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by John E. Fox
I hope you are enjoying the holidays, taking time to relax and celebrate the season with your loved ones. For most people, the holidays provide an opportunity to connect with family and friends. Oftentimes, we do this by giving gifts, sending holiday cards and convening at holiday parties. Each of these activities involves a process and varying types of content.
Holiday processes may include activities like shopping, wrapping gifts, preparing meals and traveling. The supporting content may take the shape of holiday letters, party invitations, gift tags, menus and airline tickets. In many cases, the content drives the process, and does so largely at the point of decision: a menu drives the grocery shopping experience; a tag names a gift's intended recipient; holiday cards are addressed so they can be processed by the Post Office; etc. For the most organized of us, the processes and content come together seamlessly to create the perfect holiday celebration with the people who are important in our lives.
It would appear, therefore, that the seamless unification of processes and content enables people to connect and enjoy the holidays together. It would also appear that these three primary components - people, processes and content - must coexist. This holiday season, I hope you have already effectively integrated people, processes and content, and that you're ready to enjoy the fruits of your successful integration!
In the business world, it has always been a challenge to successfully integrate people, processes and content - due in large part to the presence of disparate data sources, the overabundance of content and lack of a system to manage it properly, flawed processes, and the physical distance between (and mobility of) people. But businesses that are able to optimize the mix of these three components - much like we do in our personal lives - are yielding high returns.
A content-enabled business process management solution - one that allows users to quickly access relevant content at the point of decision - can assist organizations in efficiently executing business processes. The result? The effective integration and coexistence of people, processes and content. This issue of The AccuView focuses on content-enabled BPM solutions.
We look forward to helping your business connect its people, processes and content to contribute to your goal of making 2007 your best year ever. In the meantime, from all of us at AccuImage, we hope you enjoy the warmth, peace and joy of the season!
Happy Holidays!
John E. Fox
john.fox@accuimagellc.com
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What is BPM?
In its simplest form, business process management (BPM) automates, executes and monitors business processes from beginning to end by connecting people to people, applications to applications, and people to applications.
A process is simply a set of activities and transactions that an organization conducts on a regular basis in order to achieve its objectives. It can be simple (i.e. order fulfillment) or complex (i.e. new product development), short-running (i.e. employee on-boarding) or long-running (i.e. regulatory compliance), function-specific (i.e. proposal management) or industry-specific (i.e. energy procurement). It can exist within a single department (i.e. billing), run throughout the entire enterprise (i.e. strategic sourcing), or extend across the whole value chain (i.e. supply chain management).
What are the Primary BPM Components?
What is the Role of Documents in BPM?
Documents are often as fundamental to commerce as the people who participate in the process. In spite of this, modern BPM systems have focused largely on improving internal processes while ignoring the relationships between people, workflows, documents and enterprise systems that extend beyond the firewall to users both online and off. For any BPM strategy to succeed, it is important to address the fact that paper documents - invoices, proposals, legal contracts and other materials - are essential to transactions.
Until recently, technology options were limited for integrating document-driven processes with the backend systems that support an organization's sales, finance, HR and other activities. However, technology's ability to convert paper-based information into searchable electronic data provides organizations with the opportunity to roll document workflows into more integrated, automated processes. This is bringing much-needed efficiency to how forms and other business documents are completed and processed inside and outside an organization.
Who's Using BPM?
From sourcing and operations to sales and marketing, functional departments within both commercial businesses and government agencies are using BPM to automate and optimize their organizational processes.
- Sourcing and Operations. Procurement, purchasing and supplier management are typically complex business procedures within an organization. BPM helps companies and agencies automate and monitor processes like claims management, spend analysis, contract management and requests for quote. Through vendor performance tracking and supplier management solutions, BPM gives executives the ability to make better business decisions and increase supplier competition, ultimately helping the organization achieve significant cost savings.
- Finance. The finance department performs vital corporate functions, from the simple (i.e. reimbursement of expenses) to the complex (i.e. financial analysis and planning). Performing these tasks while complying with complicated business and federal regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, can drain company resources. BPM helps finance departments automate and monitor key processes - including accounts payable/receivable, expense approval and capital acquisition - while maintaining corporate accountability by generating audit trails at each step in the process.
- Human Resources. Human resources departments are responsible for processes spanning the lifecycle of an employee's time with a company, from recruitment and benefits administration to vacation requests and off-boarding. BPM not only enables HR to cut down on time spent on routine, paper-intensive tasks by automating daily administrative operations like new hire setup and training requests, but also gives executives insight into employee knowledge and development by managing complex processes like human capital management and performance reviews.
- New Product Development. Organizations are using BPM to automate all stages of the product development lifecycle - from idea conception to product testing to product delivery. Using a BPM suite's collaborative tools, product developers can speed up this often time-consuming process by managing documents and content online and sharing information in real-time discussion forums. BPM allows production managers and engineers to identify critical bottlenecks early on and make necessary process adjustments to ensure on-time product delivery and faster time to market.
- Sales and Marketing. Executing an effective marketing strategy and efficiently managing sales processes are fundamental to generating company revenue. Marketing departments are using BPM to track campaigns, create new collateral and facilitate event planning, while sale teams are using it to streamline and monitor all aspects of the sales process - from targeting, capturing, qualifying and tracking pipeline opportunities, to creating proposals, organizing contracts and managing renewals. By creating flexibility, BPM allows the organization to dynamically adjust to changing market trends.
Sources: BPM Basics, Adobe Systems
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A small, two-legged robot stands atop a glass-topped coffee table. On its two dimensional world, it has to contend with a potted plant, an old TV Guide and several coffee cups, along with the ever-present danger of plummeting over the side onto the carpet below. As the robot navigates its way around, a constant evaluation process occurs inside its software "brain." First, information is collected through its sensors. Secondly, that information is analyzed, using a decision tree to determine the optimal course of action.
What do the adventures of this robot have to do with knowledge management? It's more important than you might think. You see, right before the robot takes its next step - once this simple two-stage process is completed - the robot could be said to "know" something. It's collected all available information and analyzed it. Knowledge is created through analysis of information.
So the effectiveness of our robot friend - or if you like, how "smart" it is - depends directly on two things: the accuracy and relevance of the information supplied; and the effectiveness of the evaluation process. Poor information, through faulty sensors or too few sensors, will result in an inaccurate picture being fed to the decision-making processes. Poor analysis will lead to bad decisions, regardless of the quality of information supplied.
Now I'm sure you saw this analogy coming, but face it - your enterprise is exactly the same. To create a smart enterprise, you need to have a stable, reliable information base and the analysis tools that allow you to create valuable knowledge - knowledge that fosters good decisions.
Information management has been refined over the years, to the point where most enterprise architects are including a central structured repository as part of their information architecture. ECM (enterprise content management) systems, built on solid data-storage solutions, are the platforms that facilitate these sound information management policies.
At the heart of these information systems is metadata - data stored about the data you store. By monitoring, storing and indexing specific information about your business content, ECM vendors allow their customers the ability to easily find any piece of information, and its relevant business context, quickly and efficiently. These systems are built on information management policies and principles that have been around for a long time.
So, if your organization has a sound ECM policy and system in place, it's not likely to fall off the coffee table because of poor-quality information. The next generation of enterprise systems will focus on how to manage the analysis of that information base to support your decision-making process.
The DIKW Model is an information hierarchy that's frequently cited when trying to address this problem. The model was originally recorded in a 1932 poem called The Rock from TS Eliot:
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
In the modern, slightly less poignant implementation of the DIKW model, we find four layers:
Data
Information
Knowledge and
Wisdom
Nowadays, thanks to advances in data storage, the science of information management and the implementation of these systems in ECM products, the transition from data to information is largely a solved problem.
Getting from information to knowledge is much more difficult. Knowledge includes the "how" aspect of a problem. Returning to our robot, it's the analysis of the information that tells us "how" to proceed.
Current efforts at solving this problem are varied, and you'll probably recognize them as the more modern features provided by ECM vendors: collaboration, which allows people to discuss and share information in order to facilitate progress; and workflow, where prescriptive, best-practice knowledge as defined by a business process analyst provides "how" information. Content management tools all provide additional published content around a topic - more published analysis to help people decide which step to take next.
Tools like these are striving to bridge the conceptual void between information and knowledge. While the jury is still out on how effective they are, the challenge is considerable. The next time you need to evaluate a system for inclusion in your enterprise architecture, consider how well it bridges the gap. Think like a robot. Do I have the right information available? Will this system enable me to make better decisions? Without a careful approach to both aspects, you could end up on the carpet.
Source: KMWorld
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Accounts payable personnel at any organization know the pain of invoice processing. Because AP departments typically rely on paper-based transactions, they also experience long, time-consuming processes. Long processes can result in late or incorrect payments and missed discounts. And in situations where manual data entry is required, delays aren't the only consideration; legal risks resulting from human error can be significant.
But is there a simple way for companies to control costs, ensure compliance, and enable a more efficient accounts payable process? The key is to streamline and automate invoice processing by implementing an end-to-end accounts payable solution.
The holistic approach allows an AP organization to fully leverage its purchase-to-pay strategy. By scanning and capturing invoices and supporting documentation, integrating information into BPM systems, and then ensuring that the information is used, managed and stored efficiently, organizations can dramatically improve efficiency and enjoy significant time and cost savings.
The process of transforming paper documents into transactional content happens in several stages. These include the following steps:
- Capture. Automatically captures data from any combination of single- and multi-page invoices and related documents - with or without attachments - and refines scanned images so that "noise" and irrelevant material can be removed or ignored.
- Classification. Using text, images and knowledge-based analysis techniques, automatically identifies documents and prepares them for processing, without the need for manual sorting, separator sheets or barcodes.
- Extraction. Recognition technologies automatically extract invoice data, even from new and one-time vendors, without the need to set up templates for each and every vendor.
- Validation. To ensure accuracy and integrity, extracted data can be validated against purchase orders and vendor data from ERP systems.
- Export. Data is made available for export into AP systems.
Integrating BPM Technology into the AP Process
After documents are captured, they can be put to work. Managing accounts payable data in an ECM repository, allows the AP organization to quickly access all the relevant information in a timely and streamlined manner. Process queues can be established so the right AP employee will always work on the highest priority, and vendor payments can be much more predictable and consistent. Employees can also search, view and annotate invoices and supporting documents, which improves collaboration, decision-making and vendor service.
Leveraging a BPM system enables AP organizations to automatically enforce business rules and policies, such as auditing and record-keeping, and helps control your company's ability to adhere to compliance regulations. By using a BPM system, you can define, model and manage highly structured, high-volume business processes consistently and reliably across multiple organizations, systems and applications.
Source: EMC
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AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.
* Limited time offer. AccuImage may discontinue the offer at any time without prior notice. Offer available only to current and new subscribers to The AccuView. No purchase necessary. Following the two-hour complementary consultation, additional consulting is available at AccuImage's regular professional services rates. Consultation may be conducted in person or over the phone, depending on location. Call for additional details.
Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Update Warning
*As Internet Explorer 7 is a new release from Microsoft, none of our software manufacturers have yet released versions of their software that are certified with it. It is recommended that Internet Explorer 7 not be installed on ay machine that will need to use browser-based modules since this is not currently a support configuration. The affected modules include, but may not be limited to AppXtender Web & WebXtender, Captovation ecNet & Web Capture, and Liquid Office.
Please be aware that since Microsoft is currently pushing the Internet Explorer 7 install as a critical update through their Windows Update system, the install may be automatically installed to your workstations and servers if they are configured to automatically install updates downloaded through the Microsoft Automatic Update utility.
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