual processes to become efficient, highly parallel automated reimbursement processes. The end result is effective compliance and accountability, both for the company and for employees.

Many invoice automation solutions were created as part of legacy ERP applications, and they retain much of their inherent complexity. This means that integration, management, and updates require dedicated teams with specific skill sets in order to deploy and manage these applications. It also typically reduces adoption, as employees are required to work with outdated interfaces and complicated sets of rules. Process Director gives organizations the ability to rapidly develop expense-related applications with an easy-to-use integration framework, and can be built and managed by non-developers. Included is the ability to apply rules to auto-route to specific managers and supervisors for approvals.

From Paper-Based to Invoice Process Automation

When most people think of invoice management, they visualize a variety of receipts, print-outs, and other paper documents. But physical documents are easily lost, hard to read, and require a lot of manual data inputs. As a proven driver of digital transformation efforts, Process Director applies capabilities that reduce, and even eliminate, the need for paper document delivery, storage, and management.

Process Director enables the collection and organization of photo receipts, so employees can snap pictures of receipts and submit them immediately, along with contextual information about the reason for the expense. The photo becomes part of that employee’s expense case, and the company now has a record of the expense and some supporting data that helps during review and approval processes. Imagine a scenario where an employee meets with a customer over a cup of coffee and light breakfast. The expense might be relatively small -- maybe less than $10. Yet, those expenses add up, and if employees lose receipts, they’ll eventually be out a significant amount. By providing a digital way to submit an expense with immediacy, they can be assured of repayment, and don’t have to make a project out of creating their reports.

To further reduce the burden, employees can also email receipts that are automatically imported and assigned to the user’s profile. This ensures that the necessary data is captured and the necessary triggers are initiated to move the expense through approvals.

Invoice Automation Supported by Case Management

Process Director is built with case management functionality tightly embedded into its foundation. It can pull together processes, data and rules around accounting and compliance rules, and actively assesses, coordinate, and plan every aspect of a given expense report (treated as a “case”) ultimately working toward time-based goals.

These processes, transactions, and responses that define a complex set of activities like expense tracking and approvals must be tracked over a period of time, with a very specific deadline (most companies abide by a timeframe in which an employee can expect to be repaid). This allows invoices to be reviewed by as many different people, both inside and outside of the organization, who are required to evaluate them. Every action, message, response, and document generated during this complex activity becomes part of the case, and that gives the organization a trackable log of data about the employee, his or her expenses, and how/when they were reconciled.

Better Reviews with Invoice Automation

The process flow for invoice automation typically follows a fairly standard process, but can get stalled if the processes lack automated mechanisms for ensuring smooth movement from creation to completion. Process Director enables these processes to be easily created and modified to meet the specific finance and operation needs of a company.  It provides the flexibility to incorporate different requirements and procedures that map to changes in invoice automation policies. With Process Director, IT teams can create electronic forms the enable uploading of receipts into a convenient online workflow, either as one-off expenses, or as a bulk upload. The bulk option allows employees to submit mass numbers of receipts, and for workforces that are mostly mobile, or that require a lot of travel, this significantly reduces the workload for employees and their managers. The forms that are built can also apply auto-filling, so regularly used data is automatically populated, also saving time.

Additionally, Process Director allows for invoice categorization capabilities for different regions, amounts, and expense types, and can automatically generate accounting codes that correspond to those categories. Those codes can be used to populate the auto-fills to validate that the dropdowns are correct.

Process Director gives organizations the ability to develop and deploy invoice automation capabilities that are robust, but that don’t come with the complexity of legacy solutions. It enables integration of multiple applications into a single user interface that gives employees a fast and easy way to submit expenses, for companies to validate and track them, and ultimately for fast and effective reconciliation.

Cloud platforms are rapidly being adopted by enterprises as an agile, adaptable foundation for their IT environment. The move to the cloud requires serious consideration, however. IT leaders should understand the impact on their organization and how they will need to change. But they should also understand how the cloud can provide them with a new, and fundamentally better way of using technology to support business goals. Organizations that use the cloud as a foundation for their IT and business operations are deriving true economic value and demonstrable improvements in efficiency.

It is important to think of a cloud environment in the right context: it's not so much a solution or a tool as it is a foundation for the intersection of technology and business. The cloud offers a way of managing your technology investments that is more efficient and aligned with the needs of a growing enterprise. It lowers management and maintenance costs dramatically, while also providing the scalability that allows an organization to use computing and transactional resources as needed.

Cloud platforms operational efficiency: Reduce IT maintenance and support tasks

IT teams are filled with highly specialized staff who look out for the various parts of their technology strategy. While they may be focused on specific initiatives, invariably, issues arise that require an "all hands on deck" approach to problem solving, and it will take the time and attention of even your most specialized people. When your team is working to avoid outages or handling other infrastructure issues, they are not being as productive on critical issues as they could be. Nor is your company getting the maximum benefit from their valuable skill set.

IT departments will always have KPIs around daily technology-related tasks, but imagine if you didn’t have to actively manage them. Consider the difference in staffing and cost when much of the usual heavy lifting is no longer required. Besides the reduction of fixed costs like staffing, meetings, and physical requirements, having your applications in the cloud means that you can determine KPIs for what's critical for your business, rather than your technology, and rely on the vendor to perform accordingly.

Find out from your cloud vendor how different your allocation of resources could be. Analyze what it would look like if you deployed your people to projects and tasks that will move the company forward. Doing so will benefit from efficiencies around economies of scale and distribution of responsibilities— efficiencies that can only be achieved in a cloud environment.

The shared responsibility model of security

The reputation of your brand is based on trust among your company’s various stakeholders. Providing information so business users can make better decisions creates benefits, but there is potential risk. Every endpoint that your technology touches becomes a potential security risk.

Enterprise organizations require solutions which ensure data is only accessible for intended purposes and by known users. As more data and functionality become available and usable, CIOs must find ways to make data available where it can be most effective, without opening up the organization to potential risks. Yet, as more data is used by more people on more devices in and new ways, are you able to keep up with the ever-present potential risks?

Using the cloud means you can take advantage of a platform that has the ability (and for reasons of business sustainability, the necessity) to dedicate staff and resources solely to the pursuit of protecting their tenants, applications and customer data. Consider the focus your team can place on strategic issues and initiatives if you could reduce the need to constantly stay up to date and focused on security.

Make sure you are comfortable knowing that, while your data is owned by your company, it is being handled by the vendor through their ability to continuously deliver better security solutions. Security is important to an organization’s operations, so ask hard questions and insist for proof points from your vendor to ensure risk is mitigated.

Controlling your data and how it's used is critical to a company's health, and is fundamental to the CIO's role.

Economic advantages of using the cloud

Purchasing enterprise-grade technology hardware requires a lengthy review process, an implementation phase, ongoing management, and then finally depreciation and updating tasks. Every one of those tasks is time consuming, non-productive, and expensive. They also involve the valuable time of staff whose expertise could be used far more effectively and productively.

The cloud eradicates most of these wasted costs and instead uses a more efficient model where customers are billed on a subscription basis. Even more appealing is how cloud service providers break down spending based on usage type and amount. Cloud users pay on a per-minute model, rounded down to the nearest minute. In this way, organizations can efficiently manage costs and plan for growth.

When moving to the cloud, some of the money normally allocated for management of physical resources and upgrades can be used to develop a skilled staff that’s capable of using the cloud to implement innovative new services. Additionally, the cost effectiveness of the cloud is recognized in terms of scale. Organizations can grow without having to meet corresponding needs of more hardware, networking assets, and other manifestations of legacy, on-premises environments. That level of scalability is precisely what is required for modern enterprises that need to be highly responsive to changing market and customer needs.

A new model for modern enterprises

IT departments must respond quickly to market changes as well as shifts with internal KPIs. It is incumbent upon them not just to manage technology tools, but to figure out how to best use those tools to drive an agile business agenda. Instead of spending so much time on things like implementation, upgrades and uptime, the modern IT can now use the cloud to optimize the tools at their disposal, and create optimized, and secure, business solutions.

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Process Director has empowered many higher education institutions in delivering automated application development and workflow pointed at supporting students’ varied needs. Of course, some of the advantages that BPM delivers are behind the scenes, for things like university administration, student financial aid and a myriad of internal processes. All of these add up to a mountain of Process Director supported use-cases, and result in it being an important engine for schools wanting to deliver an exceptional student experience.

Today’s college students have grown up in a digital world. Just about everything they want is available through their smartphones, and they now expect to be able to scroll their way through tasks and plans. Innovative colleges and universities understand this and are creating highly digital experiences, powered by BPM, to help students with everything they need from admissions all the way to graduation.

Process Director’s capabilities are aligned with the goals of higher education organizations that want to move past legacy systems and adopt digital solutions that meet the needs of demanding student populations. BPM is not just a way to make better use of data and create efficiencies of scale; in the context of education, it is used to provide a more connected overall experience across the student’s lifecycle.

Effective Workflow for Colleges and Universities

Effective workflow is more than just a series of tactical activities. It has to align with user intent and create behaviors that maximize usage and deliver meaning to users. Some organizations see their processes as a series of unconnected events; they don’t see the connectedness of the user experience, nor the value of deploying solutions in the context of the user’s lifecycle while they’re engaged with the organization.

Process Director, however, has been built to recognize that schools serve the needs of an audience that is busy and operates with many competing demands. Many are still learning how to prioritize life events and meet deadlines. Registering, paying, signing-up — these actions and others must be fairly simple and easily incorporated into the daily lives of students in order for solutions to be adopted.

The three most critical aspects of aligning with the student experience are: ease of use, solution context, and communication. Effective workflow ensures that all these elements are met so that users have not just a more efficient experience, but one they can begin to rely on to consistently meet their needs to make student life easier and more meaningful.

Ease of Use for College Students with BPM Software

Most students are in their late teens and early 20’s; this is a generation accustomed to an inbound style of productivity. Rather than having to wait in lines and submit paperwork, they have used online apps and smart forms to deliver and receive information.

To build engaging tools that meet the needs of students, schools can use Process Director to create sophisticated, low-code digital applications that take into account the necessary data and workflow sources on the back-end, and considers how users on the front-end will actually use the app. By being able to create simple apps that integrate relevant information, including smart forms and processes, students can get information they need and take action on things like class scheduling, financial aid, and other relevant events. The application build teams from Process Director’s agile approach to adapt as needed to increase adoption and productivity.

So while Process Director is easy to use for those who need to build applications intended to engage students and help them with decisions and actions necessary to their experience, that ease of use is also reflected in elegant, simple usability that encourages repeatability and adoption.

Managing Academic Workload

Managing an academic workload of multiple classes, administrative issues like financial aid, and extracurricular activities like intramural sports and campus activities all compete for students’ attention. School IT teams use Process Director to optimize the use of data so that the applications they create help students engage and complete tasks with limited disruption to their schedules.

Process Director helps direct the way that organizations surface and orient data through interactive forms and workspaces. Just as human interaction is complex, Process Director looks at the workflows in applications not as a linear phenomenon, but as a continuously shared collection of usable elements that allow for context-based structural changes, last moment decisions, and individualized attentions depending on each circumstance.

The case management approach inherent in Process Director also helps greatly when delivering applications that integrate historical data on students (transcripts, payments, scholarships). With navigable data that can be filtered for omission or inclusion depending on the situation, applications can adapt as the students’ situations change and evolve. This approach supplies students with applications that provide them with what they need when they need it, all without forcing them to search outside the context of the case to find answers.

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Better Communication

Students are bombarded with emails, texts, direct messages, and a host of other types of communication. But more information can go unnoticed if it doesn’t fit with how they are accustomed to consuming information. Schools need to ensure that students see important messages, but also create ways for students to communicate back with them.

With capabilities that facilitate connecting and communicating across departments, Process Director can help schools collect applications, forms, and data sources into a collective portal that delivers all student’s actionable needs into a single interface. That reduces response time and enhances the kind of communication students need in order to meet deadlines, stay on top of opportunities, and keep their good standing with their school.

The digital transformation of higher education cannot happen on an application-by-application basis. Schools that want to align their goals and processes to student behaviors will apply digital transformation through the use of smart workflow and processes. To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative and contextual education workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution of information, and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.

As college becomes increasingly expensive, financial institutions are facing more demand to extend loans to students eager to further their education. The student loan process has become an industry unto itself, and the only way to manage it for students, families, and schools is with effective BPM and workflow. Process Director is already being used by higher education institutions across the United States to deliver effective process automation solutions that help schools deliver financial and academic support to students.

Process Automation for Financial Aid

Financial aid is critical to higher educational institutions to help them meet enrollment quotas, and in a competitive student market, they need to be able to quickly process and deliver aid packages in order to retain admitted applicants. American colleges and universities enrolled almost 20 million students in 2018, and that number is expected to maintain, or even increase, in pace over the coming decade. Of those students, 67% received some form of financial aid that enabled them to pay for tuition, books, and living expenses. Currently, more than 44 million people owe just over $1.5 trillion in student debt. This is a major source of economic activity in our country, but more importantly, it’s a channel for students to change their lives.

Coordinating applications, funding, debt services, and collection requires a huge set of processes that must be integrated among different school departments, students, and sometimes the government. Aid can be funded by the school’s FAFSA offering, through the school’s privately funded scholarships, or through grants. To ensure that schools are making the right moves to fund qualified students, they must navigate this complex web of teams and decision-makers.

The typical applications involved in the wide range of financial aid activities require forms, paper documents, approvals, data sharing among applications and databases, as well as tracking, and general lifecycle management. These are normally unconnected and disjointed pieces within the overall process, but with so much at stake, it’s critical that milestones are achieved and deadlines are met. Process Director creates order among, and between, different data sources and process stages. What results is a system that is inclusive of many disparate participants, enabling consistency, compliance, and efficiency. Ultimately, the process is about speed and efficiency. Process Director applies capabilities for forms management, workflow automation, lightweight application development, and other process-related functions that are already being used by leading educational institutions.

Process Automation for Workflow and Case Management

Workflow and case management features drive the process among the different parties, and Process Director is already helping leading colleges with a platform that provides, among other things:

• Attractive, web-based, and responsive user interaction;
• Built-in support for multiple languages, locales, and cultures;
• Easy integration with a broad array of databases, web services, and applications;
• Directory synchronization with LDAP, Active Directory, and Windows network security;
• Full integration with federated authentication services, including Oauth and SAML.
• Strong encryption of data at rest, and data in-flight;
• Digital signature of documents;
• Granular permissions structure, with temporary privilege escalation.

Students and parents initiate the aid process with applications to schools and/or to private banks. Process Director can provide a framework for the initial capture and routing processes with both forms management capabilities, and by applying a case management approach to each application. This gives each student a shareable profile that can store and share relevant documents and data.

Process Automation with Process Director from BP Logix

Process Director integration connectors can identify and pull data from disparate repositories and applications so that meaningful information can be used for better decision-making. The finance department may need personal data; the specific department the students wants to major in may require academic data to determine if the student qualifies for an academic scholarship. With Process Director, schools can create lightweight applications to fulfill their workflow needs, and use these connectors to connect and exchange information with databases that store relevant data. Any data that can be accessed via SQL can be integrated directly into forms and workflow.

As data is updated, or new documents are added to the case file, Process Director applies continuous monitoring to ensure the workflow detects and attaches those documents. Especially as schools work with other sources like FAFSA to determine a students’ loan qualifications, it’s important to be able to see the most current information so it can be shared and used in the decision-making process.

Process Director is optimized for workflow and process automation, and it’s also heavily adopted within the higher education market because it can serve the needs of the school while also delivering benefits to the end user. In this case, that user is the student. The ultimate outcome of the financial aid process is a happy student who can now attend college, and that’s a worthy goal of any product. BP Logix is proud of our part in supporting the efforts of schools to be accessible to students, and giving them a way to be efficient in their goals.

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To remain competitive for enrollment and to provide a great experience for students, colleges and universities must hire and retain top talent. This applies to every level of the school, from professors and instructors, to campus administrators, and to all support staff.  Process Director BPM for HR and workforce management is helping higher education institutions create order for HR teams so they can execute their important role in hiring and creating an excellent working environment for faculty and staff. Delivering effectively on these tasks is critical to HR teams contributing to their school's vision and goals.

Now, more than ever, it is critical for higher education HR strategies to align with the applications and workflows that drive other university departments. Process Director provides this critical path through innovative workforce automation, process management, forms management, and other capabilities that encourage consistency, compliance, and efficiency.

Higher Education HR For Complex Workflow Needs

Streamlined HR management provides critical insights to a school’s human capital strategy, enabling them to maximize the strengths of their people. But human resources must do it in a way that is cost-efficient and covers a wide range of different types of employees — full time, part time, contractor, tenure track, special needs, underrepresented, and a host of other categories of workers. To do this effectively requires the ability to collect, process, and transact data from many sources and make it usable throughout the employee lifecycle, and deliver it to other workstreams happening within the school IT and HR environments.

Colleges and universities are using Process Director to handle their complex HR issues and tasks so these departments can play a valuable role as schools compete for talent and strive to remain economically viable. With limited budget, it’s important for these teams to be able to innovate on their own. Process Director delivers capabilities like workflow automation and lightweight application development functionality that enable higher education HR teams to do the following:

• Build processes and create forms to meet changing institutional goals. These range from things like improving the onboarding process to using BPM to demonstrate compliance adherence.
• Access data that can help with decision-making and meeting workflow milestones.
• Efficient approval handling.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

How Process Director Supports College and University HR Processes

Because HR deals with so many different aspects of an employee’s experience, it demands a solution that is responsive and adaptable. An improved way to request vacation time means less stress for a busy worker, and a better way to plan for when that worker will be absent. Onboarding new employees with greater efficiency means they can start work and be productive faster.

Process Director can be used to apply a case management approach for employees, which allows schools to integrate data and documents from various applications into a shareable profile of each employee. This provides clarity for all workflows that touch each employee so that important decisions that impact their working environment can be achieved faster and with greater context. Process Director also has native integration with popular HR systems like PeopleSoft. Users can build workflows with Process Director with the benefit of data from the full complement of PeopleSoft modules that impact employees.

Consider also that schools operate on a cadence that maps to the academic calendar, and HR needs to help ensure that workers are available and can be productive for things like the beginning of each semester and during the summer planning months. Process Director users can build workflows that take into account these timeframes. Process Timeline, the business process modeling element provided by BP Logix, captures time as a formal process dimension so teams can benefit from better planning. With AI-driven technology, this time-driven workflow engine can take direct action by escalating or rerouting actions to account for predicted delays. This is a critical factor in helping HR teams plan and be prepared for those busy times of the school year when hiring may take a back seat to more operational tasks.

Innovative Higher Education Institutions Using Process Director Workforce Automation

Many forward-thinking colleges and universities are using Process Director to transform how their HR teams operate. Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), near Salt Lake City, is using Process Director across all their administrative departments. Within HR, they have used it to build processes to manage conflict of interest disclosures, fitness center applications, leave requests, personnel action notices, W4 forms, and other critical employee-centric actions.

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has built processes around hundreds of different types of forms used by their HR department. Part of that was driven by a university-wide goal of automation and reducing paper document management. The ability to scan documents and store them with contextual information was a key reason for UTEP adopting Process Director for HR and across their entire IT department.

To meet goals of hiring, onboarding, and creating an exceptional experience for workers in a competitive economy, Process Director is being used by leading colleges and universities for its workflow automation, case management, and the efficiencies delivered through BPM. Higher education organizations demand an effective way to onboard, manage, and serve employees through a complex process of milestones; Process Director provides the foundation to support that.

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Across the country every year, students apply to colleges and universities unaware of the complex series of processes that support their admissions application. Getting this mix of processes and workflows streamlined is critical for this major milestone— one which has a huge effect on the culture of the school, and the life of the student.

Process Director by BP Logix empowers universities in the creation of customized higher education admissions processes, and currently supports a myriad of colleges and universities both nationally and internationally. For students, the intended outcome is simple: acceptance to their desired school. But behind the scenes, Process Director is supporting this potential result through process efficiency, reliability, repeatability, using a suite of unique workflow and adaptive case management tools. With these, admissions departments have the ability to optimally identify and select those students who will be the best fit for the school.

Business Process Management for Efficient Admissions Process

Business process management (BPM) is critical for efficient higher education admissions department because processes drive the student journey from the first point of contact (admissions application), through the financial, housing, and scheduling aspects of a student’s life, and ultimately, all the way to graduation. But this is not without layers of complexity.

This requires an agile approach to process, one that ensures higher education IT departments are able to serve a wide variety of stakeholders (administrators, parents, students, financial aid organizations, among others), and still maintain adherence to governmental, organizational, and industry governance requirements and compliance frameworks. Additionally, they are often restricted by budget constraints, and to ensure equity, the admissions process is usually held to rigorous standards.

How Process Director supports Higher Education Admissions

Process Director is uniquely positioned to support the needs of college IT organizations. Its digital process automation capabilities enable the efficient processing and reviewing of applications across all necessary admissions counselors and administrators. As the application process has become more competitive and rigorous, students are required to provide more data points to make their case and stand out from other applicants. The University of Central Florida, for example, received 43,225 applications for the 2018-2019 school year alone, each of which required analysis and processing, all within a 3-4 month timeframe.

To optimize the process, higher education can rely on Process Director’s case management capabilities as well as the ability to build and deploy these applications through low code development. This makes it easy to create sophisticated digital applications that emphasize a human-directed work style. A case management approach also enables each student’s file to be moved through the processes and milestones required by admissions departments. Process Director applies automation to improve how and where applications are routed, and individual admissions team members are equipped with the tools necessary to collaborate, advocate, and discuss students and the factors being weight to determine acceptance. In the higher education applicant process, this includes: 1) screening, sorting, and scoring; 2) individual analysis; 3) committee collaboration; and 4) decision.

To facilitate and optimize these processes and workflows, Process Director uses capabilities that have been proven to help the unique needs of fast-moving admissions teams, including:

• Application and workflow application integration: The application submission is usually a student’s first touch point with the university, but also a way to engage student data with other applications that can improve her experience. Process Director uses built in connectors for a variety of ERP systems, and allows users to construct forms that can pull and deliver data that can be useful for things like financial aid and scholarships, and eventually for housing, onboarding, registration, and course scheduling.
• Digital process automation: Especially because the admissions process is time sensitive and involves key milestones, universities benefit from Process Director unique suite of tools to stay agile and move fast. Process Director functionality gives organizations the ability to manage, automate, and report on the critical business processes that will take a student’s application from first touch point to final decision. Process Director workflow tools are managed through a browser and require no programming expertise, which enables even non-technical admissions team members to easily create and modify workflows according to their specific needs and processes.
• Among the key features that support the admissions process is document workflow management. Students often need to submit multiple documents, including transcripts, recommendation letters, and other documents that speak to their fitness as a potential student. Process Director offers a document workflow management system that empowers team members to rapidly create filtered searches and tabular reports with a few keystrokes. Reviewing task lists, browsing document folders, or searching for a specific asset about a particular student, Process Director Knowledge Views are easy to configure and even easier to use.
• Digital transformation optimized for education organizations: Most campus administrative desks contain stacks of paper waiting for decisions, approvals, mailing or filing. Departments print, fax and mail electronic documents and information. Email inboxes are filled with important attachments waiting in Outlook files on desktops where they are subject to being lost or deleted. Process Director is enabling colleges and universities to rapidly digitize processes and apply automation solutions to optimize the use of data. The result is greater visibility into each student’s profile and the data within their application packages. Documents and information can be shared with the necessary decision-makers, and milestones in the process can be made with greater clarity.

Colleges and universities are seeing more demand as young people seek higher education as a path into the global economy. To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative education workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution, and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.

The modern educational organization must effectively manage a complex process of applications, reviews, acceptance, and confirmation— and a digital process platform facilitates just that.

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“The 2019 KMWorld 100 list spans a wide variety of companies that are each addressing the evolving demands of knowledge management,” said Tom Hogan, Group Publisher of KMWorld. “Some are long-standing companies with well-established offerings that have evolved over time, while others are much more recent entrants to the field. In selecting organizations to be included on the list, we consider insights gleaned from our own interactions with companies during interviews and events, how they have succeeded in helping customers solve business problems, and we review product updates to make sure that capabilities are advancing to address evolving requirements.”

For ten consecutive years, KMWorld has continued to recognize BP Logix by including us in their annual list of organizations who influence the constantly changing landscape of knowledge management. Compiled by analysts and experts, as well as users, the list of KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management reflects not only innovation in theory, but also practice.

KMWorld considers customer stories on how each product aided them in solving their business problems, how the product has continued to improve, and where each organization’s ambitions place them as future contributors in the world of knowledge management.

The Future of BP Logix

This recognition builds on key milestones in product enhancements with the launch of Process Director 5.0, a comprehensive platform designed to enable digital innovation and business transformation and give users the needed visibility into processes in order to make sound business decisions.  

“Our product and service offerings are continually growing in order to meet BPM and digital transformation requirements and the bigger trends in the industry with AI and machine learning solving critical enterprise challenges,” commented Jay O’Brien, CEO of BP Logix. “This recognition is a testament to the critical work we do to help customers achieve their business goals through the use of low-code BPM applications.”

Read the Press Release

About KMWorld

KMWorld is the leading publisher, conference organizer, and information provider serving the knowledge management, content management, and document management markets. KMWorld magazine and its digital marketing resources reach more than 50,000 information and knowledge management professionals. They are a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

About BP Logix

Our leadership combines decades of business strategy, technical experience and thought leadership— effectively collaborating to translate a proven track record of results into rapid business growth. From product positioning and development, to sales strategy, to developing a strong company culture, BP Logix leaders continue to spearhead the initiatives that have resulted in consistent growth since the company’s inception.

But the foundation of BP Logix’s success lies in its employees, from sales to BPM implementation to customer care and beyond. These are the people who embody the BP Logix ethos of innovation, commitment and accessibility, and whose efforts you see translated each day into positive engagements with Process Director BPM software. The most valued asset of BP Logix is its personnel, without whom none of our achievements would have been possible.

Request a Free Demo

Request a free demonstration of Process Director and discover for yourself how this unique BPM platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

BP Logix is a BPM Vendor Listed on the 2018 Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for iBPMS

Gartner recognizes leaders in intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS) and has named BP Logix to the list of 2018 Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites making it the fourth year in a row.

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About Gartner

Gartner is an American research and advisory firm that aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for iBPMS report evaluates BPM software vendors once a year and defines their intelligent BPM platforms as “platforms which compress the observation-to-action-to-outcome cycle, and help business transformation leaders, business process directors and solution architects establish a fluid capability to handle big change.”

Gartner does not endorse any BPM vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those BPM vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner BPM Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMS) research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About BP Logix

BP Logix is BPM vendor that unites IT and business users enabling them to deploy sophisticated, form-based, workflow-driven enterprise apps in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost of traditional development. Our award-winning BPM software and workflow automation software powers workflow-driven solutions that cross organizational boundaries, embracing the C-suite, operations, sales, customers and prospects.

Customers including Barclay Damon, the City of West Allis, IDEX, Leo Burnett USA, Memphis Light, Gas and Water, MultiPlan and University of Central Florida rely on Process Director innovations such as its mobile BPM capabilities and its broad integration with SharePoint, MS Dynamics and MS Office integration, and other enterprise applications and data bases. Process Director low code / no code BPM applications enables customers to build award-winning applications that deliver clear and measurable improvements in productivity, compliance, and customer engagement.

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Process Director sets the pace for your BPM and digital transformation. Schedule a free demonstration of Process Director and discover for yourself how this unique BPM platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our business process management software have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

On the long journey toward purchasing a BPM solution, leveraging BPM examples can be instrumental in not only deciding on a vendor, but also best practices for those first few applications. Here we offer you the resources to do just that: BPM video testimonials, customer case studies, links to pages around function as well as digital transformation do-overs. 

BP Logix offers both on-premise and cloud BPM solutions of our flagship product, providing customers with the advanced digital process automation capabilities they need to manage their business processes.  Some of the leading organizations in various industries that entrust BP Logix with their business process management (BPM) needs. Browse our BPM examples below and learn how Process Director BPM software can solve real world industry problems.

BPM Examples By Industry

Advertising 

From cost estimating new projects to automating approvals, Process Director BPM software helps advertising and marketing firms streamline their review process, improve engagements with customers, and avoid duplicating data entry.

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Education 

Whether addressing student admission requirements, purchasing issues, course certifications or research grants, BP Logix digital process automation solutions aids educators in the distribution, monitoring and process management of information.

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Energy and Utilities 

Engineered to deliver a collaborative working platform while eliminating regulatory compliance headaches, Process Director workflow solutions helps pipeline companies, utility providers and distribution organizations manage, monitor and continuously improve internal business activities.

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Financial Services

In a time of regulation, consolidation and reporting, BP Logix solutions empower financial services companies to more readily demonstrate compliance, automate SEC filings and quickly report on end-of-the-month activities.

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Manufacturing

Bringing automation to order processing, quality assurance, engineering change control and Sarbane-Oxley/ISO compliance, BP Logix BPM software enables manufacturers to avoid redundancy, increase the spend of decision-making and eliminate waste.

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Healthcare

In these BPM examples learn how healthcare organizations are able to improve efficiencies while reducing operational costs by standardizing their business operations and workflow processes.

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Public Sector

With business processes that span departments, roles and systems, the need for public sector BPM solution for government has become increasingly important. Maintaining efficiency and speed along with greater integration and near real-time responses creates a leaner, more productive organization.

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BPM Examples By Function

Accounts Payable

These BPM examples demonstrate how with Process Director, you can automate the entire approval process surrounding accounts payable handling-while maintaining real-time visibility into the approval process at every step along the way.

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Application Integration

To ensure that your business operations are optimized, Process Director provides built-in BPM application and workflow application integration with many third-party and in-house applications and databases.

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Expense Management

Process Director is a BPM solution that includes approval software— providing expense management solutions that allow you to automate, track and report on all of your organization’s review and approval processes.

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Human Resources

When it comes to expense management, it seems like everything you do requires some type of review and approval. Routing paperwork to the right people in the right order-without losing anything along the way- can be a difficult challenge. These BPM examples showcase how Process Director BPM software provides expense management solutions enabling you to automate, track and report on all of your organization’s review and approval processes.

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Mobile Inspection

Even though it runs in your browser, Process Director BPM software takes full advantage of your mobile device’s unique features. Snap a photo to attach to a workflow, or record your GPS location information at the click of a button. 

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Governance Risk and Compliance

In today' unpredictable and highly competitive business environment, with its changing regulatory requirements, a holistic approach to governance, risk and compliance (GRC) just makes sense. With these BPM examples learn how Process Director business process management solutions can help your organization be efficient, effective and compliant.

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Clearly, no one can predict the future — however there is a significant difference between a ‘guess’ and an informed estimate. In our case, we derive our workflow and BPM trends by combining our knowledge of products, technology, workflow and BPM trends we’ve seen with the continuous feedback we receive from our customers, analysts and other influencers to develop what we believe to be an informed estimate.

Our customers in various industries, you see, are a fairly vocal bunch. Because we partner closely with them, we learn about their vision and the direction(s) they are pursuing. We also learn about what they consider to be hard priorities and daily realities. That combination of information and factors brings us to propose (and share) our view of key potential workflow and BPM trends in 2019 for business and IT managers:

Championing Simplicity: We are all aware of the vast number of digital workflow tools available to modern employees. As technology drives more of our lives, it also exerts a greater influence on almost every decision and action we take. This is neither good nor bad. The reality, however, is that the sheer number of options we have for applications, tools, processes and devices can become stressful and difficult to manage. We believe that one of the workflow and BPM trends in 2019 will be that BPM companies will take measures to reduce technology options and, instead, rely more heavily on processes, checklists and repeatable methods to create desired behaviors.  Organizations will use processes that are easy to build and change as-needed, updated when necessary, and managed by the business users themselves, reducing the reliance on IT. Business managers will seek solutions that allow employees to be productive on-the-fly and make an impact in real-time to company operations.

A Prediction about Predicting: Time can be both the greatest asset and, potentially, biggest enemy, of any business. Failing to meet a schedule or not delivering on expectations can be disastrous. Having insight into your organization’s operations and rhythm, then applying that information to ‘predict and prepare’ is one of the most important advantages a company can have. We believe the BPM trends in 2019 we are going to see is that more organizations will be insisting on using analytics to provide insights. They will anticipate and predict outcomes based on both historical references and current operations. These companies are going to plan and allocate resources more effectively, becoming more agile and efficient.

The Value of Collaboration: ‘Mobile’ is a BPM trend that has clearly changed the nature of how we work. It has given employers who offer the ability for employees to work remotely a huge advantage— and has accelerated the time it takes to complete approvals and, often, tasks as well. With technology providing a foundation for productivity and communication, companies can utilize the best talent irrespective of where employees choose to live and work. Remote workers, however, have not always been able to take advantage of real-time interfaces — and this has been a challenge to that strategy. We predict that some of the workflow and BPM trends in 2019 we will see will be that companies will ‘implement collaboration’ at a greater level driven by workflows that keep employees engaged with one and other more easily (“collaboratively”) resulting in increased productivity. These capabilities will come in the form of process-driven tools that encourage workers to distribute, share and create together.

A Different Kind of Workforce: The job market is hot and all indicators suggest it will remain so in 2019. As with any cycle, however, there is a shift happening that will have waterfall effects regarding how people work in the coming years. More millennials will be hired in 2019 than at any other time; in fact, for the first time in a while, the Gen X’ers will become a secondary group. We expect millennial workers to be dedicated and passionate. Moreover they have grown up with technology and expect there to be very little difference between the technology they use for social purposes and that in their work environment. Employers who will win the war for talent will do so partly by providing recognizable interfaces and technology infrastructure that this younger generation will be comfortable using.

The Shrinking IT Department: As more applications run in the cloud and use more consumer-oriented interfaces, there is less reliance on IT departments to deploy, maintain and manage apps and support users. While IT is, and will always be, a critical element of every enterprise, the infrastructure that was used in companies in the 90s is very different from what we use today. We believe the will probably see less direct hires in IT, but more hiring among LOB managers who have an understanding of IT basics. The key will be ensuring that employees can address most of their own issues using tools with interfaces and dashboards that enhance decision-making.

We would love to know more about your BPM trends and plans for 2019— and how we can help you achieve them. In that spirit, we invite you to meet with us so we can share information about how workflow and BPM can help your organization in the New Year.

About BP Logix

BP Logix is a BPM vendor that offers Process Director, an innovative business process management engine combining the power of BPM software with the flexibility of rapid application development—with no programming. Electronic forms, workflow automation software and BPM case management solutions are just the beginning of digital app development. Process Director combines the easiest and most efficient workflow engine in the industry with a rich set of tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.

Schedule A Demo

The new Process Director 5.0 is transforming the above-stated predictions into reality by utilizing BPM and AI and BPM and IoT to enhance predictive analysis, create dynamic business rules and facilitate collaboration within cases. Schedule a private demonstration and learn what Process Director will do in assisting your organization with its digital transformation goals.

Deciding on a BPM and Workflow Vendor

The review and validation process for any new product is always challenging. You are given a lot of attention from potential BPM vendors, but more often than not, they just want to tell you about their product (and are not very good listeners.) Sure, it is fun to be courted, but the attention wanes quickly when you realize that some of the BPM vendors aren't being honest with you, or you discover, after a big investment of time, that their product simply cannot deliver what you need.

Because of our due diligence in our search for BPM vendors, we made it very clear what we wanted in a workflow solution and how it should work with our existing infrastructure. We went to great lengths explaining to multiple BPM vendors our company culture and how technology is used: We let them know our IT department is already over-worked and not able to respond to change requests as quickly as they or we would like, that our sales team operates mostly in the field and requires mobile and cloud capabilities, and that our users are getting younger and more accustomed to consumer-like user interfaces.

The result: We chose a BPM vendor with a workflow automation software solution that provides functionality that no other product could deliver, get an experienced vendor who listens more than talks, a company that is already over-delivering and wants to partner with us to ensure that our feedback and experience are considered as they add additional functionality into next versions of the product.

That last part is really important to us. More than price or any other factor, knowing that the vendor will be involved and available to us after the PO is signed is so important! I can’t say we have been burned too badly in the past (as we are cautious), but we’ve heard lots of war stories about BPM vendors selling a product, upselling services, and then upselling further when later versions are introduced. That is part of their model, and I understand that. But the vendor we chose is already proactively addressing our implementation —and our comfort level about the kind of people they are speaks volumes. Our executives and I, myself, have a great deal of trust in them.

There were four elements that made this the right choice for us in terms of product fit within our organization and how we anticipate it growing. Some BPM vendors had one or two of these, but none had all four — and none had the flexibility to adapt to our changing needs. We fell in love with these aspects of the solution:

The time continuum: Falling behind, or being unaware of when activities are happening, and not properly setting expectations can lead to potentially disastrous consequences. And that’s precisely the problem we are trying to solve: getting better insights and a deeper understanding of what we can do — and how long it will take. After validating and reviewing multiple BPM vendors in 2019 and their solutions we chose one that can look at the dimension of time within our environment. Their BPM technology includes a workflow engine that provides early notice of potential delays and the ability to subsequently intervene to correct the course we are on. This advanced BPMN software solution also provides workflows and processes represented as "what if" scenarios, which gives us the ability to anticipate the impact of hypothetical situations. These cannot be represented, or acted upon, through ‘typical’ BPMN flowcharts.

No coding needed: When meeting with various BPM vendors in 2019 I stressed that we needed a workflow tool for process owners, not programmers. Understanding the impact of an action is very different from knowing how to use REST APIs to pull data from different repositories. Previously we relied heavily on IT to make changes to our processes: build requirements, code the changes, test them, and then roll them out. With IT drowning in requests and application backlog, that paradigm no longer works. We want our people to make changes they determine are necessary to the processes directly. The solution we chose is FOR and ABOUT the people who are involved in the processes. The process itself is not necessarily the goal; outcomes are. Having a BPM tool with rapid application development capabilities that can be used by our team will keep them engaged and ensure that processes are operating efficiently. Our solution provides an intuitive graphical user interface that makes building, deploying and managing processes easier. The result will be greater time-to-value from our processes and business operations.

Deployment options: I explained to multiple BPM vendors how I am looking to move most of our applications to the cloud to minimize spending, simplify our infrastructure and reduce the IT workload. Our new solution can be implemented and used on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both. This gives me the flexibility to determine what works best for us. In some ways, I feel that getting a sign-off for this BPM and workflow solution is, by itself, a huge step for our organization. At the same time, this might be ‘just the right time’ to initiate my cloud plans. From what I have seen, the tool is optimized for the cloud, can extend business processes more broadly across our enterprise and into third parties (like customers, partners and suppliers). This flexibility and functionality will serve us well as we grow.

Extensibility and enterprise application integration capabilities: Our organization is becoming more complex. That said, we do not want it to also become more complicated. We rely on internal data from our enterprise applications as well as from third-party repositories. Without those, we would not have a complete picture of what our company is doing or how we can address problems that arise. After meeting with various BPM vendors in 2019 we chose a solution that has APIs, workflows, forms and business rules, offers, hooks and callouts that support scripted interactions. We will also be able to access data through extensive web services and APIs because the solution adheres to WSDL and works with REST-enabled applications. With BPM application and workflow application integration and document imaging integration built-in, I’m confident that we will not only be able to meet our needs now, but also as we grow, change and adapt.

Now, with our list of BPM vendors narrowed down to just one in 2019, our decision is made and we are moving forward. There will be a lot of organizing and planning that need to happen, but we are closer to our goals already — and I am incredibly excited to request a demo and move to the next phase.

Automate and improve your workflows and business processes while avoiding BPM and workflow compliance landmines

Process Director BPM and workflow software enhances process efficiency and reliability of virtually any business process and helps establish efficient workflows. Highly regulated processes, such as those in the financial services and pharmacology industries, face specific regulatory compliance and BPM compliance challenges. They are subject to more scrutiny than their lightly regulated counterparts. They must track and record every meaningful transaction in a way that can be retraced later by auditors and regulators. Finally, their data must be tightly protected, with minimal impact to customers and operations.

As a process workflow solution, Process Director supports the unique workflow compliance and BPM compliance automation needs of these organizations. Offering enhanced data security, audit, and access control features, this enterprise workflow automation software enables these highly regulated businesses compliance automation to automate and improve their business processes while avoiding compliance landmines.

Process Director Includes BPM Compliance Automation & Management Features:

• Enhanced Audit Support
  • Form field auditing tracks any change to form data
  • User reference reporting identifies all objects in which a given user is explicitly named
  • External audit log records all events and actions
• Enhanced Authentication
  • Digital Signatures
  • Electronic Signing
  • Re-authentication
  • Multi-factor Authentication
  • Strong password enforcement
• Other Features
  • Ability to print detailed reports of process and form definitions
  • Strict default permissions
  • Optional encryption of form data
  • Machine learning capabilities for risk detection
  • Configurable restrictions on the set of users to whom a given individual may delegate his/her authority

Highly regulated processes, such as those in financial services and pharmacology industries, face regulatory compliance challenges, meaning that data must be tightly protected and every transaction tracked in a way that can be retraced by auditors and regulators. Process Director ensures organizations meet this high hurdle. If your organization is in financial services, health care, government, or any other highly regulated industry, Process Director is the best solution for secure, auditable business process management (BPM).

Schedule a Free BPM Software Demo

Request a free BPM software demonstration of Process Director BPM and discover for yourself how its unique low-code BPM capabilities sets the pace for digital transformation, empowering unparalleled ability to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Contact us with any questions you have regarding Process Director’s BPM software and workflow management software capabilities.

Internal Process Automation Solutions With Process Director BPM Software

Process Director has always been the internal process automation solution of choice for meeting the business process management (BPM) requirements of enterprises, mid-sized companies, agencies, and non-profits. These business and IT leaders have counted on Process Director to automate and improve internal processes, and have realized the many benefits of doing so.

Increasingly, forward-looking organizations have begun to look for ways to take advantage of cloud-based and social media technologies to extend their internal processes not only more broadly across their own enterprises, but also outward to their customers, partners, and suppliers. Process Director BPM software provides the capabilities and features for internal process automation making this strategic expansion possible.

The Process Director social capabilities were built with three simple principles in mind:

• Engage the customer by making it easy for her to communicate her problems and expectations, and for you to acknowledge them.
• Embrace the customer by enabling him to participate directly within the internal processes you have designed for them.
• Extend the cloud into your work environment by integrating popular cloud services within your workflows.

Engage the Customer

Customers today set a higher price than ever on their loyalty. They expect not only outstanding products at a reasonable price—they demand round-the-clock access to company representatives and swift resolution to problems.

Social media, mobile apps, and cloud-based services have been the primary drivers behind this shift to greater customer engagement. The legacy customer service model of the (frequently offshore) phone center accessed via IVR (interactive voice response) systems has been completely upended by the simplicity and immediacy of Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, brick-and-mortar retailers—those hardy survivors of the first e-commerce revolution—are facing competition within their own walls by customers “showrooming” products on the shelves, seeking lower prices online. Customers are mobile, they’re connected, and their expectations are high.

How can you leverage BPM software to engage these customers? By making sure you can reach them where they live: in the mobile, socially-connected cloud. Process Director BPM software provides you with internal process automation solutions that gives you the power to:

• Drive workflow behavior from social media events (such as a tweet or Facebook status update)
• Respond to your customers via Twitter (tweet, RT, DM, reply)
• Manage Facebook campaigns (likes/unlikes, comments)

Engaging your customer with Process Director will help you improve your internal process management which leads to gaining exposure, increasing customer satisfaction, and ultimately improving retention rates for your organziation.

Use Case

You're waiting for your flight to push back from the gate, comfortable in the business class seat the airline upgraded for you just before boarding. As directed, you are reviewing the safety card from the seat back in front of you when your realize that the overhead light isn't working. You send a tweet:

The airline customer service agent is using Process Director to identify problems reported by customers. He views the tweet, and from the same window, opens a service ticket to have the matter looked at by a maintenance team at the next airport.

Once the ticket has been created, the agent sends a response to the customer via Twitter, again from the same Process Director electronic form:

Fortunately, there's another seat available. You settle in, reassured by the knowledge that you were able to reach somebody at the company who actually cared about your issue.

Embrace the Customer

Engaging your customers by connecting with them on social media is an important step. The next is to give them the opportunity to interact with you directly within your own business processes—processes that extend beyond your corporate boundaries to offer valuable services, not only to your customers, but to your partners and suppliers as well.

Process Director BPM software provides internal process automation solutions enabling you to provide a broad range of services to individuals not only inside your organization but outside of your organization as well. Your customers can participate directly in your workflows as authenticated users by taking advantage of the accounts they already have from providers such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Your corporate partners and suppliers can login as well using federated authentication technology such as SAML or ADFS.

Of course, Process Director BPM software includes strict, granular protections, so your outside users only have access to the workflows, forms, and data that you've authorized them to use. Offer secure access to your custom services to partners and suppliers, prospects and customers, enhancing your value proposition and strengthening your relationships.

Use Case

Let's extend the previous example. Besides simply thanking you, perhaps the airline wants to go a bit further and compensate you for your inconvenience. The customer service agent's response might be:

You go straight to the site and pick up the coupon. Because you're already logged into Twitter, and the offer is linked to that account, only you have access to download the coupon. You download it to your phone, and present it to the flight attendant. Drink in hand, you kick back and relax for the remainder of the flight.

Meanwhile, Process Director internal process automation solutions has opened a service ticket and added it to a group queue for maintenance. The airline outsources its maintenance activities to a third party, but a technician from that company is able to log in to the airline's system and accept the ticket. The technician does not have a login on the airline's network, but rather is able to use his login credentials from his own employer thanks to Process Director's support for federated authentication via SAML.

Extend the Cloud

Process Director has always enabled you to build and manage your internal processes in your datacenter or in the cloud. Now, Process Director BPM software brings internal process automation to the cloud, enabling you to integrate a variety of useful and popular network- and cloud-based services directly into your business processes. Save files to Dropbox, download documents from Google Docs, or populate form fields with data from Amazon SimpleDB. Whether you are filling dropdown menus using Google Sheets, or collaborating with colleagues on a presentation using Sharepoint, Process Director brings the cloud to your internal process management.

Use Case

You work in a widely distributed enterprise. Projects are set up and torn down relatively often, and teams are highly dynamic. Project documentation is tracked within SharePoint, but tracking project organization—who leads which effort, who is involved, etc.—can be difficult. The company is attempting to track this information using the cloud, so that no matter where somebody is, they have access to, and can update, the relevant data.

But organizational data isn't only useful for human consumption—your business uses this information to determine, for example, to whom to assign a given task, or how an overdue task should be escalated. When an escalation event occurs, Process Director BPM software provides internal process automation solutions that retrieve the necessary information from from an Amazon SimpleDB table in real time, combine it with documentation extracted from SharePoint, and forward a notification to the appropriate individual for further action.

Schedule A Demo

Schedule a demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how it's internal process automation solutions empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

BP Logix helps companies change the way they operate through business process management (BPM). View our resources on the BPM basics to find foundational business process management content to help get you started on your journey.

BPM Basics: What is Business Process Management?

According to BPM.com, an online resource for the business process management industry, the business process management definition is: “A discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.”

What is Business Process Management to BP Logix?

What is BPM to us? We here at BP Logix think of it a little more simply: it’s the practice of refining business processes that will improve process efficiency and profitability. Really, it means is what it sounds like — identifying, improving, and maintaining processes within a business.

Passing a routine piece of paper to a co-worker is a business process. It’s when you establish rules and a method, either a manual method or technology-driven method, to govern how and when that piece of paper is distributed that you enter the realm of process management. That’s our specialty.

BPM Basics Resources

Get the BPM basics. View our resources below created to help you on your journey to finding the right solution for your business process improvement and process efficiency needs.

Process Director

Process Director BPM software combines the easiest and most efficient process management and digital process automation software in the industry with a rich set of workflow tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.

Check out these BPM examples to see how our customers in every sector are successfully using Process Director to prepare and deliver transparent, end-to-end digital applications offering engaging customer experience, robust business process governance, regulatory compliance, and smooth, efficient operations.

An Award Winning Platform

BP Logix and Process Director have won awards for innovation and excellence from many prestigious organizations, both domestically and abroad. Our most valued recognition, however, comes from our customers who have achieved goals beyond those they had originally imagined through their partnership with us.

Process Director offers:
• Unsurpassed ease of use
• Rapid time-to-value
• Rapid application development software

Why Utilize Workflow Management Software?

Every efficient organization wants to do more with fewer resources. Technology can be an enabler of these goals, but only if the tools used are accompanied with an effective foundation of processes that support business goals. And as organizations seek to go faster in today's hyper competitive and increasingly connected world, they are relying on processes to enable change, create sustainable growth, and help them adapt to changing business and technology conditions. Enter workflow management software.

When organizations apply process to their operations, they not only can improve how work gets done, but it also provides continuous insight into where improvement can be made. Ultimately, efficient workflow management software leads to cost reduction, worker productivity optimization, better engagement with customers, and even higher profit margins. Without process and workflow management discipline, human, physical, and intellectual assets cannot be effectively deployed to meet business goals. And if goals aren’t met, there’s no chance for an organization to grow and establish a repeatable, sustainable model for continued growth.

Much of this is because both as methodology and practice, business process management (BPM) and workflow management have been designed to bridge the efforts of IT and business units. Both are proven, effective methodologies for disparate teams to collaborate in order to achieve better business outcomes through the use of technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HduhwGtEMKI

Process Director: A Different Kind of Workflow Management Software

Process Director's workflow management software is equipped with powerful features that provides organizations with the ability to manage, automate and report on their critical business processes. Workflow software is foundational component of “lean BPM”, and is integral in achieving not only automated, but also fully optimized, processes.

Managed through a browser, Process Director requires no programming expertise, thus enabling business or IT users to easily create and modify workflows according to their business needs and processes. Workflow software definitions enable organizations to capture and manage their business processes according to their own policies and procedures.

In summary, Process Director is a workflow management software that enables businesses to model their review and approval procedures, automate the process, monitor the results, and satisfy their business process management needs.

The Power of Low-Code Electronic Forms

Your digital applications deserve a great user interface. Developing a flexible and responsive UI on your own used to demand lots of time, lots of programmers, and lots of money.

Not anymore.

Process Director empowers you to create beautiful reports, dynamic smart forms and electronic forms, and rich graphical dashboards—no code required. IT organizations are slashing their development backlog by utilizing Process Director’s fast, cost-effective workflow management software for building powerful user interface elements. Business units benefit from the ability to develop mock-ups or even fully-functional dynamic e-forms using their own “citizen developers”, thereby fusing the business’s intimate knowledge of the customer and the desired customer experience with IT’s strength in building essential rules, logic, and governance features, all backed by modern workflow tools.

Process Timeline™

Process Timeline is a workflow engine with workflow automation technology that provides an easy way to compose, manage, and modify your business process. Key data, such as process duration and critical path, are available at a glance using a Gantt-style chart automatically produced and updated as your process is running. At the same time, Process Timeline is unmatched by any other iBPMS software solutions or any other workflow management software available.

Extensible Workflow Management Software

Process Director offers these workflow management software capabilities to enable you to extend your applications with custom features:

• A broad range of web services and REST APIs that can control virtually every Process Director action or access data, reports, or metadata
• A comprehensive C#/ASP.NET software developer kit to create scripts, extensions, or custom tasks (available via the Process Director SDK)

Process Director workflow management software also enables you to insert custom logic at virtually any point in the life of a workflow. And you can do so without worry: we have a great track record of backward compatibility for SDK specifications, and that’s a tradition we plan on continuing.

Document Workflow Management Software

Process Director offers a document workflow management system that empowers you to rapidly create filtered searches and tabular reports with a few keystrokes. Whether you want to review task lists, browse document folders, or search for a specific item, Process Director Knowledge Views within its workflow management software are easy to configure and even easier to use. And Knowledge Views aren’t only for display: you can export the results, automatically trigger processes, or even use the data to drive decision making in running forms, processes, or rules. If you’re looking for brilliant graphical reports, turn to Process Director’s Advanced Reporting component to produce colorful, real-time charts and graphs, suitable for interaction, email, or printing.

Web Based & Mobile Friendly Digital Transformation

The applications you create with Process Director are web apps: all you and your users need is a browser to view reports, submit requests, manage processes, etc. Any browser: all recent-release browsers on all major platforms (including iOS and Android) are supported. Your knowledge workers aren’t tied to their desks, and your applications shouldn’t be, either. Navigate Process Director’s responsive UI, create mobile-friendly interfaces for your own applications, and take advantage of native mobile BPM capabilities such as geolocation and photos—no app store download required. Just boarded a flight without WiFi? No problem: you can even take action via email. The tools that Process Director workflow management software offers enables you to do your work wherever you are, whenever you’re ready.

Application Integration and Workflow Management Software

Process Director-driven workflow applications don’t live in a vacuum. Most businesses today rely on a plethora of applications, information, and services, both within and beyond your datacenter. As an intelligent BPM platform, Process Director BPM and workflow automation software ties these disparate workflow and BPM applications together, making it easy for you to access, combine, and update information, whatever the source.

Process Director offers comprehensive BPM solutions including case management software and workflow automation software capabilities that enables both IT and business users to create robust business process management and workflow solutions to address a variety of business challenges. Whatever sector your organization occupies, and whatever your function within that organization, we invite you to join thousands of others who now rely on Process Director as their workflow and business process management solution.

Digital Transformation Solutions

Process Director workflow and business process management solutions powers digital transformation across the enterprise, providing an innovative, no-code/low-code platform for digital solutions connecting you to your customers, suppliers, employees, and stakeholders.

Learn More

Workflow & BPM Solutions By Industry

Process Director workflow and business process management solutions play a key role in helping organizations in sectors including Advertising, Education, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing and other industries. View solutions by industry by scrolling over "Solutions" in the main navigation.

BPM & Workflow Solutions By Function

Process Director workflow and BPM solutions drives growth, reduces expenses, and mitigates compliance risk. Learn more about the business departments leveraging our advanced workflow and BPM solutions. View solutions by function by scrolling over "Solutions" in the main navigation.

Schedule A Free BPM Software Demo

Process Director is an award-winning low-code/no-code BPM software solution for building and operating workflow-driven business applications. Innovative and unique, Process Director is a business process management software that offers fast time-to-value, greater flexibility, and deeper insight into your business than any other workflow software or BPM solution. Schedule a live, interactive free BPM software demonstration of Process Director.

All organizations want to increase efficiency and operate at an optimal level with business process management (BPM). BPM Software, smart forms and workflow software help to create a business environment that is highly responsive, accountable, and compliant. Process Director BPM software (BPMS) provides the BPM tools required to automate all your business processes and improve your results.

Why Choose a BPMS (BPM Software) Solution?​

We all want more time and money. Businesses are no different. Business process management software (BPMS) setup takes some investment initially, but in the end, the benefits of intelligent BPM software are vast, not to mention measurable. Below are some reasons why organizations turn to Process Director BPMS software solutions:

• Integrated Business Rules Engine: Process Director's business rules engine uses advanced machine learning algorithms to empower users to rapidly implement better workflow and more complex business processes.
• No Programming: 100% web-based GUI workflow builder for business users on a bpm software foundation—no programming required.
• Web-Based Smart Forms: A faster, easier and more cost effective way to create an automated electronic forms system.
• Reporting and Process Intelligence: Process Director business process management software offers a variety of searching, reporting, business activity management (BAM), and process intelligence (BI) features.

Process Director is an Award Winning Business Process Management Software Solution

Process Director offers benefits around business process management including:

• Unsurpassed ease of use
• Rapid time-to-value
• No programming

Key Benefits of Process Director BPM Software (BPMS) and Workflow Software Solutions

• Transparency: It can be difficult for senior business leaders to gain a comfort level with the various hardware and software “black boxes” deployed by IT.  Process Director business process management software and workflow tools bridge that gap offering a solution that is fully customizable and extensible, and yet does not require programmers.
• Efficiency: If business process improvement (BPI) is important to a business—and in today’s world, it needs to be—then automation and metrics are a core requirement. Process Director business process management software measures the performance of each activity within a given process; as the process is executed over time, Process Director learns how its actual timeline varies from the original forecast. This unique capability, called predictive analysis, alerts process owners that upcoming activities may not complete on time, even before those activities have started.
• ROI: In any growing organization, the number of homegrown and off-the-shelf solutions accumulates pretty rapidly. Each one brings with it another team, another vendor, maintenance, updates, infrastructure, and training.  Process Director BPM implementation gives the CIO the opportunity to start replacing those one-trick-pony products with a flexible, customizable BPM tools addressing a huge variety of business needs in operations, finance, HR, IT, sales, and other areas. Fewer vendors, less maintenance, reduced training costs, smaller infrastructure.
• Improves Business Process Governance and Compliance: Improved process control, auditing, and monitoring help organizations to demonstrate business process governance and compliance. Replacing manual, paper-based processes with Process Director that offers a unique deployment for BPM compliance solutions such as automated, electronic forms and processes is an effective way to ensure users are in compliance.

Business Process Management Software Examples

Read specific BPM examples of how organizations use BP Logix’s customizable BPM software, Process Director, as their BPM solution. To start, check out City of West Allis and Columbus Technical College and see how these busy organizations used Process Director BPMS successfully to create process efficiency.

Automating Manual Processes

-Bill Kahlert

Solutions Director, Global IT Firm

Accelerate Digital Transformation With Business Process Automation

In 2009, BP Logix introduced Process Director with its revolutionary Process Timeline, the first business process modeling and orchestration workflow engine to offer business process automation solutions through predictive analysis tied to automatic behaviors such as notification, reassignment, and rerouting. Process Director customers have taken advantage of this workflow engine and its intrinsic ability to provide the earliest possible notice that a future milestone or deadline may be at risk, and to take immediate remedial action.

Prediction Is Just the Start

This advanced workflow engine provides unique predictive/responsive business process automation capabilities that grow from fertile soil: a carefully architected, utterly unique way of thinking about the design and execution of sophisticated, end-to-end, low-code/no-code digital applications.

No flowcharts. No programming. Rapid time-to-value. Process Timeline is the perfect business process automation solution to speed your organization’s digital transformation past the competition.

Process Timeline and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Now, Process Timeline delivers the power of BPM and artificial intelligence (AI) to your enterprise applications. Process Director’s machine learning (ML) technology enables you to customize both how predictions are made, and what response should be triggered, to a greater degree than ever before. Of course, like all of Process Director, the AI features are easy to configure and use by analysts and process owners—yet rich enough to be appreciated by data scientists.

Process Timeline and Process Director have received over 50 awards and recognitions, and that's part of the reason why organizations around the world continue to rely on Process Director for robust, compliant, and flexible digital solutions.

Process Timeline Features:

Process Timeline business process automation solutions are successfully being used by organizations in various industries to compose, manage, and modify business process. Key business process data such as process duration and critical path are available at a glance using a Gantt-style chart automatically produced and updated as your process is running. At the same time, it offers powerful business process modeling and business process automation solutions unmatched by any other BPM solution, including:

No Coding

Designed for business users, Process Director business process automation solutions enable you to build and deploy efficient, robust workflows and business processes, with no programming:

• Build rich, complex applications through point-and-click
• Intuitive graphical user interface facilitates rapid deployment and time-to-value

No Complex Flowcharts

Time is a critical component of any business process. Late activities—or activities that Process Timeline predicts will be late—are highlighted and easily identified. Time to completion for any activity or for the business process as a whole is also immediately available with this workflow engine. Traditional flowchart-style workflows simply cannot offer this level of insight into your business processes—insights that translate into business success:

• MS Project-like builder: list tasks, dependencies
• Automatically generates and updates a Gantt-style chart to show you, at a glance, how (and for how long) the process will run

No Surprises

Any workflow software can tell you when your task is due, or late. But only this workflow timeline software offers the earliest possible notification that some future task is predicted to be late. And it can do more than just notify you: this workflow engine can take direct action, escalating or rerouting activities to account for the predicted delay:

• Business process automation solutions that continuously evaluate your business processes, based on past experience and current status
• A key part of BPM technology that predicts when any future activity is likely to be delayed, offering the earliest possible opportunity for manual or automatic intervention

No Unnecessary Delays

Ideal for automating, tracking and reporting on complex processes, Process Director business process management software is perfect for “activity-based” processes with well-defined milestones. Unlike a traditional workflow system, its workflow engine features “implicit parallelism" modeling and execution. Process designers no longer have to explicitly identify which steps can be run in parallel, a time-consuming and error-prone analysis:

• Every timeline activity will execute as soon as it is eligible to do so
• At any given moment, every activity that can be running, is running

No Excuses For Business Process Improvement

As your business evolves, you will want to analyze the performance of your business process (and your process actors), to find ways for business process improvement to make it even more efficient:

• A workflow engine with business process automation technology that records every action taken by every process participant (human or automated), ensuring total accountability
• Includes BPM technology that points you directly at those activities within your process that are consuming the most time, so you can quickly focus your process improvement efforts where they will have the most impact
• Drill down to review historical information about any activity, or to see how different actors have performed within a given task
• Reset analytics at any time to get a fresh perspective

Schedule a Free Software Demonstration

Schedule a free demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how this unique business process management software platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

Our roots are in the software industry however we are involved in our communities, work in philanthropic and non-profit organizations, and write books. We are grateful to be a part of a BPM company that thrives on challenge and rewards creativity and innovation.

As evidenced by multiple awards for business, BPM software, business process automation software and process excellence, we are a BPM company that is also recognized as a key partner to customers across industries and geographies.

We hope that knowing more about us and our business process management software – and what we do for our customers – will be the reason to check us out further. And we invite you to start that conversation.

More About Us

BPM Awards - View our BPM awards. We are proud to be recognized for our successful customer implementations and technological achievements.

Press Releases - Our central area for all our press releases and the latest information regarding us and our products.

Media Coverage - Learn more about the latest industry news, media coverage and announcements from us.

BPM Success Stories - Learn more about our customer and their success stories.

BPM Examples - View use cases for specific industry verticals.

Tell Us Your Story

BP Logix is a BPM company that helps companies change the way they operate through business process management (BPM). We know process, and we have discovered that it is not merely the movement of a decision, document or action along a workflow. Rather, process is an always-changing and flexible way of thinking about, and applying, a better way of doing things. What things? The things that are important to you.

Successful BPM implementation with our BPM software comes from us knowing your story and recognizing how we can help you meet your goals. That knowledge allows us to partner with you so we can collaborate to change the fundamentals of your business.

You know what you want to achieve. Tell us your story so we can help you get there.

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Schedule a free demonstration of Process Director BPM platform and discover for yourself how this unique business process management software platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

The Possibilities Of BPM and IoT Data

If knowledge is power, then the seeds of its unfettered potential lie within the humble dataset. And yet, until recently, these seeds have struggled to take root, kept in check by the unforgiving soil of paper-based records, clunky ETL interactions, and stale or corrupted information.

Here at the dawn of the digital transformation era, however, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are fully blossoming. The power of BPM and IoT is unleashed, and it is revolutionizing our understanding of data and its possibilities.

BPM and Internet of Things (IoT) Drive Predictive Analytics

Process Director's AI capabilities analyze data from an array of sources to achieve that elusive element of control that has long been coveted by businesses: predictability. Accurate and consistent predictability requires tremendous amounts of data—the more that is fed into the AI algorithms, the more intelligent your applications become. And that means that the vast amount of data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices provide the high-octane fuel powering Process Director's machine learning driven predictive analytics.

The Solution

Of course, Process Director has always provided the integration and connectivity tools you need to transform information into intelligent action. From databases, to social media, to cloud services, Process Director can mine critical data, wherever it may live. And the platform's unique data virtualization technology marries robust governance to easy, no-code development, so that sharing and reusing your critical information is easy.

Knowledge is power.  What could your organization do with IoT data and the power unleashed by Process Director?

Schedule a Free Demonstration

Request a free demonstration of Process Director, and discover for yourself how this unique BPM software platform empowers you to innovate, respond to market demands, and delight your customers. Or, contact us to learn more about how our digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their BPM and IoT challenges.