Recently, two Lombardi customers were interviewed by SearchCIO’s Manufacturing News as part of an article that discusses how manufacturers are using BPM [i.e., Lombardi Teamworks] to assist with making their supply chain more effective.

The article, entitled “BPM tools help firms bridge communications gaps in supply chains,” provides some interesting insight into how manufacturers can receive value from BPM. 

One of the customers is El Araby, an air conditioner manufacturer based in Cairo, Egypt. They had this to say:

 “Before Lombardi Software [BPM] was in place, all we could do for a customer was recommend them to the nearest service center and that was the end of it… We had no clue what happened next until the monthly report came out afterwards. Now, the Lombardi BPM software system handles all of the details of the repair process, even down to what technician is working on what appliance in what service center.”

We’re pretty proud that Teamworks customers around the world like to share such great testimony!

You can read the whole story here.

Last week, UK analyst firm Butler Group published their latest Technology Audit report on Lombardi. In it, analyst Mike Thompson reviewed the capabilities of Teamworks 7 as they relate to Butler’s product assessment methodology in the areas of building, optimizing and managing processes faster and smarter in this Technology Audit.

It’s a good report for you to send to those colleagues in your company who are interested in 3rd party takes on BPM technology.

The bottom line – excerpted from the report:

“Teamworks 7 is a full-featured BPM solution, with all the functionality expected of a market-leading solution. It really differentiates itself from its competitors in two distinct areas, one technical and one non-technical. By using a shared-model architecture, Teamworks ensures that the process model is always up to date, regardless of where and when changes to the model are made. Thus, changes to a running process instance can be reflected back to the high-level model. From a non-technical point of view the major focus has been on ensuring ease of use for any and all of the participants of process lifecycle management. This ensures that the people involved in the process are able to help in optimising the process, which makes far more sense than handing off the task to a ‘process expert’.

Allied to Teamworks is the Blueprint solution which creates a collaboration and communication environment that further empowers the process participants in all aspects of process management. A final factor worth highlighting is the graphical nature of the product – not just in process design terms, but in having the ability to graphically represent KPI and/or SLA non-compliance on the process map.”

We couldn’t agree more!

Butler customers can access the full Technology Audit report here, or you can also get it compliments of Lombardi here (if you have not registered with us before, you will be asked to do so).

I’m proud to announce that CIO Magazine has named NACCO Materials Handling Group as one of this year’s CIO 100 winners in recognition of its success with BPM. This is the second year in a row that one of Lombardi’s customers has won an award for their BPM project!

The 2009 CIO 100 Awards honor 100 companies that are creating new business value by innovating with technology.

We are especially proud that Teamworks was the only BPM product specifically mentioned by CIO as delivering customer value in the awards, and that it has saved NACCO approximately $2 million, while improving their customer satisfaction and time to market.

Congratulations to the NACCO team!

Yesterday was the culmination of hundreds of man years of effort and understanding here at Lombardi. Yesterday marked the end of what I call “the first decade of BPM” and sets the industry on what I think is going to be an all-new course, or more accurately, a much broader and valuable course. And so out of pride, but also because I think that the BPM industry shifted today, I want to write about it a bit more.

Lombardi announced major advances in all three areas that determine success or failure in BPM:

1. The need to communicate — you have to make business improvement personal
2. The need to automate — you have to drive productivity and re-use
3. The need for talent — you need to be able to assess risk, plan, and lead

Forget about simplistic approaches to driving transformational change based solely on whether your BPMS (or “BPP” or “PAAS”) has a given feature. The so-called “Business Process Platform” as a sole-sourced technological salvation is a hoax. It’s a solipsistic approach by technologists to once again say “if I have a better tool, I won’t be as big a fool.” Go on, stare at your image in the water and try to pawn all this off on simply another development tool or architecture. Instead, you need to take to heart what Toby Redshaw, CIO of Aviva, said a couple of weeks ago (paraphrasing here): “If you’re in IT and not doing BPM, three years from now you won’t have a job.”

He wasn’t talking about a tool. He was talking about change and changing everything: how we relate IT to the business, how we use tools, and how we manage, nay, lead, change in our businesses through the use of BPM tools and methods.

Yesterday Lombardi re-defined what a BPM platform needs to be; three specific vehicles: Blueprint (Spring ’09), Teamworks 7, and Lombardi University.

Together, these 3 pillars — communication, automation and leadership — combine to form the basis for the platform for BPM’s second decade. Lombardi is that platform.

Editor’s note: The above is excerpted from Phil’s personal blog. Follow this link to read the full post, including a discussion of each of Lombardi’s new products.

I’m proud to share with you some results and metrics from a Lombardi customer that has done some truly amazing things with their labor distribution process, which dictates where grant monies are allocated.

The following is reported to us by Stewart Mixon, Chief Operations Officer at the Medical University of South Carolina.

MUSC is the oldest medical school in the Southeast, with 1,200 faculty members teaching more than 3,000 students and residents annually. MUSC depends upon financial grants as a primary means of funding its medical research. The university manages the post award grants allocation process where up to 3,000 requests for grant fund distribution changes are made every quarter.

Previously, this process was entirely manual; the same information was keyed into different front-end and back-end systems, resulting in significant backlogs and delays, as well as many errors and rework efforts.  Due to error rates and other contributing factors, there were more than twice as many forms submitted in the manual process than are processed using the Lombardi Teamworks product today.

This new process quickly delivered significant benefits for the university, enabling MUSC to proactively catch and eliminate errors at the point of entry, bringing the per-grant error rate from 85-90% down to 2-3%.

Through the use of Teamworks, MUSC also was able to reduce “human touches” in the grants allocation process by an impressive 65% — allowing the university to free up several staff full-time equivalents (FTEs) for other important tasks.

Moreover, through the use of Teamworks dashboards, MUSC management receives key performance indicators containing real-time status information of all of its financial grants distribution activities. This important metric was impossible to collect prior to implementation of the new process.

If you’d like to learn more, you can also watch this webinar with Stewart and Salvatore Salamone from Ziff Davis.

Last year, the U.K. government mandated that national hospitals improve patient waiting times by nearly a third, and Lombardi customer University College London Hospitals (UCLH) suddenly found itself with a new challenge –  reducing the turnaround for hospital treatment for half a million patients from 26 weeks to 18 or less.

Using their existing processes, complying with the new rules would have required hiring over 12,000 new employees.

Recently SearchCIO reporter Kristen Caretta wrote an excellent piece on how UCLH met this challenge using BPM.

The piece is especially helpful as a case study in how to evangelize BPM internally, and getting buy-in from senior management on the business side.

To read more about executive-level buy-in, you can check out this post too, by VP of Services Toby Cappello.

Last week, Gartner released the latest update to their BPMS Magic Quadrant. I am happy to tell you that Lombardi has been positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in the report titled:  ”2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites.”

Gartner positions vendors in the magic quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Delivering on both of these axes is the big challenge. Good quote from Rod Favaron – our CEO – on exactly this point: “From my perspective, leaders in this analysis must not only have a vision for BPM – they need to demonstrate success in executing that vision.”

2008 was the best year in Lombardi’s history.  In 2009, execution is going to be more important than ever – not just for us. Our customers and partners need BPM now more than ever. We are looking forward to the challenge.

I’m happy to announce that Lombardi Teamworks was selected for an Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Award as a “Company to Watch” in the Business Process Management category. We’re especially proud of this award because it can’t be applied for — companies are selected based purely on merit.

Specifically, we were called out for our human-centricity and exception management:

“Business process management systems knit together the people and systems involved in end-to-end processes. Lombardi Teamworks shines in both styles of integration, but human-centric-workflow and event and exception management are its strong suits. Lombardi always seems to be on our short list for BPM.”

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Hasbro recently won the Service and Technology Innovation Award for their e-Connect application, which is built on Teamworks. The award was presented by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) as part of the Hong Kong Logistics Awards.

We wanted to take the time to congratulate the Hasbro team, and particularly the Far East division, on this important recognition of their work. The Logistics Awards are a major accolade for manufacturers doing business in Hong Kong and China.

This also represents the latest in a long line of awards for Hasbro, going all the way back to 2006, when they were named to their InfoWorld 100 for their first implementation, which also marked the very beginning of the e-Connect project.

But more importantly, here’s what won Hasbro the attention of their peers.

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Two weeks ago, Lombardi presented at the BPM Tech Show in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. The conference is organized to help organizations with their decision-making process for selecting a BPM vendor by having each of the vendors demonstrate their approach to addressing a specific business process use case(s). By giving attendees a chance to evaluate several vendors in just three days, it helps them speed up the decision process and avoid some of the risks of the whole process.

The great news is we were just informed that the attendees rated Lombardi as one of two “Best-In-Show” vendors at the event!

Our very own Brandon Baxter delivered the presentation that won. He participated in the “BPM Product Shoot-Out” where each vendor was allotted 10 minutes to demonstrate how they would address one of two possible scenarios with their products. Brandon picked the loan approval process scenario to demonstrate Lombardi’s end-to-end BPM capabilities. In it, he highlighted how to use the Lombardi Solution discover and document processes, deploy and manage them, and to analyze and measure their performance and continuously improve their performance.

Judging by the votes, Brandon clearly demonstrated how our product separates itself from the rest.  We’re really pleased to be named “Best-In-Show” by the attendees.