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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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.

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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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.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Apathy, Systems Transformation Project Manager at the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), about their successful implementation of Blueprint.  He said “Blueprint is the first place I go when I want to document or  analyze a process.” SEARHC is a consortium of 18 remote Alaska Native communities, many of which can only be reached by plane or boat.  Blueprint gives SEARHC the ability to unify the workflow processes across these regions.

In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system.  The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level  Seven (HL7) messaging protocol.  HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.

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The October ‘09 update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has some exciting enhancements that I think will make Blueprint an even more valuable tool for discovering and sharing your processes. We’ve added a new process analysis mode, several new properties to the Blueprint documentation template, email notifications for changes happening to your processes, and a many more improvements based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• Enhanced Process Analysis: We’ve introduced a new analysis mode in today’s release that allows you to instantly highlight the areas of your process that need attention and improvement. When you switch to analysis mode, Blueprint heat maps both the discovery map and process diagram with the data you’ve entered in the details for each activity. This allows you to instantly see which parts of your process have problems, excessive cost or cycle time, or that are risk points. It substantially increases the visibility you have into all of your processes, and is an excellent tool to help you make a business case for improvements.

  You can find the Analyze button in the toolbar whenever you’re viewing a process. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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It’s Business Process Management conference season right now. Over the next 4 weeks, Lombardi and our customers will be participating in quite of few conferences around the world – spreading the news about how BPM can help companies to quickly improve their processes and gain efficiencies.

In fact, last week we found ourselves presenting in Washington D.C. for the Brainstorm BPM, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the 2^nd International Congress of Business Processes, respectively.

This week it was the IRM BPM summit in London. Aviva, one of our large insurance customers, spoke about how they are using BPM to get measurable results across their organization.

Next week we are back at it at the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando Florida, with seven Lombardi customers speaking about their BPM projects. If you are attending this one, you are in for a real treat – we have executives from Lincoln Trust Company, Wells Fargo, Medical University of South Carolina, Foreign Currency Exchange Corp. and others sharing their experiences and best practices for “How to succeed with BPM.”

But the world tour doesn’t stop there. We’ll also be at Forrester’s Business Technology Forum in Chicago next week where another customer, SIRVA, will be sharing their perspective on how BPM helps them drive world-class customer experience in the corporate relocation business.

Finally, we will be rounding out the conference season with Phil Gilbert speaking at a Banking event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as participating at both of Gartner’s Symposium/ITXpo events in Orlando, Florida and Cannes, France.

And that’s how you go around the world in 30 days with BPM. Pretty busy schedule, but certainly worth it because we feel that every company can benefit from process improvement if they take the right approach. We hope to see you at one of the events.

This morning, the August ‘09 update went live on blueprint.lombardi.com! The team has been hard at work over the past month and I think you’ll be very happy with the latest improvements. We’ve improved the portability of your processes with the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format, added full text search across all of your process data, and made substantial usability improvements to Blueprint’s activity feeds based upon your feedback.

Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:

• BPMN 2.0 Exports: We’re committed to ensuring that you can use your processes in whatever way you’d like with whichever system that works best for you. To that end, we’re delivering the first shipping implementation of the BPMN 2.0 export format. We expect BPMN 2.0 to quickly become the de facto standard for exchanging process diagrams among modeling tools. The BPMN 2.0 specification just reached beta status, and as Bruce Silver pointed out there are areas where it still could be improved. We hope that our implementation can help further the discussion and serve as a reference for others in the industry. We think that well designed and supported standards are hugely beneficial for our customers and we’re committed to making BPMN 2.0 just that.

  And don’t forget: Blueprint also supports XPDL 2.1 to give you the maximum flexibility with your models today.

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On Friday, KMWorld Magazine announced that Teamworks 7 received a 2009 “Trend-Setting Product of the Year” award. I’m pretty excited about this award, as is our development team.

The innovations that Teamworks 7 offers customers is really helping them expand their BPM adoption exponentially throughout the organization. It increases their collaboration, governance and reuse abilities, and it helps them simplify nearly every task that they need to do across the entire process development lifecycle.

We’re proud to receive this recognition. But we certainly won’t stop here. Thanks to all of you for nominating Teamworks 7 as a winner.

Yesterday, Phil Gilbert spoke about the human aspects of BPM as an invited guest on the well-known Internet talk radio show, CIO Talk Radio.

It’s obvious BPM has come of age when mainstream media programs are starting to weigh-in on the topic.

The hour-long show featured ‘HIM: Handling the Human Side of BPM,’ and focused on whether the new Human Interaction Management (HIM) framework  is necessary given that BPM already addresses most of the same issues and is a mature discipline. 

In addtion to Phil, the other invited guests were Clay Richardson (senior analyst at Forrester) and Howard Smith (BPM author and CTO of CSC’s European Group).

If you are interested in hearing how BPM can help your organization,  or if you need a better way to explain its benefits to your executives, you should listen to the replay. You can access the replay here (not required to register).