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!

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.

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

I’m excited to announce that two of Lombardi’s financial services customers were selected as finalists in the 2009 Global Awards for Excellence in Business Process Management.

The first customer is Homeloan Management Limited (HML), a UK-based mortgage lender. They were selected for the strong case study results achieved while using BPM to streamline their Credit Management Processes. The second customer, Lincoln Trust Company (LTI), is based in Denver, CO. They achieved finalist status for implementing an enterprise wide BPM program that manages all strategic processes within the organization. LTI is especially proud of the measurable results of their program in the areas of driving processes to the web, reducing costs and risks, improving customer satisfaction, and completely turning around a damaged relationship between their IT and business organizations.

The prestigious Global Awards for Excellence in BPM, sponsored by WfMC, BPMFocus and BPM.com, are now in their 16^th year and recognize user organizations that have demonstrably excelled in implementing innovative business process solutions to meet strategic business objectives.

We are proud to congratulate both HML and LTI for their achievements and for being named 2009 BPM Excellence Award finalists!

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.

Recently the Foreign Currency Exchange Corp. (FCE) recorded a webinar with TechTarget discussing the experiences that they have had with BPM.

FCE, which is a subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland Group, provides a broad range of currency conversion products and services to wide range of industries and uses both Blueprint and Teamworks as an alternative to traditional application development. Using BPM lets them deliver projects an eye-popping 50% faster than traditional  approaches.

Some important take-aways discussed in the webinar include:

• How they became self sufficient after their very first project
• How they gather business requirements in a much more collaborative way
• How they recevied valuable feedback during development, not waiting until after it’s 80% built
• How to engage the business to take ownership in their business applications

To listen to the FCE webinar, go here (you will need to register) or alternately you can listen to a podcast version of the interview here.

For those of you looking for hard metrics to help you justify your own BPM initiatives, I recommend you read the July 23rd issue of Campus Technology Magazine (CTM). It includes an extensive interview with Stewart Mixon, the COO of Medical University of South Carolina.  

The article, “MUSC cuts error rates and improves efficiency with automation” discusses the financial grants management process that MUSC implemented in Lombardi Teamworks. It also points out the reasons why they elected NOT to go with an ERP system to accomplish this project, and and how they incorporated some legacy systems into the process.

Some nice ROI figures that MUSC achieved:

• [Teamworks] has reduced the per-grant error rate dramatically, from 85 – 90 percent down to just 20 - 25 percent initially, then finally 2 percent to 3 percent as users learned to use more efficient processes.
• “human touches” during the grants allocation process, traditionally a source of errors in any process, have dropped 65 percent.

You may read the whole story here

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.

Next week at the BPMInstitute.org BPM Conference in San Francisco, three Lombardi customers will be on hand to share their BPM success stories. The conference is being held downtown at the Parc 55 Hotel.

Details about their presentations are below. Also, stop by to see me and the rest of the Lombardi team in the Solution Showcase.

• Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect at Wells Fargo, will present the best practices keynote session entitled “Architecting BPM through a Center of Excellence at Wells Fargo Bank”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 9:40 – 10:25 a.m. (all times are PT)

• Cheryl Mascaro, Enterprise Architect at Intel, will present a case study discussing “BPM vs. BPM – The Discipline and the Technology.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 11:20 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

• Sean Perry, CIO, and Steve Nimmo, senior manager of business process and performance improvement, from Robert Half International (RHI), will share their BPM experiences in an end-user case study – “How Robert Half International is Delivering Results with BPM.”

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2:10 – 2:55 p.m.

Also, Brandon Baxter, Lombardi’s senior product marketing manager, will present “Clear Directions for BPM Success.” Brandon will talk about how comapnies can ensure long-term BPM success by using proven project development and deployment capabilities. He will also be on the BPM vendor panel discussing “Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful BPM Initiative.” Those are always fun.

Time: Tuesday, June 30, 3:50 – 4:35 p.m., and the panel runs immediately afterward.

We hope to see you there!

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.