The pandemic has spurred the digitization of processes within every industry, but it hit institutions of higher education harder than most. Digital transformation (Dx) is essential, not only to provide services safely today, but to keep up with evolving student expectations. Higher education leadership needs to tackle key questions like . . . “How do I build a more connected student experience? How can I get faculty and staff on board and enthusiastic about digital transformation of their departments? How can digital transformation simplify processes for students?"

Defining Digital Transformation as it Applies to Higher Education

EDUCAUSE provides us with a great definition – “Digital transformation is a series of deep and coordinated culture, workforce, and technology shifts that enable new educational and operating models and transform an institution's business model, strategic directions, and value proposition.”

An Evolving, 3-Step Process

Step 1 - Digitization

Student facing forms, applications and other documents that used to be distributed in paper form via the sneaker net are now stored and completed online. Records and reports are ideally stored on the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere. Digitization has occurred gradually over recent decades, but paper forms still exist on campuses across the country, despite the challenges with COVID-19.

Step 2 - Digitalization

The process of digitalization is the collective utilization of technology for specific operational purposes, like research, administration functions, payroll, procurement, or online delivery of courses. Many of our customers have undergone digitalization of their departments, which offers encouraging green shoots of progress. The difference between digitalization and the final step: digital transformation is that Dx demands a coordinated effort to efficiently implement digitization for every practical purpose throughout the organization. 

Step 3 - Digital Transformation

This concept might be described as a global movement within and throughout an organization. A movement to transform the workforce's attitude, the company's culture, an effort to coordinate every department.  To steer, in this case, an entire educational institution's digitalization efforts in a strategic direction to increase value and deliver a better experience across the student journey from recruitment to graduation. This takes organizational willpower, strong leadership, and an increased level of cross-departmental coordination. 

Digital transformation can be a daunting task for leadership and IT teams, a time-consuming effort at reprogramming, of continuing support as staff members strive to fully understand their role in adapting to and driving change. It must be more than a task for the IT team if it's truly going to be successful, though IT has a strategic position as both a driver and implementer. Ultimately, institutional leadership must sponsor an organization-wide mandate. Organizational silos must be busted to deliver lasting change.

A global solution for a movement encompassing every department

By investing in a platform built for driving digital transformation in Higher Ed, designed for the needs of a higher education institution, implementation can be accomplished without extensive IT resources. A low-code/no-code platform requires no software development expertise to digitalize processes across departments. With the right coordination, business users and students alike can help the organization make great strides in Dx.  

BP Logix offers a simple, low-code/no-code solution for bringing your Digital Transformation strategy together through efficient digitalization across departments.

Some ways our Higher Ed customers have utilized our platform to drive Dx:

• To create a seamless experience for students in enrollment and registration by connecting applicable data from different legacy platforms, to surface elsewhere to students in online forms. .
• To automate manual HR processes.
• To save hours of development time automating financial applications.

Benefits backed by customer testimonials:  

John Rezendes, Director of IS Operations at Stanislaus State commented on the system's simplicity:

“Process Director gives us a suite of tools we can use without needing a lot of development experience. It's cutting development time at least by half to get an electronic form and a backend workflow up and running and working for our students on campus.”

Eddie Serrano, Deputy Director for Research Business and Operations at UNC mentioned the ease of coordinating data.

"With Process Director, we were able to quickly modify existing financial forms — Expense Reimbursement, Invoice Payment, Purchase Order Request — to track COVID-19-relatedexpenses." . . . "Our new workflow also allows us to easily seek other necessary approvals according to procedural changes instituted by the University."

 The easiest way to implement digital transformation is through the combination of an organization wide initiative and the right automation platform designed for Higher Ed. 

Interested in learning more about how your university can use a low-code platform to jump start your digital transformation initiative? View a demo of Process Director. Watch our webinar "Process Automation Solution Tailored for Higher Education" .

Automating processes is easier to do today than ever before. Most workers have an understanding of how automation impacts their work, and IT teams are automating increasing numbers of business-critical tasks. Ultimately, automation reduces operational costs and improves productivity, so it is a no-brainer as a top priority for almost any company. You can find more on how to stand up an automation initiative here.

In order to actually deliver on the automation promise, however, IT teams need to be selective about what processes they automate, and how they reconcile their automation efforts with company goals. Without a plan based on specific goals, time, money, and resources are misspent and it prevents more important processes from getting priority. That’s frustrating for the internal team members who rely on process improvement, but the real impact is felt when companies see their growth slowed while they waste time trying to implement the wrong things.

With that in mind, consider that automation works best for repetitive tasks that typically suck a lot of time from humans. Also, think about how machine learning and artificial intelligence can deliver advantages in some things that humans might typically complicate.

Your team does not have unlimited time, and the business cannot stop while you figure out your priorities. So, it’s best to start your list of automation projects where you can get the biggest potential impact, along with the highest probability of success.

Identifying which processes need automation requires focus on the part of IT and business team leaders. It’s challenging to agree on how to move forward, but with a well-formed plan, teams can create an effective priority-based list of automation projects. The first step will require exploration and discovery, which can be built with a standardized methodology for evaluating and prioritizing the right processes, and in the order, they should be automated. This approach will enable a defined set of criteria to determine which processes are good candidates for process automation.

The team tasked with this needs to explore these issues and questions:

• What are the current pain points our company faces that could be potentially solved through process automation?
• Does automation of these processes align with company goals?
• If we automate, do we get ROI, and will the cost to automate be absorbed through these savings?
• Do we have the expertise and resources available to perform the necessary tasks to automate a given process?

The answers you get from the above list is a starting point, but armed with a set of potential processes, your team now needs to get into “brass tacks” and determine if you can actually take the necessary steps to automate. When looking at your project candidates, see if they meet these criteria:

• Are prone to human error
• Operate with frequency
• Have repetitive elements
• Can be integrated with other processes or applications
• Use a structured format for data
• Can be performed in a continuous fashion (e.g., are not dependent on specific hours of the day when they run)

With these questions answered, you should be able to prioritize your list of automation projects. The next step is to create general requirements for these projects. This list of requirements should include the following:

• Executive sponsor
• Key stakeholders
• Goals
• Project milestones
• Document requirements and needs; e.g. when a document is needed, where can it be accessed from, and where will it be stored?

Your team should now be comfortable with a list of projects, prioritized in such a way that they can be achieved, and that they can show impact quickly. This strategic approach will ensure you can deliver value and save costs. These things will demonstrate true transformational change that will create a better operating model for your organization.

Recently, a bipartisan team of members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill that would promote equal access to academic opportunities, services, and materials for students with disabilities. The Accessible Instructional Materials in Higher Education Act, also known as the AIM HIGH Act, would create a commission to develop voluntary accessibility criteria for instructional materials and educational technology.

The AIM HIGH Act is the result of a collaboration between the National Federation of the Blind, the Association of American Publishers, the Software and Information Industry Association, the American Council on Education, and Educause. To successfully implement the provisions of the Act, schools will need to create processes both for implementation and to monitor compliance. Done effectively, these processes will also generate analytical insights that will help schools become better at delivering services and at meeting their institutional goals and legal mandates. The most effective tool to support these efforts is with a business process solution.

Codifying Accessibility with Processes

Accessibility takes on many different forms. As a general rule, information and communication technology is considered accessible and usable if it can be used in a similar fashion, and to the same effective results by people both with and without disabilities. Essentially, comparable access to information must be provided, taking the needs of all users and learners into account. Digital formats can complicate accessibility for not just the sightless and the hearing impaired, but also for those who are color blind, those prone to seizures, and people with physical limitations that require keyboard navigation rather than the use of a mouse. These are only some examples.

Things like what to make accessible, and how to comply with the Act will fall to individual schools to decide. Without specific guidelines, the effort could be complex, but with a process-driven approach, IT teams can frame the scope of the effort to become AIM HIGH compliant and customize to their own needs.

University IT departments can start by developing workflow standards to guide all aspects of development and implementation. Building these standards will be critical for establishing the consistency needed to be accessible in the eyes of the legislative framework, and the agility to manage the specific needs of individual cases.

IT teams can start by identifying specific categories they need to work on, including:

• Testing and data collection tools: this includes things like Web-based tests (open-ended or multiple choice), or data collection that students might employ in the course of doing academic research.
• Academic presentation material: includes electronic document templates used to create coursework-related documents or presentations. This could be a standard PowerPoint template that’s required to establish a common look and feel for presentations or requirements for using and submitting term papers in Google Documents.
• Educational materials: this covers interactive online courses, which are increasingly becoming used in higher education. This includes self-paced training courses; educational webinars; other educational presentation formats; and support materials for such activities, including electronic worksheets, required reading, and tests. It could also include a course syllabus or administrative documents and tools.

Implementing Accessibility with Process Director

Process Director has long been used in higher education to meet all manner of student and institutional needs. It can be a critical tool in helping to codify and manage the necessary processes that will help schools be successful in administering AIM HIGH and other accessibility requirements.  IT teams can use functionality in Process Director to apply a guided approach that includes:

• Discovery: it’s essential for IT teams to understand the unique needs of the issues for which they are solving. A well-prepared team will be better able to incorporate specific milestones, approvals, and decision-making into workflows if can use a process-driven approach to understanding and implementing necessary tasks.
• Awareness: this is about recognizing when to accommodate and when it’s not necessary. This may seem easy to ascertain, but for someone who has never had to consider accessing a website in a way where they have unique physical or mental abilities, it may be difficult to truly understand how to meet the needs of different users.
• UX design: make sure that the design of any digital format is built in an accessible way, and perform UX testing with the audience for which the solution is being developed.
• Visual design: this is different from UX. Visual design is about the actual placement and layout of web pages, forms, and other tools so they can be interpreted and understood.
• Development: your code should be accessible so that, irrespective of ability, it is able to be deployed in different formats.
• Workflow development: ensure that in all workflows, AIM HIGH requirements accounted for.

To successfully meet the needs of higher education inclusion, colleges and universities will need a dedicated effort that includes some level of complexity. In order to make sense of it and roll it out successfully, they will require a process-driven approach. Being compliant with legislation like AIM HIGH will be one goal of these efforts, but of far more importance will be the ability to create an inclusive learning environment for learners of all types of abilities.

Modern institutions are realizing significant advantages from low code development, an approach to building software which allows non-developers to build applications in a visual, drag-and-drop environment with components for different types of functionality. Low-code platforms have enabled the rise of a business analyst support system who can direct application priorities by abstracting the typically complex coding tasks associated with programming by using reusable components. Innovative college and university IT teams are taking advantage of low-code platforms to improve process automation and derive significant ROI from their technology investments, and it’s changing how they build for the future.

By employing low-code capabilities that enable non-developers to connect various stakeholders and implement sophisticated functionality, users and teams realize greater efficiency. Essentially, those closest to the problems can now have the greatest impact at solving those problems. In higher education, solutions are wide-ranging, and low-code allows schools to benefit from:

• Automating processes, integrate apps with existing systems, and easily connect to data from multiple sources so information and functionality render in a single user experience. Each instance of building a connector can cost as much as $25,000 in developer expenses when using traditional methods.
• Optimizing ROI from legacy applications to deliver better user experiences and increase user adoption.
• Designing and building best-in-class apps that can be deployed when needed. Provide the ability to iterate and improve as needed.
• Recognizing and delivering solutions for all aspects of the university experience. This includes things like HR management, student recruiting, facilities and operations, and alumni relations.
• Migrating applications from on-premises to the cloud.
• Delivering applications in mobile formats to increase usage for students, faculty, and school staff.

Low-code solutions like Process Director give users a highly visual dashboard and software components that can be used to create an application without having to use code. The combination of rapid development capabilities along with the low-code approach offers enterprises the ability to build, deploy, and iterate quickly. Additionally, it provides ways to identify deep insights into usage and performance of applications.

Higher Education Technology Transformation

In higher education, using a low-code approach is about much more than just the applications themselves. It can save schools money, improve how IT resources are used, and deliver services to better meet the ever-changing needs of the 21st Century university student, faculty members, and staff. These things, in turn, make schools more competitive and economically viable.

This is important for colleges because they operate according to prescribed schedules — admissions, registration, financial aid, and the routine of the quarter or semester system. It’s difficult to innovate when the next milestone is right around the corner. Having to adhere to the typical application development lifecycle is slow and typically results in solutions that can be obsolete before they even become available. However, by building and delivering quickly, and with reusable components, university stakeholders can not only deliver fast, but IT teams and departmental groups can iterate and update applications continuously.

Low-code process automation provides a foundation for all university processes, and operates as the engine that moves the student through their journey from first point of contact, all the way through graduation.

Process Management and Workflow for Higher Education

In a university environment, admissions, financial aid, HR, and all departments are using Process Director to effectively manage the complex processes involved with operating a school and delivering effective services. Higher education institutions are able to deploy Process Director to help them meet business-level goals for things like student outcomes, effective recruiting, employee management, and facilities-related operations. It also supports IT goals like integration, process efficiency, and repeatability.

Institutions use Process Director to automate services delivered according to a school’s specific requirements. An example is its digital process automation capabilities, which 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. Consider that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) received 102,242 student applications in 2017, each of which required analysis and processing, all within a 3-4 month timeframe. Building the application framework to support this scale of automation cannot be done in normal development timelines. Low-code changes how a school like UCLA would be able to adapt to increased demand through effective process automation.

The Importance of Process Automation for Colleges and Universities

Low-code equips teams to build applications that work in a human-directed work style. Process Director encourages this innovative approach through things like:

Document and forms management: Consider how students submit all manner of documentation in the course of their time on campus. And employees use a variety of forms in order to be hired in the course of their time as employees. Schools like the University of Central Florida Global deliver low-code solutions to ingest and make sense of things like transcripts, test scores, recommendation and letters for students. For employees, it manages applications, personal data, benefits information and a variety of other types of documents. Some of these are submitted and stored digitally, while some are delivered in paper form. Process Director is able to digitize these documents and include them in individual files. This eliminates outdated and inefficient processes like managing files through email attachments and paper-based artifacts. The result is more context about students and other stakeholders, provided through validated documents. Process Director also enables sharing of information with trusted decision-makers so that milestones in the process can be made with greater efficiency.

Application integration: The student and potential employee application submission is the first touch point with the university, and kicks off processes that will lead to admissions or employment. 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, housing, and registration for students, and things like hiring and benefits administrations for employees.

Decision-making, enhanced with workflow: Process Director uses the following innovations that make it a first choice for many colleges and universities:

• 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.

Many colleges and universities rely on outdated systems that cannot support schools’ desires to meet the competitive needs of 21st Century organizations. While there is an increasing need to move fast and address specific needs, the low-code capabilities of Process Director can provide digitally transformative education solutions that facilitate efficient management and streamlining of processes.

An article in Educause summed it up nicely, "The digital transformation of higher education is at hand. Leaders must prepare their institutions now to take strategic advantage of the coming shifts in culture, workforce, and technology.”

As economic growth spreads across the globe, one of the main engines of progress is manufacturing. Especially in the United States, which produces more than 18% of the world’s goods, the manufacturing sector is driving not only financial health, but also innovation. Increasingly, manufacturing companies are looking for competitive advantages which are being facilitated by business process management as a way to encourage digital transformation. Organizations that are effectively pairing agile business process management (BPM) with things like Six Sigma and other operational excellence frameworks are able to move fast to respond to market trends and customer demands.

Digital Transformation is Necessary for Manufacturing

To realize just how important manufacturing agility and innovation is to business growth, consider just how important and impactful it is to the U.S. economy:

• In 2018, manufacturing drove 12% of overall economic output, accounting for $2.3 trillion.
• Every dollar spent to develop and improve manufacturing operations contributes $1.89 in business growth to other economic sectors.
• Manufacturing in the U.S. is projected for continued growth into 2020 and beyond.

The primary benefits of digital transformation in manufacturing include better efficiency and reduced costs. Those two goals alone, once achieved at a sustainable scale, can create massive value for companies that want to differentiate themselves from competitors. Manufacturers that are employing digital transformation strategies that can immediately address a variety of use cases where innovation can deliver incremental changes in quality, performance, process management, analysis, or other aspects of operations.

Agile and Six Sigma in Manufacturing Digital Transformation?

Technology intended to support manufacturing can often look overly complex. But when agile and Six Sigma thinking is applied to it, one starts to recognize that technology is really only focused on getting the actions in the manufacturing process from point A (initiating manufacturing activity) to point B (finished product) faster, and more efficiently that was done previously.

Digital transformation enables this simplification of these processes through the application of effective BPM principles. Typically, processes handle everything involved with the development, creation, collaboration, and fulfillment of every manufactured good. BPM forces organizations to identify not just what points A and B are, but also incorporate workflow management software to determine what intermediary steps are involved in every process, and evaluate how valuable and/or important those steps are.

Manufacturing organizations have to know what’s happening at every step in every process. This includes development-related documents (many of which don’t fit standard document types, like blueprints and photographic images), compliance information, change orders, distribution tracking, parts ordering, inventory control, and a massive number of actionable steps that must be included in order to be optimized. A surprising number of manufacturers operate with a cobbled-together structures of paper-based systems and manual operations that are impediments to speed. Ad hoc processes used to manage the flow of unstructured data can create knowledge gaps which can slow processes and even prevent essential data from being part of the manufacturing continuum.

Streamlining Manufacturing Business Operations

Especially as manufacturing becomes more complex through the addition of additional content sources, suppliers, and other stakeholders, BPM is needed as a foundation to streamline every aspect of manufacturing processes. It helps eliminate organizational redundancy AND oversight, both issues which contribute to slow down of activity and confusion. These are the “enemies” that digital transformation seeks to eradicate, and an effective BPM solution like Process Director rapidly delivers an actionable framework for elements such as:

• Product development: Gone are the days when a blueprint was created and then years and years of consistent delivery of that product constituted a healthy business. Today’s planning and design requires the input of many (often many who are not internal employees) and it must be adaptable so incremental improvements can be made along the way. A BPM solution like Process Director enables collaboration, data management, and change capabilities through its lightweight, low-code application development capabilities.
• Procurement: To get the best cost efficiency, companies need an agile approach to working with vendors and suppliers. The ability to rapidly integrate with a stakeholder’s systems and share necessary data means fewer roadblocks on the way to incorporating the advantages of that vendor into your own processes.
• Production: Here again, the essence of effective manufacturing is getting from point A to point B quickly, painlessly, and with the right outcomes. However, in today’s connected world, nothing seems linear, so making that connection is a major challenge for companies that are producing goods. To overcome that, BPM can act in a way that captures data and assets, includes the necessary inputs from the right people, and ensures that all of that information is available, automated, and correctly inserted across and throughout processes.
• Distribution: Manufacturers need visibility and awareness so they can fulfill orders and plan accordingly for changes in demand. Process Director provides unique functionality in this regard through the use of its patented Process Timeline, which models workflows to anticipate capacity, demand, and activity. This predictive analysis means better notifications for stakeholders, as well as automated reassignment and rerouting at the earliest possible notice that a future milestone or deadline might be at risk.

The right mix of digital innovation with a logical BPM-focused approach means that manufacturers can build a framework to rapidly and efficiently coordinate their operations. Process Director is purpose-built with the needs of enterprises that take advantage of modern methods to operate their manufacturing with lean, agile principles. As the economy gets more complex, Process Director is helping to simply how manufacturing gets done.

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 recent TechTarget article by Jan Stafford painted a highly favorable picture of our flagship product, Process Director, and key aspects of AI, predictive analysis and other features that define the most recent version, 5.0. The piece offers a great overview and we’re grateful for the insightful and appreciative perspective Stafford brings to the topic of BPM and digital transformation.

Because we get to see how customers apply BPM functionality and what it ultimately does for their organizations, we have an even deeper perspective that has helped us define the roles that AI-enabled BPM software and intelligent workflow play in actually providing the foundation for the elusive holy grail of all innovative organizations - digital transformation.

What Digital Transformation Means To BP Logix

Now, we recognize that digital transformation can have a lot of different meanings. Indeed, some see it merely as a buzzword, but Process Director initiated the use of predictive intelligence as a core element of BPM. In our minds, digital transformation transforming one’s business isn’t just about transforming one’s business by moving from legacy systems to cloud or mobile environments. Our feeling has been that the value of BPM is in it’s inclusiveness. When business processes include the right people who have access to the most meaningful data, and who can then deliver results that meet specific objectives, we believe that in and of itself is transformative.

Our predilection for collaboration and context led us to make use of BPM and AI to drive users towards better outcomes. As organizations benefited from better compute capabilities provided by more agile infrastructures, we are able to equip them with a BPM solution that anticipates user behavior, expected results, and how to identify and make use of the right applications and data sources for the job. These new platforms could transact, crunch, and make sense of user, process, resource, and event activities to provide a clear picture of optimal outcomes.

Process Director 5.0: BPM and AI Combined

Stafford makes an astute point about Process Director’s use of AI when she says, "Rather than present complex AI features, Process Director 5.0 offers a set of basic machine learning tools that the average app developer can use, such as a point-and-click graphical interfaces that guide configuration processes and display results of analytics, with no coding required.” We recognize that not all organizations will have data scientists available to them to make sense out of massive amounts of data coming from Process Director’s machine learning functionality. It’s also not lost on us that many organizations are not necessarily interested in the data science itself; they want better information and it’s only through AI-enabled processes that they can get that.

We know there is not just a single way to move data and information around the organization. Infrastructures are complex things and combine legacy tools and approaches in conjunction with newer ways that apply agile digital transformation solutions to dynamic environments. The TechTarget piece highlights a comment from Intellyx analyst, Charles Araujo, who said: “The value Process Director 5.0 delivers is less about features, per se, and more about accessibility.” Araujo’s point about accessibility extends not just to users, but also to data sources and the other tools being used in IT environments to provide better intelligence to processes. Access brings more meaning, and when AI is used, it also helps users plan with better precision.

Especially in the midst of evolving environments, where shadow IT can form and organizations rely more heavily on a “bring your own device” (BYOD) philosophy, BPM can act as a foundational element that keeps disparate systems, groups, and even rules and requirements organized around a forcing function; in this case, that function is BPM.

This is how digital transformation is allowed to happen. Some try to position it as a 1:1 migration, as if a company could shut down operations while systems move from massive databases to the cloud. Things don’t work like that; workloads are moved into new, dynamic environments incrementally, but they can’t lose their functionality during the transition phase. It’s up to BPM to maintain consistency and ultimately to enhance the use of data and the technology investment by creating better, more inclusive processes.

Stafford also makes the case that the low-code/no-code BPM approach to application development Process Director offers is core to BPM acting as a foundation for digital transformation. The right tools in the right organization can go a long way towards helping transform how work is accomplished, but giving people the ability to actively engage with these BPM software tools and contextual data to effect change is what truly has a transformative effect.

Bottom Line

BP Logix recognizes that those closest to business issues are in the best position to create corresponding solutions. Having the ability to adapt as goals and business needs change, all without having to engage with IT or apply technical expertise results in faster implementation of meaningful solutions. People being able to respond rapidly to issues, coupled with BPM software tools that support their need to make changes, all leads to the best kind of digital transformation.

Schedule A Demo

Schedule a 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.

Business Process, Digital Applications, and Digital Transformation Solutions

In today's hyper-connected global economic environment, companies are racing to identify and adopt effective digital transformation solutions to engage customers and stay competitive. As a result, BPM software—already the gold standard for developing custom, process-driven digital business applications—is itself evolving to meet the needs of the digital enterprise. BP Logix Process Director is emerging as the digital process automation (DPA) platform of choice for trailblazing private- and public-sector leaders, who count on the award-winning digital process automation platform to stay a step ahead of nimble competitors, shifting markets, and fluid supply chains.

Your organization relies on digital applications to provide the features and experience that set you apart from the pack. No application operates in a vacuum, however: end-to-end engagement means relying on digital channels for communication, engagement, and transactions. From every corner of your business, you need to reach everywhere—in the cloud, on mobile devices, and yes, even embedded inside the Internet of Things (like smart homes and self-driving cars). In short, you need digital transformation solutions to be able to build process-driven business applications that meet your customers, partners, and stakeholders, wherever and whenever they prefer. And you need to do it:

• Quickly. Rate of change is the signature metric of the digital era. Process Director is the platform of choice for no-code, rapid application development in a DPA environment. Process Director gives you all the workflow tools you need to develop fast, deploy easily, and improve on demand.
• Broadly. Your customers can already order a pair of sneakers, catch a ride home, or pay their bills at any time of the day or night, using whatever device happens to be convenient. They expect no less from you. Process Director digital transformation solutions are driven digital applications are cloud natives, boasting a responsive, modern user interface that moves easily between phone, tablet, and desktop.
• Securely. In the rush to share more information, with more people, on more platforms, GRC solutions (governance, risk management, and compliance) can easily become the first casualty of your DPA effort. Fortunately, Process Director digital transformation solutions ensure that your business rules are applied to every application, that every action is logged, and that every actor is accountable.

About BP Logix

BP Logix is a BPM company that offers Process Director, an innovative and powerful business process management engine combining the power of BPM software with the flexibility and leverage of rapid application development—with no programming. Workflow software and eforms are just the beginning of digital app development. Process Director combines the easiest and most efficient business process management and digital process automation software in the industry with a rich set of tools offering snap-in data integration, rapid prototyping and release, and comprehensive reporting and analytics. Check out these BPM examples to see how 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 BPM compliance, and smooth, efficient operations. Contact us to learn more and schedule a free demonstration today.

BPM and Digital Transformation Solutions Improving Business Outcomes

In a world of cloud computing and omnichannel digital access, enterprises differentiate themselves from competitors through time-to-market, agility, and increased engagement with customers. Reaching these goals demands that companies search for BPM and digital transformation solutions: embarking on a fraught digital journey, breaking down organizational silos and rationalizing disparate data sources to create a new framework for delivering and continuously improving digital solutions.

The goal of this digital journey is nothing less than the transformation of the enterprise itself: the way it works with customers, the way it measures its success—and ultimately, the way in which it thinks of itself.

The Process Director Digital Transformation Platform

Process Director BPM and digital transformation solutions offers:

• Graphical and menu-driven builders for every part of your application: forms, rules, workflows, data connections, etc.
• A seamless combination of structured, unstructured, and case-management process patterns.
• Flexible interaction styles, including web-based, email, and offline.
• Freedom from complex data definitions, flowcharts, and other relics of a slower-moving era.
• AI-Enabled business process management (predictive-BPM)
• IoT connectors
• Process Timeline™, the simplest to create and most efficient to execute process engine in the marketplace.
• Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid deployment.

Setting Out on Your Digital Journey

You can’t climb a mountain in worn-out shoes, and you can’t dominate in the digital age using tools that have barely changed since the turn of the millennium. Let’s face it: the decades of accumulated home-grown code—millions of lines of it—defies modernization. And the inflexibility and sheer volume of packaged applications—and the procurement, support, and training required for each—is unsustainable.

It’s time to change the plan: time to meet the digital challenge with a robust digital response.

Schedule a Free Demo

Process Director sets the pace for your digital transformation. Schedule 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.

The need for digitally agile BPM platforms with highly subtle, rapid application development capabilities is no secret. Applications need to be built and then rebuilt based on the evolving desires of insistent customers and a constantly changing business terrain, with increasing levels of subtlety required. This is the central fact of modern business and woe be unto you if you fall behind the pace of digital transformation.

Rapid Application Development vs Speed and Nuance

There are two competing camps within the world of digital transformation and rapid application development: speed and nuance. Each is equally important and neither can be forfeited without serious cost. Many people believe that nuance is built on the back of complexity, which will then inevitably increase drag on the speed element.

It is true that many BPM platforms have, in an attempt to keep pace, tossed half-baked features into their architecture just so they can advertise having them in the product. Customer organizations are the real losers in this scenario. They will find themselves vainly trying to glean use from clunky functions that are poorly integrated, and from which neither speed nor nuance have been achieved. This is not functional rapid application development and is only masquerading as digital transformation.

I would argue that true nuance is built on the back of precision, which, from a product development standpoint, takes gallons of blood, sweat and tears. A violin is an example of nuance built from precision. To create a violin equal to the finest Stradivarius, the materials must be right, the vision accurate and the talent there. The end result is a magnificent instrument that helps you create amazing music. Now I am not comparing Process Director to a Stradivarius… except that I am. Oh yeah, I went there.

Digital Transformation with Process Director

Using our award-winning, highly scalable, rapid application development, low code BPM platform will show you the real power of combining speed with nuance built of precision. Let’s work together and make your applications sing!

Process Director BPM solutions offers:

• Graphical and menu-driven builders for every part of your application: forms, rules, workflows, data connections, etc.
• A seamless combination of structured, unstructured, and case-management process patterns.
• Flexible interaction styles, including web-based, email, and offline.
• Freedom from complex data definitions, flowcharts, and other relics of a slower-moving era.
• Predictive BPM with AI and BPM combined
• BPM and IoT data integration
• Process Timeline™, the simplest to create and most efficient to execute process engine in the marketplace.
• Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid development.

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.

Digital transformation initiatives act as a litmus test for company culture. How adaptable are its personnel? How receptive is its leadership? How willing are all involved to extend themselves in pursuit of the larger gains available through company-wide digital transformation?

Change Begins With People

The burden of lean and agile BPM implementation rests on the shoulders of the digital transformers. They must have the imagination to conceive of how adaptive case management could improve their company, or perhaps how creating a more comprehensive client portal would drive optimized change. Maybe it begins with integrating AI, or expanding the company’s mobile workflow solutions. Most likely, it will result from a combination of tactics, all deployed with ingenuity and skill.

Change Requires Education

Company executives must be educated as to the necessity of digital transformation, and this can be a slow and painful process, but the support of the company’s leadership is an essential ingredient for the success of any organizational change. Contrary to the title “leader”, some leaders tend to be reactive rather than proactive, especially if there is an initial investment involved. It is an investment, but with the correct solution this plunge can be tempered by a solid platform’s combination of utility and adaptability, saving the organization time and money.

Change Requires The Right BPM Platform

Building on an intuitive BPM platform that minimizes the learning curve, while facilitating rapid application development is essential. This BPM platform must also support continuing digital transformation by enabling its implementers to structure and restructure its applications for continually improved performance.

Process Director’s unique workflow software enables easy, point-and-click process modeling, automated routing, business activity monitoring (BAM), and sophisticated content management. The workflow automation software is configured through a 100% web-based interface enabling you to graphically model and build processes, requiring neither development nor advanced IT resources.
Using Process Director, business users can easily create workflows and electronic forms, as well as utilizing its intuitive business rules engine to deploy without assistance from IT. Automated workflows enable organizations to take control of their business processes. Process Director workflow automation software ensures that critical information and vital documents are routed, reviewed, and revised in accordance with corporate and regulatory policy.

Of course, Process Director enterprise workflow automation solutions integrates with existing user directories such as Active Directory or LDAP, enabling your organization’s entire staff to participate fully with automated workflow process software. Process Director’s enterprise workflow automation technology automatically notifies users of assigned workflow tasks via email and is presented with a concise and easy-to-understand web page relevant to the task or activity requested. They do not require specific knowledge about the overall process because requests are automatically routed to the appropriate users as tasks are completed

Request a Free Demo

Request a free demonstration of Process Director, and discover for yourself how this unique BPM software platform empowers you with workflow solutions allowing 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.

Back in the days of yore, when the good people of Widget Corporation closed a sale on one of their widgets, that was the end of the sales experience. They would stand at the door as it closed, waving with one tanned hand at the retreating form of their customer and smiling their megawatt salesperson grins, as person and widget retreated into anonymity. And then came the digital world and with that  the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital transformation.

In today’s Widget Corp. there is no such end point. Since the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), a door bell is no longer just a door bell – it is a surveillance device with personalized tones and lights. A watch no longer only tells time – it monitors everything from your heart rate and sleep cycle to your steps throughout the day. At this point, even your typical refrigerator has the inside scoop. Inside these widgets are vast arrays of sensors and monitors that generate and gather data for the benefit of both the customer and organization that sold the widget. This allows a feed of information that is continuous, responsive, and, in many cases, transformational.

AI, IoT and Digital Transformation

Just as one cannot speak of digital transformation without acknowledging the role of artificial intelligence, so it goes with the IoT and digital transformation. After all, how else are these massive amounts of algorithmic data that AI analyzes being retrieved? Today’s devices not only report back with data, but are increasingly interconnected as well. This living data opens the doors to rich and creative possibilities in regard to AI – and never has a customer journey been more immediate, responsive or nuanced.

This leads to high demand customers, conditioned by the two prongs of IoT and AI, and their uniter: digital transformation. Today’s satisfying customer journey is a cocktail of positive touch points, individual attentions, predictive analytics, historical data mining, and this is only from their water meter!

If you are still acting like the Widget Corporation of the past, then your customers will suffer for it. It is inevitable that you will lose them to a competitor who has implemented platforms that treat them with the immediacy and individualized attention to which they’ve become accustomed. The first step toward achieving this goal in your organization is to drag your business from the dark ages with a BPM platform that can act in a similar function – by providing a workflow solution that has the integration capabilities to support this new world of the IoT and digital transformation.

IoT and Digital Transformation Solutions

Enter Process Director BPM platform - to ensure that your business operations are optimized, Process Director is an IoT and digital transformation solution that provides built-in BPM application and workflow application integration with many third-party and in-house applications and databases. The application integration connectors can be called based on different events in the system, including when a step starts in a workflow, when a business rule is evaluated, or based on an event or a Smart Form.

Process Director intelligent BPM offers cloud based single-tenant and multi-tenant deployments, which provides flexibility for both small and robust business requirements. Because BP Logix Process Director gives key insights into each behavior of the process, it can take direct action.

For example, if a future task is in danger of running late, the system can notify the process owner. This way, the case manager or other responsible party can address the issue at the soonest possible opportunity. Process Director BPM software is flexible, allowing ad hoc and improvisational tasks to be added to a process or dynamically linked via rules or established predecessors.

Process Director from BP Logix offers BPM and digital transformation solutions will empower your organization to do more and get better results, all the while experiencing a more consistent and personalized user experience. Contact us today to schedule a demonstration to get a customized in depth look at how Process Director can help solve your IoT and digital transformation needs.

Digital transformation is the trending celebrity in the business process management (BPM) world, flanked by an entourage of terms: the sexy ‘Digital Supply Chain Management’, the enigmatic ‘Context Aware Mobile Experiences’ and of course who could forget that frequent attention hog, ‘Internet of Things’. They strut across our BPM landscape revered, nay, worshipped by beatific throngs.

Digital Transformers Are Agents of Change

Enamored as we are by the zeitgeist of digital transformation, it is easy to forget the poor schlub toiling away behind the curtain: the digital transformers. She is the CIO who finds herself installed in a company that still delivers documents via pneumatic tubes. He is the CEO of a burgeoning start-up, trying to build a competitive architecture for the future. Digital transformers are the men and women pushing against the grain of archaic technologies toward this better way. You might be this long-suffering individual, this oft overlooked crusader, staring into the faces of a befuddled board while trying to explain the need to eliminate wet signatures.

Rarely does digital transformation break down the walls of a company, Kool-Aid man style. It more often happens in inching (infuriatingly slow) steps, first one application, then another, then one more. The danger of this is at the end of the transition your organization is left with a poorly-fitted patchwork of solutions. Sure, your company has been digitally transformed—but the result is more Steve Buscemi than the hoped-for Christian Bale.

The Right BPM Platform For Digital Transformation

Whether you’re beginning from blessed scratch or dragging your company kicking and screaming into the digital age, the right BPM platform will be an indispensable guide on your digital journey, from the first e-signatures to always-on, customer-focused, end-to-end digital nirvana. In either situation potential is key. Your BPM platform must have the potential to grow, adapting to many roles and performing among an ensemble. It directs your digital production as a low-code/no-code, rapid application development environment—perfectly cast for the critical role it will play as your business expands.

For that your BPM solution needs to scale easily, and tessellate with legacy applications and systems of record, giving you the ability to deploy custom applications to solve your unique problems. For giggles and grins, let’s throw in a graphical interface that is intuitive and easy to use for non-programmers, such as your business or technical analysts. If digital transformers can achieve this and the business world will be your stage.

Contact us to learn how our award winning BPM platform, Process Director, can help you on your digital journey.

What is Digital Transformation?

Simply put, digital transformation is the leveraging of technology to improve efficiency and provide more value in your business. Reaching this goal can be much more complicated than the definition given here may suggest, however, it can radically change business processes, activities, customer relationships and even value propositions.

Technology To Help With Digital Transformation

Considered disruptive in nature, digital business transformation has executives in nearly all industries on alert to changes in the industry. They watch in order to get a glimpse into the future to see how they can integrate new technologies to grow revenues, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve differentiation, and increase their speed-to-market. In essence, forward thinking executives are looking at ways to use technology to refine, and accelerate their businesses.

“The best companies…combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation. This is what we call Digital Maturity. Companies vary in their digital maturity, and those that are more mature outperform those that are not.” MIT Sloan Management Review

Therefore, the goal of a digital transformation platform is to create a more agile business to keep up with the constant flux of technology advancements, environmental changes, and customer demands. The additional benefits are more streamlined business processes, reduced waste, and increased productivity and efficiency.

What Is Digital Transformation To BP Logix?

Well, all aspects of business process management (BPM) – its functions, tasks, processes, and assets are interconnected. A BPM platform pulls all these items together and in that process eliminates redundancies and inefficiencies, increasing profitability and improving the user’s experience. BPM software, such as Process Director, additionally serves management with business process automation solutions offering predictive analytics to allow for immediate intervention and correction, further reducing down time, costs and ineffectiveness. Consider for a moment the main drivers for using a BPM platform and digital transformation:

Technology Advancements: Changes in technology means things are moving faster – production, delivery, demands . A big problem in the past has been in the interconnectivity of legacy programs and new technology. Constant updates to new programs leads to employee frustration, and a loss in productivity due to training and implementation. However, low code BPM with rapid application development allows seamless integration between programs to reduce “learning curve” challenges that come with new product deployments.

Basically, digital business transformation platforms, or BPM, allow for a level of customization never seen before without the high costs, significant time investments and specialized coders.

Environmental Changes: Changes in supply chain, regulations and compliance law, competition, and even the economy can have an impact on businesses and are mostly unforeseen. Agility, through the use of Process Director digital transformation platform, helps accelerate the transformation of workflow processes to allow the business to make adjustments as needed and set themselves apart as market leaders.

Digital business transformation allows changes to be integrated quickly through low code, rapid app development technologies.

Customer Demand: Along with technology advancements comes the changes in demand and expectations of customers. Businesses who are digitally mature have the ability to provide a better customer experience, resulting in increased revenue. Imagine if a customer is able to engage with your company, find exactly what they are looking for, and make a purchase within minutes instead of hours or days. How could this increase your revenue growth?

Process Director makes this possible through predictive analytics, custom forms and mobile apps.

Process Director Is Your Digital Business Transformation Solution

Digital business transformation is upsetting the old way business has been done. Innovation, disruption, agility, and a constantly improving environment is the way business will thrive in years and decades to come. Executives are tasked with change management as a way to unlock revenue streams, reduce waste, and gain competitive advantages by creating outstanding customer experiences.

Process Director BPM software provides business process automation solutions that allows your company to develop more agility and innovation, streamline systems, and create people-oriented processes quickly, easily and at less cost than in the past. The ability to move faster in response to demands, forecast challenges, and adhere to compliance and regulations leads to better decision making, healthier management, and an improved customer/supplier/staff experience.

Process Director from BP Logix is a versatile digital business transformation platform designed to support forward thinking businesses looking to improve efficiency, manage workflows and compliance, and create a valuable experience for all those engaged with them. For a demonstration of Process Director and to see how automating processes with BPM software can help you with your digital transformation strategy, contact us today.