Blueprint and WebSphere Business Modeler: A Great Match

Earlier today, we announced the completion of the deal that makes Lombardi a part of IBM. Now I’m very excited to share with you the first fruits of the merger: Blueprint now integrates with WebSphere Business Modeler.

WebSphere Business Modeler has some of the most advanced simulation capabilities on the market, so it’s a great option for taking the analysis of your process to the next level. Blueprint’s speed and simplicity combined with WBM’s deep capabilities make a great match.

You’ll find the new option for WebSphere Business Modeler on the Export Data screen. Try it out and let us know what you think!

A BPM Point of View – Lombardi’s Wes Chung Explains

RecentlyBPM:redux posted an interview with our very own Wes Chung. Wes is one of Lombardi’s Alliances Managers. In the post, Theo Priestley discusses various topics with Wes about Lombardi’s vision for BPM, its evolution to date and more.  There are some really great comments worth summarizing here in Process People.

Expectations for 2010 After a Fairly Turbulent 2009

We saw companies strategically select BPM as a means to improve their operating efficiency and also to position themselves competitively for eventual market condition improvements. In 2010, we are expecting that there will be an increased oversight and due diligence on how money actually gets spent.

Training and Education Services

We have expanded our offerings for both on-site and virtual classroom-style skills enhancement. Lombardi University covers all of the roles needed in a BPM program and at all of the skill levels for different responsibilities that exist.

Blueprint

Our customers are using the tool to improve their understanding of their processes and to drive process changes.  Blueprint has the ability to:

• Identify differences between operating branches or geographical units
• Standardize best practices and operating procedures
• Manage candidate projects across the portfolio of BPM initiatives

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Getting Your Masters Degree in BPM Development

What separates a good university masters degree program from a great one?  I believe it can be summed up in 3 key factors:

1. Expert instructors, who are actively working in their field.
2. A curriculum with a strong practical focus.
3. Perspectives drawn from a broad range of real world experience.

These same 3 key factors were core design principles for our Level 2 BPM Developer course – which takes good BPM Developers and helps them transform into master BPM Developers.

Most of our customers have learned how to build successful process applications, but they are still unclear on how to best leverage Teamworks to address their more complex application requirements.  They want to know how to design, architect and implement very robust process applications … how to master the use of Teamworks. 

That’s why Lombardi field mentors lead the instruction of our Level 2 class.  Lombardi mentors are highly experienced implementation consultants that work shoulder-to-shoulder with customers – but as mentors their focus is on teaching the customer how to build the solution, rather than building it for them.  Their mission is to build self-sufficiency in our customer teams and transfer knowledge about BPM best practices and implementation techniques.

Our mentors and consultants helped design a Level 2 BPM Developer curriculum with a strong practical focus.  Through 6 half day instructional modules, we teach the most common complex requirement patterns encountered in the field and the best practices for addressing those patterns.  The course topics and hands-on exercises are based on experience gained by Lombardi field delivery teams across hundreds of customer projects.

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Get Started Documenting Your HR Processes

In case you missed it, we published an article in the latest issue of Workforce Management that might be of interest. The article is entitled “A Simple Approach to Documenting your HR Process” and it is filled with statistics and tips for getting your HR processes documented and streamlined.

A recent study by Staffing.com revealed that 70% of applicants and 28% of hiring managers are dissatisfied with how their hiring processes work; and that is just one of the many critical processes in your company. Effective documentation of your HR processes can lead to impressive savings and a large reduction in your company’s overhead.

Optimizing your HR processes is critical for saving time, avoiding errors and reducing company overhead. The absolute best way to save time and money is through process documentation. If you are interested in finding out how to quickly document and streamline your key processes, there is a simple next step. Just click the link below to download the full white paper.

Get the White Paper: A Simple Approach to Documenting Your HR Process

Ready to start documenting your processes now? To effectively document your processes, you will need the right tool. Click here for a free trial of Lombardi Blueprint, the easiest process documentation tool on the market.

Lombardi Customers Honored in 2009

As 2009 comes to an end, Lombardi would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for an extremely rewarding year.  Your successful BPM implementations are the reason that everyone at Lombardi strives to deliver unparalleled products and services.  Here are some highlights of 2009 where our customers have won prestigious awards through the use of Blueprint and Teamworks:

• NACCO Materials Handling Group – 2009 CIO 100 Award for automating several processes and introducing the capability to track core processes in real time, eliminating the risk of defective designs entering production.
• WE Energies – Honorable Mention – Gartner “Out of the Box BPM Delivery” Award for improving efficiencies and customer service of their Low Income Pilot Project which helps low income customers change their long term approach to managing their energy consumption and their energy bill.
• Homeloan Management Ltd. UK – 2009 Silver BPM Excellence Award for Europe for their Credit Management Project which has significantly improved the efficiency of the process and also added a much greater level of control.
• Lincoln Trust Company – 2009 Gold BPM Excellence Award for N. America for delivering the most tangible results and benefits to its users which have generated firm metrics including reduced staffing costs, reduction in cycle-times for internal and external stakeholders, and substantial increase in employee productivity.

Congratulations to these and all of our customers for their continued success with BPM – As Lombardi joins the IBM family, we certainly look forward to another remarkable year of customer successes in 2010!

A Standard Approach to Process Documentation

Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.

Rachel recently sat down with Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing with Lombardi to record a webinar on how Blueprint has helped her company restructure, document and standardize their processes. To listen to the full webinar, click here.

In the webinar, Rachel explains that one of the biggest challenges they faced was that everyone had their own way of doing things. Documents were in piles all over people’s desks and everyone was doing their processes differently. There was no standardization within their processes, which was costing them time and money. PRC needed to be able to take a narrative of their situation and see it in a visual manner.

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A Message From Rod Favaron, CEO of Lombardi

This morning we announced IBM’s intention to acquire Lombardi. In case you missed the announcement, you can find it here. I could not be more excited about this. Many of you that have been following us for a long time know that Lombardi has been growing by leaps and bounds over the years. Now, becoming part of the IBM family gives Lombardi the opportunity to reach out to even more companies around the globe and help them solve their process pains and run their businesses more effectively.

Lombardi’s had a long-standing technical partnership with IBM – we were one of the first vendors in the BPM space to deliver a product running on WebSphere. We understand IBM’s strengths and we know how they complement ours as well. We also know that there is a great fit for both Teamworks and Blueprint into the overall IBM BPM portfolio.

We also have many joint customers and partners – so we understand the types of expanded product and service offerings that are needed to drive enterprise level success with BPM.

And, most importantly, we both share a strong passion and commitment to customer success – so our goals are very much in line.

Over the coming weeks we will be sharing more information about this acquisition and what it means for the future. But one thing is clear, the future is truly brighter than ever for Lombardi. In the meantime, I would like to thank our customers, employees, partners, and investors for your support and I look forward to the next decade of BPM.

Announcing the December ‘09 Blueprint Update

The December ‘09 update is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! With this release, we’ve focused on adding improvements that make you even more productive while documenting and analyzing your processes. We’ve refined the new analysis mode we introduced in the last release, greatly enhanced printing, streamlined several administration tasks, and added much more based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:

• Refined Process Analysis: We’ve gotten some excellent feedback since we introduced Blueprint’s new analysis mode in October. If you haven’t tried it for yourself yet, in analysis mode Blueprint heat maps your diagram with the information you’ve collected about your process. Areas of waste, high cost or cycle time, and opportunities for improvement instantly stand out. It allows you to have insight and visibility into your process that would have been difficult and time consuming to get previously.

  Today we’ve added several improvements based upon your feedback. First, we’ve made both the diagram and the analysis list show much more information presentably. The diagram now shows more detail on the dimension of your process that you’re viewing through a combination of badges on the activities as well as interactive tooltips. Likewise, the analysis list also shows each of the activities in context with the value that’s being heat mapped to them. Want to see the systems your activities leverage while viewing your process as a BPMN diagram? That’s now a very easy task.

  One more thing: everything you see in the analysis view is now printable.

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An ‘event-full’ fall at Lombardi…

During this past fall, Lombardi has traveled to 5 states and 4 countries attending or hosting industry events. Here’s a brief re-cap of where we’ve been and what we’ve learned along the way…

At the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando Florida, seven different Lombardi customers presented sessions during the conference. While some sessions were Gartner-sponsored and some were Lombardi-sponsored, it’s always exciting when our customers are able to share their BPM successes.

At the Forrester Business Technology Forum in Chicago Illinois, Erik Keller, CIO of SIRVA, presented a presentation entitled “A CIO’s Perspective On Where BPM Fits.” A very fitting presentation as BPM continues to be a top priority among today’s CIOs.

Finally, I’d like to highlight Gartner ITxpo in Cannes France. On day three, Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, spoke to attendees on the benefit of putting business first in process improvement; including a live technology demonstration on how Lombardi is using next-generation innovation to make that possible. Stay tuned for more details early next year.

So as things start to slow down for the holidays, look for Lombardi next year in a city near you.  And as always, you can stay up to date with Lombardi events online.

Aviva’s CIO in Financial Times podcast about BPM

Last week, the Financial Times (FT) digital business reporter Stephen Pritchard published a podcast interview with Toby Redshaw, the CIO of global insurance giant Aviva on the importance of business process management.

Aviva currently has 23 live BPM projects. One, the “Joiners, movers and leavers” system, tracks staff across their time with Aviva, from both an HR, and an information and systems access point of view. It was built in less than 12 weeks using Lombardi’s BPM tools.

In the podcast, Mr. Redshaw claimed that BPM is the single-most important technology he has seen for helping to improve the business in his 28+ years. We couldn’t agree more!

To listen to the entire interview (7:05), go here