No matter their size, private/public designation, endowment, or geography, all colleges and universities are experiencing major changes due to COVD-19. While large universities have received the most attention for the challenges they’re experiencing, it’s often smaller schools that are hit hardest. 

Faced with limited budgets and fewer resources, small colleges are already dealing with the challenges of meeting enrollment demands, effectively servicing students and being nimble enough to adapt to change. With major disruptions for all schools because of COVID-19, smaller schools have to make moves to be prepared for navigating uncertain territory. 

There is no question that smaller schools are an essential part of higher education. They usually have better student-to-faculty ratios, offer specialized academic tracks and are better options for students who want to be part of a smaller environment. 

Small liberal arts colleges emphasize a broad array of academic disciplines, while some regional schools focus more on training for professional services like fire services, nursing and other service-related professions. 

Higher education workflows address key technology needs

The changes that stem from the coronavirus have thrown everyone for a loop. Schools are having to build solutions immediately to address current needs and they are developing plans for an uncertain future. The major difference between big and small schools in the current education landscape comes down to technology and how it’s applied to solve these problems. 

However, budget restrictions of smaller schools prevent massive student relationship management systems and armies of software developers that spin up solutions as needed. While scale of technology may always be an issue, the approach to problem-solving can be addressed by schools of any size. Workflow can be the defining factor for schools being agile because workflow is foundational to how problems are solved, irrespective of the technology that’s used.

Establishing a workflow & process management foundation

Effective workflow, however, is more than just a series of tactical activities. It aligns with user intent and is applied to the unique technology functionality required of a college’s students, faculty and other stakeholders. 

It also helps to create behaviors that maximize usage and deliver meaning to users. This is especially important when higher education is changing behaviors for things like online learning, applying for financial aid, hiring and offering new types of student services. 

A workflow foundation will also help when even those new solutions change as schools change regulations to adapt to new governmental and health and safety requirements.

The three most critical aspects of aligning workflow, technology and university needs 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 irrespective of the rate and type of change they will experience in the short- and near-term. Let’s look more closely at how these factors can support the needs of smaller schools:

Workflow & process management simplifies digital experiences

Process Director provides a great example of how ease of use can translate into effective solutions. It enables the creation of 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 the information they need and take action on things like class scheduling, financial aid, and other relevant events. The teams who build the apps benefit from Process Director’s agile approach to adapt as needed to increase adoption and productivity. 

While Process Director is easy to use for those who need to build applications rapidly and continuously meet changing needs.

Workflow & process management provides context for data

Small college 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 attention 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.

The Importance of Communication

Students and faculty are being bombarded with emails, texts, direct messages and a host of other types of communication in order to get the information they need. However, that information can go unnoticed if it doesn’t fit with how they are accustomed to consuming news and alerts. 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 adapt to changes, stay on top of opportunities and always be current about how they can interact with their school.

Final thoughts

No school, irrespective of size, can meet the demands of the post-COVID-19 world on an application-by-application basis. Small schools that want to align their goals and processes to student behaviors will need to apply change 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.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

"There's no good time for a pandemic. But for admissions, this has got to be the worst time.”
- Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University

For millions of current and incoming college students, the financial, health, and social factors surrounding COVID-19 are causing them to change their higher education plans. As a result, college admissions and IT departments are going to have to change their normal processes to adapt to the needs of a whole new wave of college students.

Consider the findings from a recent poll about incoming college freshmen: One in six high-school seniors who expected to attend a four-year college full time before the coronavirus outbreak are now planning to embark on a different path in the fall of 2020. Three out of five students who still plan on attending college are seriously concerned about their ability to afford college.

The reality of all this uncertainty creates a huge workload for college admissions officials and IT leaders who will need to develop new software applications processes to address a variety of admissions issues, including:

• Enrollment deferment 
• Changing admissions requirements
• Communication with students
• Timelines and plans for reopening campuses, which includes facilities and scheduling

These are just some of the issues that schools are dealing with, none of which can be addressed in a simple fashion. For IT departments, the key is agility. Decisions are being made by school leadership on a daily basis which impacts enrollment, admissions for the fall semester and beyond. 

Low-code development starts with data, builds with process

University data and content is currently stored in a wide variety of applications. They range from the basic (spreadsheets and graphics) to complex (some data analytics solutions and massive ERP systems). All of that data serves a purpose, and in a time when colleges are moving quickly to create new and updated admissions and enrollment processes, the data has to be able to be called into use whenever and wherever it can be most applicable. Information is important, but using it in context with other data is where schools stand to be most effective. To do this requires being able to build software apps quickly and for specific purposes.

The best way to bring new applications to productive use is to reduce development time, and when addressing the changing landscape in response to COVID-19, speed is critical. To meet this challenge, low-code development has emerged as an efficient way to create software. It is a methodology and approach that uses reusable, pre-built components of code and applies them in a drag-and-drop fashion that simplifies the coding effort and accelerates the pace at which applications are built.

Rapid application development for the post-COVID university

The promise of low-code development is attained through speed, efficiency, and the democratization of technology. Business needs can be met through rapidly-built applications that can be created by non-programmers. All of a sudden, solutions can be created and put to use by those closest to business problems. At a time when the future is difficult to plan for, this level of agility will give college IT departments their best chance at delivering solutions for these unique times.

It’s easy to think of low-code as a rip-and-replace substitute for all application development, but in this case, it’s more about enabling university administrators to iterate on their changing admissions application requirements.  It also puts people who are closest to problems in a position to create or at least initiate solutions. But much of the ability to do that corresponds to understanding admissions needs, changing academic requirements, and the available data the school can work with. Even though low-code is much easier than complex development, it still demands time, a plan, and trial-and-error. 

There is no one single system of record that can be used when changes are happening so quickly; colleges typically rely on a variety of different student information management and other types of enterprise planning apps. The key becomes, then, the ability to integrate data from those sources into custom-built apps to serve their changing needs. Speed will be critical to developing these new apps. Schools will not have time for traditional software development cycles, which means non-developers will have to be included in the process of scoping and building apps. 

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

Changes happening now in higher education as a result of the coronavirus pandemic are undoubtedly having a major impact on students all across the country. The way they engage with classes and benefit from various services will undergo sweeping changes as social distancing becomes more normalized into every day human behavior. 

There have been hero-like efforts by many who have conceived and delivered short-term solutions; these are the people in IT who have had to integrate systems, build custom apps, and generally drive a completely new face of the university in record time. But their solutions are helping with changes that affect more than just students.

What many may not realize is this: for schools to remain viable and adhere to their mandates, they will need to change their HR practices in order to create a workforce that can deliver the next phase of higher education. To do that will require HR processes that enable them to hire, reassign, and manage the right people to deliver solutions for the new world of higher education.

Agility to meet changing HR needs in higher education

Higher education strategies for HR have typically been built around hiring that’s mapped to long-term growth plans. But in the face of COVID-19, these plans are largely thrown out the window while schools move rapidly to adapt to their new and changing needs. As a result, a new HR playbook must be created.

Some schools have established hiring freezes. Others have reduced staff who were performing outdated functions. Others recognize that they need people who can turn their campuses into innovative engines that can recreate what a university is going to be in the post-COVID world. For some, that means hiring for these roles, while for others, it means reassigning existing staff and faculty. For each of these situations, schools need to develop effective workflows for smooth transitions and ensure they have the staff they need to limit disruption.

All of these situations require some form of organizational orchestration which can be driven by effective workflow automation. At most schools, the goal is to do whatever is necessary to finish out the school year and maintain the effective delivery of classes. But forward-thinking colleges are not only delivering for the short-term. Long-term strategies can wait, but limiting disruption by deploying the right staff is a priority. But it takes more than a checklist to ensure that goals are met. 

Using workflow automation to meet immediate and long-term needs

Staffing changes involve many organizational and personal data. In order to create smooth transitions, these changes must be supported through data from HR information systems and financial applications. This enables a title change or reporting structure to become officially recognized and creates a clear view into an employee’s job description and responsibilities. It means that schools can reallocate employees where they can most be beneficial in meeting new challenges and sets up the college to be agile once a “new normal” begins to take shape. This is clearly important for the college - the HR team is able to quickly adapt as needed. But it also takes into account the issues of privacy of individual staff information.

To make this all happen requires a variety of forms, documents, requests, and decisions to be reviewed and acted on. In a normal environment, the reliance on paper forms and manual intervention for decision-making milestones might be tolerated. But with massive pressure to conserve money and be highly efficient during this time of great change, HR and IT teams have to pull together all these things into an integrated, rapidly moving set of workflows in record time. 

Many BP Logix higher education customers are already using Process Director to handle these types of issues. Schools like the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)  and Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), near Salt Lake City, cite their ability to be flexible and quickly develop new processes as major advantages of using Process Director’s workflow automation capabilities as core to their foundation.

With a limited budget and vague goals, all college HR and IT teams need to be able to innovate to hire, reassign, and perform other essential tasks related to having an efficiently operating workforce. Process Director delivers capabilities like workflow automation and lightweight application development functionality that enable higher education HR teams to do the following:

• Rapidly build processes and create forms to collect new and existing HR information housed in existing applications, and to be able to integrate that with updated information from the employees themselves.
• Create time-dependent milestones that use automated communication and workflow to ensure that the right decision-makers are included.
•  Efficient approval handling.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

Workflow automation can intelligently apply relevant data from various applications and documents into a shareable profile of each employee. This case management approach provides clarity for all workflows that touch each employee so that important decisions that impact their working situation can be achieved faster and with greater context. Process Director also has native integration with popular HR systems like PeopleSoft and other enterprise apps which makes it easy for non-developer to build workflows with the full complement of various application modules that are relevant to employee management.

COVID-19 has clearly changed all aspects of higher education and will test the ability of university leaders to maintain the viability of their schools. When they are able to build the right school with the right people, colleges and universities will be prepared to meet the demands of the new normal. Through the application of workflow automation, colleges will be equipped to meet both the short-term changes and long-term HR demands required in our changing world.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

College students face a world that is far more complex than it was even 20 years ago. They must navigate more than only their academic environment; the world they’ve grown up in, and the path for a post-college life present challenges that have left many with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. Without a doubt, this is a massive issue. Many administrators are applying innovative ways of helping students through individualized care, supported through effective approaches like case management.

Student Mental Health Trends

Emotional and mental health issues like depression and anxiety have become far more prevalent among today’s higher education students, with many feeling that these issues are among the biggest barriers to fully engaging and performing well in school. More than 16% of  students reported that depression had a negative impact on how they performed with academic and social issues, with anxiety impacting more than 24% of students. Mental illness is clearly affecting far more young people, so it’s important for schools to provide mental health support for their students and for students to have opportunities to seek the help they need.

The management of mental and behavioral health requires different processes and the coordination of many people. Effectively administering services has become more sophisticated and requires the input of a broader array of medical and university stakeholders, and more data from a variety of sources. The key is to focus these inputs and resources so they can deliver better outcomes for students in the form of treatment, medical care, intervention, or other avenues. The most effective way of achieving positive results is through applying a case management approach. This provides insights and context for each individual student who is receiving services and treatment.

Mental health case management has to incorporate strategies from multiple fields and departments across the institution. It includes social workers, psychology professionals, and medical doctors, and the information they provide about the student must be centrally collected and accessible so they can collaborate. Despite its complicated nature, best practices for behavioral health case management can be summarized by three guiding principles: individualized care, professional responsibility, and a comprehensive approach to treatment. Each of these is an umbrella under which many aspects of effective case management fall. Let’s look at these in more detail:

Individual student care: Case management takes into account that not all situations are the same. Effective case management must take each client’s unique combination of situations and needs into account. This means being able to pull relevant data from different data repositories to get a comprehensive picture of the student’s situation. It might include:

• Background: student demographics and personal information from administrative applications can provide a picture of the student’s family situation and support structure.
• Academic performance: information coming from grades, projects, and reviews may give insight into trends about where, and when, students have been both successful and unsuccessful academically.
• Medical history: university healthcare and insurance information will provide information about substance abuse, medications, or other factors that might contribute to students’ situations.

Professional responsibility: academic organizations are dealing with very sensitive information, so case managers and social workers need a special kind of discipline. The two most important factors in maintaining a disciplined and responsible approach is through, 1) effective documentation, and 2) patient privacy:

• Documentation: higher education health professionals and their support staff must maintain accurate, up-to-date records of their clients that are easily accessible when necessary, and can be used in processes that deliver services. While in the past that meant detailed, hand-written notes kept in a physical folder, the transition to digital patient records has facilitated more diligent documentation along with more streamlined coordination of care.
• Privacy: college and university healthcare providers have to abide by compliance mandates to protect student privacy. A case management approach can ensure guidelines so that patient information is only shared for specific needs and only with student permission. Those guidelines will be used to share information where necessary and permitted, and prevent data from getting into the wrong hands.

Comprehensive approach: successful behavioral health case management requires an understanding of all aspects of a student's life. The right case management solution will connect all relevant providers so as to better integrate clients' medical, social, educational, and vocational information and then apply that information into effective treatment. This treatment may come from university health services, or through contracted arrangements with other providers. But by coordinating through a single case management application, academic organizations have a much better way of achieving the kind of success that’s needed to address very serious problems, and help students become successful.

Case management is a powerful way to enable higher education professionals to be effective contributors to the successful delivery of student health. It also enables integration of relevant data, and timeline-driven workflows that can give professionals visibility into the best courses of action. Case management enables organizations to build and manage digital applications that coordinate the efforts of different groups, yet can connect them all to the same goals. This creates a powerful framework that helps university departments and the power of their IT stack to achieve truly powerful outcomes for students in need.

Process Director can be used to apply a case management approach for student mental health services. It allows schools to integrate data and documents from various applications into a shareable profile of students under care. This provides clarity for all workflows that touch the students during their treatment so that important decisions that impact their mental health can be achieved faster and with greater context.

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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By now we know that business situations ranging from customer interactions to transactional exchanges are hardly the linear creatures of the past, and now require context and ongoing coordination. Because of this, case management software solutions have surged to the forefront as a natural replacement to the linear processes of yore. Cases involve actions by many different people, both inside and outside of the organization, with every action, message, response and document generated becoming a part of the whole. That being said, case management software solutions still face some issues around coordination, communication and the actions threaded therein.

Process Director BPM Software's Milestone Feature

With Process Director’s new Milestones feature, the goal of actionable communication within adaptive case management software solutions has now been achieved. Not only does Process Director’s Milestones feature allow you to define context within cases, as well as comment and collaborate around milestone events or conditions, it also gives you the power to train the milestone as an event itself, with the ability to drive process. With this, Milestones serves as a bridge not only between employees within a case, but also from the technical-to-business side and onward toward streamlining all-round best practices.

This is why BP Logix Process Director is the perfect fit for BPM and case management software solutions:
• Built on a formalized BPM and case management framework
• No code/low code BPM interface allows for adaptive case management solutions, such as workflows, to be created by the user rather than developers.
• Multimodal run-time patters combining sequential flow style with both event-driven and time-driven execution.
• Automatically adapt and respond to incoming events and ad-hoc changes.
• Milestones component allows actionable communications that can also drive process

As well, the patented business process automation software technology, Process Timeline™, will allow you to:
• Know exactly where you are in the state of the case.
• Know exactly how much longer it will take for the case to be completed.
• Have clear vision into the compensating steps or remedial actions that need to be launched at any given time.

Analyst Nathaniel Palmer has this to say about Process Director’s Process Timeline: “What continues to set Process Director apart from its BPM and Case Management software competitors is the Process Timeline™ — an executable process model that presents a Gantt chart-oriented notation. The Process Timeline captures time as a formal process dimension in ways not possible with other models.”

The Trifecta Of Process Director’s Case Management Software Solutions

With a solid case management framework in place, and Process Timeline acting as a major dimensional enhancement, Milestones then finishes the trifecta to allow actionable communication to reach its pinnacle— giving your business the opportunity for stream-lined clarity within adaptive case management.

Request a Free Demo

Process Director sets the pace for your BPM and digital transformation. 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 business process management software have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

What is content without context? At best, the content is merely an excess of useless information that sits redundant and obnoxious. At worst, it impedes users from completing their objective, and sends them on virtual wild goose chases.

Can we have context without content? Well, information fuels context, so unless your objective is to exist in a nebulous ether, devoid of meaning, then you will need information to achieve your goals.

What is Adaptive Case Management?

How to display and orient this data is the challenge of adaptive case management. Case management software could be defined as ‘adaptive’ if it relies not only on processes, but also a variety of Forms, roles and workspaces to create applications. Rather than act as a linear phenomenon, the application shares data across components without a set beginning or end, defying a history of constructive linear workflow structures. It is fluid, allowing for context-based structural changes, last moment decisions, and individualized attentions depending on each circumstance. And, of course, this cocktail of processes, forms and deadlines must still be managed, monitored and measured.

In other words, adaptive case management creates a harbor for easily accessible, highly navigable data that can be filtered for omission or inclusion depending on the situation. The applications built  supply users with what they need when they need it, all without forcing them to search outside the context of the case to find answers.

Process Director BPM and Adaptive Case Management Solutions

The award-winning Process Director, with its Process Timeline™ capabilities, has long been considered a pioneer of adaptive case management.

“Market expectations have evolved in the direction where Process Director has already been. This is certainly visible with Process Timeline, which beyond the time-based dimension supports the multimodal run-time patterns required for Case Management, combining sequential flow style with both event driven and time-driven execution, as well as checklists and ad hoc activities.” – BPM.com First Impressions

Process Director provides an award-winning BPM software that combines an easily modifiable and intuitive interface with a highly scalable, low-code/no-code, rapid application development platform environment. Process Director BPM and adaptive case management solutions include:

• Integration: Fully integrated, out of the box, into the Process Director environment. No additional options to purchase; no additional components to learn.
• Reporting: Sophisticated, case-aware applications and reports.
• Documents: Configurable case folders for fast access to all case-related processes, documents, and data.
• Import: Automatic (batch) or drag-and-drop import of documents and data into appropriate case folders.
• Time: Multimodal run-time patterns combining sequential flow style with event-driven, time-driven, and decision-driven execution.
• No coding: Designed from the ground up for the “citizen developer”; users do not need to be programmers to build rich, responsive digital, adaptive case management applications.
• Migration: Built-in application integration and migration tools, enabling users to add case management software behavior to existing Process Director BPM applications and workflow applications, quickly and easily.
• Process Timeline: The easiest and fastest way to configure and deploy the predictive, alert processes that lie at the heart of your digital business.

Request a Free Demo

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 BPM and digital transformation solutions have helped our customers conquer their digital challenges.

What is Case Management Software?

Case management software pulls together processes, data and rules and actively assesses, coordinates, and plans every aspect of a given case ultimately working toward time-based goals. For our purposes, a "case" is a group of processes, transactions, or responses that define a complex activity, and which can be tracked over a period of time. A case usually involves actions by many different people, both inside and outside of the organization. Every action, message, response, and document generated during this complex activity becomes part of the case.. To further illustrate what a case could look like, consider these examples:

• A case manager is in charge of complaints at a cable company
• A case manager works for companies providing assisted living services to determine and meet the needs of a client with special needs
• A case manager oversees orders at a factory

Because most cases are complex, meaning there may be a number of processes launched sequentially or in parallel, it usually requires the work of several people.  These processes sometimes can't be predetermined and could cause delays in the overall case or business event. For example, one person may need to determine a time line for everyone involved and inform those same people of new developments while another person makes sure all documents are signed and shipments are sent and received. Even if there is only one person with the title of "case manager" assigned to a specific case, they almost always have others who work with them to achieve results.

Why Case Management Software is Important to Businesses?

Like practically everything else in the 21st century, modern management has been made easier thanks to the right computer software. Case management software puts the necessary information where you need it and when you need it so that you don’t have to concern yourself with the process as much as you do the critical steps required for the case.

Case management software is often used for time tracking, deadline setting, document management, billing, estimates, and keeping a database of relevant information including contact information among other things. This software can take the place of other software, like CRMs and enterprise document workflow solutions, giving you one program that covers all the bases.

Adaptive case management software allows businesses to be more organized by increasing accountability and communication among teams and between departments. This ultimately allows business processes to run more smoothly and efficiently.

How Process Director BPM Software Works as a Solution

Process Director BPM software by BP Logix is an extremely easy-to-use solution. And we aren’t just saying that.

Our BPM software does not require that you have any programming experience. Its interface is very intuitive, allowing you to quickly and effortlessly tailor the entire process to a specific project. It really does pay for itself in little time.

Process Director's Process Timeline is an advanced BPMN modeling and business process automation software that provides time-based analysis with the most updated charts and data. This in turn helps users:

• Where they are in the case or business event
• The amount of time it will take the overall case or business event to be completed
• Any steps or remedial processes that need to be started at any given time

Since much of the heavy lifting is covered by the software, more time is freed up for you to get more done in a smarter and quicker way. Put simply, Process Director simply makes a case manager’s job easier.

Process Director has received critical acclaim from analysts in a variety of industries, but we feel this statement from a BPM.com report sums it up nicely.

“It is entirely fair to say that in many ways and areas of capability, market expectations have evolved in the direction where Process Director has already been. This is certainly visible with Process Timeline, which beyond the time-based dimension supports the multimodal run-time patterns required for Case Management, combining sequential flow style with both event-driven and time-driven execution, as well as checklists and ad hoc activities.”

Don't get hung up on the BPM vs case management software differences. You can have both with Process Director BPM software. If you are a case manager interested in BPM and workflow tools, consider Process Director. Contact us for your own free BPM software demo.

Image Source: http://hubpages.com/

BPM vs Case Management. There may be some confusion between BPM and case management and it’s important to understand the differences, especially when searching for solutions for better case management, improved business process management, or both. Let’s clear it up.

What is BPM?

What is BPM? BPM, or  business process management, is the term used to describe the overall management of workflow processes in an enterprise- whether business, agency, or non-profit. Overall, it focuses on individual workflow processes and how well they are working. Each workflow process is independent of other workflow processes, but can be clustered in relationship into a timeline. For example, in HR, a process may be employee on-boarding. There is a specific set of documents to complete for each employee in order for the process to be completed. While some documents may have sub-steps, once all the items have been completed and approved, the file, and process, is complete.

Business process management looks at processes such as this in order to create more efficiency, such as in automating where appropriate, systematizing for consistency, and filing appropriately for quick retrieval- which are all possible with BPM software.

In traditional BPM, the processes, while they may have sub-processes, aren’t connected to each other. So, in this HR example, each employee will run through the process at any given time. The timeline is tied to the employee, so each time there is a new employee, the process runs, sometimes parallel with another employee going through the same process. The BPM model then assumes a processes will be mostly consistent.

What is Case Management?

What is case management? It is a group of processes, and therefore are more complex. Cases typically involve actions by multiple people and/or departments and case management works to organize, compile and track cases. While BPM puts emphasis on single processes, Case Management puts emphasis on the complete and complex unit of processes that make up a case.

An example of a case could then be an investigation. While there may be steps, the direction of those steps could be widely varied. And, it’s not just the outcomes that make it a case, but that the process itself is not consistent, as it would be in BPM. In case management, multiple people need to be able to complete their required tasks, but within the context of understanding of the case.

Again, if we use HR as an example, it could be a case of an employee injury. The employee may need to go to the doctor and be treated and released, or they may need to take a leave. Worker’s comp may be filed and they may have several doctor visits before returning to work, or they may be terminated. HR, Payroll, Operations, Medical Doctors, and Insurance may all have tasks to complete. This then, is a case.

BPM vs Case Management

Many businesses and non-profits have the need for both BPM and adaptive case management, and often the lines between the need for either is rather blurred. The reason we cover it is because some may believe they need one specific product or service only to discover their needs are more robust, more complicated, than the system or software they purchased. They become frustrated and may give up because they are trying to squeeze their cases and processes into a solution that doesn’t fit. So instead of thinking it as BPM vs case management, think of it as BPM and case management operating together to improve process efficiency.

Process Director BPM software from BP Logix was built with case management solutions in mind and is a core feature within the software. Are you ready to see for yourself if Process Director is the right fit for your BPM and case management software needs? Why choose BPM vs case management when you can have both. To learn more, contact us and speak to one of our software experts and schedule your free demonstration today.

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What if you could access all your needed client information on your computer, any computer, rather than a filing cabinet? What if it could be more secure, more robust, and easily accessible anytime, anywhere, and by only those who need it? This is the role of dynamic case management software and these solutions can be found in Process Director business process management software.

Process Director: BPM and Dynamic Case Management Software in One

Process Director BPM platform is a shared, cloud-based database of your client information. This means those who need the information can access it quickly and easily, and those who shouldn’t see it, won’t. Case management, or document management, begins with understanding who needs access and who doesn’t, and setting up permissions for that access. No longer tied to a file cabinet or single computer, Process Director’s cloud-based technology means you can manage cases remotely, retrieve information quickly, and even capture more accurate and robust information using e-forms.

Reporting, searching, and automation make Process Director business process management and dynamic case management software an attractive solution to companies that are searching for:

• Process efficiency
• Better management decisions to better meet compliance requirements
• To reduce costs

Process Director BPM and case management solutions allows users to easily share documents, calendars, lists, form data, and more with the most up-to-date information. Users can also set up alerts to notify employees of deadlines or other actions needed (including approvals).

With rapid application development software, electronic forms can be created, accessed and completed with a mobile device which also allows for seamless BPM application integration into already existing software programs and applications.

Capturing Time

As time progresses, cases change, and usually there is more than one person involved in the evolution. Process Timeline is a patented business process automation software is exclusive to Process Director business process management software and it lays out time in a Gantt chart model which adds the element of time to the management process. This allows for management of a case across several departments, such as Administrative, HR, Legal, and IT.Time is an element frequently missing from traditional workflow scenarios, meaning when one part of the equation is delayed (an approval sitting on the desk of the person on vacation, for example), the workflow comes to a halt. With intelligent software, alerts can be triggered when a deadline is likely to be missed so human intervention can step in to resolve it and keep things moving along.

Is Process Director The Right Dynamic Case Management Software Solution For You?

We welcome the opportunity to demonstrate the following features to see how powerful Process Director's business process management and dynamic case management software can be:

• Sophisticated case-aware reporting and applications
• Enterprise document workflow management system with easy-to-configure case folders for quick access to all case-related data and documents
• Designed for low code/no code BPM which means users can simply create workflows and forms without a developer
• Time-based business processes allow for event and time driven execution and decision-making and adapt to changes for ad hoc needs
• Simple application integration allows for importing or sharing of data from existing sources, with no additional options to purchase and no additional components to learn.
• Includes a unique set of BPM tools and workflow tools

Process Director business process management software redefines dynamic case management software with its ability to combine actionable communication with predictive analysis.

Want to learn more? Contact us today for a free BPM software demonstration of Process Director from a BP Logix business process management expert and learn how to speed your workflow, communication, and decision-making processes with BPM software.

BPM and Case Management solutions share a common bond; they are both approaches to managing work. In fact, here at BP Logix we see this bond becoming more relevant and are creating ways to intertwine both BPM and Case Management into Process Director.

But before we talk about how they work together, let’s first begin with a definition of both terms:

BPMInstitute.org defines Business Process Management as:

“The definition, improvement and management of a firm's end-to-end enterprise business processes in order to achieve three outcomes crucial to a performance-based, customer-driven firm: 1) clarity on strategic direction, 2) alignment of the firm's resources, and 3) increased discipline in daily operations.”

Whatis.com defines Case Management as:

“CM — sometimes called “advanced case management” (ACM) or “dynamic case management” (DCM) is a both a human- and a technology-based approach that is driven by incoming events. These events change the context of the information, requiring responses from caseworkers or other knowledge workers knowledge workers. DCM’s ultimate goal is helping such workers make faster, better and more accurate decisions.”

How BPM and Case Management Solutions Work Independently

When looking at the BPM approach on its own, process is the most important organizing construct around business activities and speaks to improvement in corporate performance as a by-product of managing and optimizing a company’s business processes. This practice is especially useful when processes can be repeated, and therefore accurately monitored and then improved. Practitioners of, and tools to support BPM refer to this analysis and modification as “optimizing a process”.

Process optimization works best when a specific process is tightly defined and repeatable in many individual instances over varied work cases.

On the other hand, case management solutions -- when in a vacuum -- are most effective when processes are encountered as a one-off; that is, they are not repeatable. It is most useful when employed in situations where the process(es) cannot be predicted in advance of the actual work.

For instance, a detective investigating a murder might have little idea where the clues will lead and will hardly be served by repeating the steps used in investigating unrelated crimes even if on the surface they seem similar. Adaptive case management solutions rely on the ability to communicate goals, vision, and intent as a rudder throughout the workflow lifecycle.

The critical difference between BPM and case management solutions lie in the predictability and the repeatability of how work is completed. BPM assumes a level of repeatability that leads to the pursuit and refinement of the process until it is considered a best practice. CM doesn’t assume that there is an order and structure to work; tasks can be approached and completed in different ways and in a different order depending on how events and other variables dictate, lending flexibility through acceptance of the changeable nature of the work.

How BPM and Case Management Solutions Work Together With Process Director

While there are critical differences between them that must be recognized when seeking to apply these approaches and when considering tools to support each methodology, there is also no reason you cannot look at them both together. By doing so, you may even maximize your results.

Yes, BPM assists in the upfront design and optimization of a predictable process and CM assists in enhancing communication and the collection of information for decision making. But together you can pull together process data and rules to respond expeditiously to business events which mean you are working toward time based goals.

Process Director is a BPM and Case Management solution that includes Process Timeline, a time-based dimension that supports the multimodal run-time patterns required for Case Management, combining sequential flow style with both event-driven and time-driven execution, as well as checklists of ad hoc activities. This design creates a robust system that maximizes both repetitive processes and unique, unpredictable processes with human decision making into one.

Want to learn more? Contact us today for a free demo from a BP Logix business process management expert and learn how to speed your workflow, communication and decision making processes with case management solutions combined with BPM software.

Many years ago Peter Drucker, the great management thinker, predicted the rise of what he called the "knowledge worker". As evidenced over time, Drucker was truly a thought leader. Today, we can acknowledge that we have arrived at “the place” Drucker envisioned: a place where almost all jobs require some element of knowledge work. Yet it is not true that everyone with a computer on his or her desk or a smartphone in his or her pocket qualifies as a knowledge worker.

The rise of the knowledge worker has also led to an impetus for business process management (BPM). BPM enables people to access more data. That, in turn, can facilitate new insights for knowledge workers who might not ‘normally’ have access to that same data.

Most enterprise applications run better and more efficiently when used by those who have what we call a ‘process mindset’. Of course, there are a variety of ways to use BPM to gain that process mindset and the insights that are derived from greater access to more kinds of data.

Case management software is a prime example. When case management software is paired with BPM software, business users can build, modify and manage sophisticated digital applications in a human-directed way. Case magnifies the effects of BPM because it is an agile way of integrating data from disparate sources and managing how it is used. As a result of detailed analytics, case management provides information that can be used to derive additional insights.

The true impact of BPM case management is best understood in the context of workflow. The market has a lot of BPM-only tools that rely on the "if, then" concept. They have been developed to manage sequential, time-driven events and operations. Yet many processes are more complex in what they deliver, who they touch and how they handle obstacles and changing conditions.

This is an important differentiator for case management because it is framed around processes that are not necessarily beholden to a timeline or a sequence— but are more often about the logic and actions taken within the process. A well-constructed adaptive case management solution can take into account things like business data (through the integration of information from different sources), business logic, deadlines, and insights derived from the data.

It is important to think about case management not as a "thing" like a project or a folder. Rather, it is the accumulation of all the elements that comprise the activity, all formed around the varying aspects of an issue, or case. The beauty of case management is that the goal is known, the premise understood, yet there is flexibility to pull in the necessary information so as to make better decisions based on deeper insights into the issues one is trying to solve.

Consider, for example, how a decision is made using a simple "T-Chart". We have all, at one time or another, sat down to weigh pros and cons of a T-Chart. To do that, we have to frame the outcome and provide details based on what we know. If it is buying a car, well, we know what we care about most that will sway us in making a decision. If gas mileage, air conditioning and color are critical, we would put them on the list. Maybe we do not care about cruise control and seat warmers, so we can exclude them. If cruise control contributed to gas mileage, and if better gas mileage could give you a better rebate, would that be a factor in your decision? All features have to be assessed and factored in at times independently, and at other times, collectively. A T-Chart (and most human brains), is incapable of calculating so many interconnected variables. Case management, however, is designed to do just that, and by doing so, provides users with an advantage in terms of perspective and understanding.

Peter Drucker also said, “The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.” If you apply that to today’s enterprise, you will recognize the difference between data and, as Drucker says, “Knowledge.” Knowledge brings understanding, and understanding leads to a better decisions.

Case management is a methodology that can help organizations better address and use the information it collects. In so doing, BPM case management solutions enables companies to optimize their most prized asset.