This week, Lombardi has been at the Forrester IT Forum 2010 – The Business Technology Transformation: Making it Real.  The conference is taking place at the Palazzo Hotel Resort Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

So far it has been great, in fact, we just wrapped up our Guest Executive Forum where we had Lincoln Trust Company speak on our behalf about their successful implementation of Lombardi BPM.  Speakers included Bonnie Lewis, VP of Business Operations and Bill Garner, Senior IT Director of Solutions and Innovation.

Lincoln Trust Company (LTC) took advantage of our BPM capabilities to go beyond their main challenges of standardizing their document management and workflow processes,  to bridging the gap between their IT and Business side of the house.  Session attendees learned not only about the great results achieved by LTC (120% ROI in year 1 and 90% reduction in customer complaints),  but also about the lessons learned by LTC throughout their BPM journey (don’t over analyze, build the right team capabilities), along with tips on how to get started on the BPM journey.

As you have heard from us time and again – the success of our customers is what drives us to innovate and deliver products that can help solve crucial business problems.  Special thanks to Bonnie and Bill for a wonderful presentation as well as to the session attendees for the insightful questions!

We are extremely excited to have had such a tremendous presence at Impact 2010.  The impressive conference of more than 6,000 registrants took place at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada May 2-7, 2010.

Welcome Keynote

We kicked off the week with Lombardi Day, a special Lombardi Driven event specifically for Lombardi customers and partners. Lombardi and IBM leaders  were on-site to provide an executive update on the state of Lombardi as well as a status on the acquisition and how Lombardi will fit within the IBM WebSphere portfolio.

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Kickoff 2010 was hosted by Lombardi February 22nd-26th.  Kickoff is an annual, company-wide conference in Austin, Texas that has been a wonderful tradition at Lombardi since 2004.  This year, not only did we have all world-wide Lombardians come to downtown Austin, but we also had a large number of IBMers attend.  This week-long conference was definitely valuable for the successful integration of Lombardi into the IBM family – we were able to meet, enjoy each other’s company and learn about one another throughout the different meetings and events.

It all started Monday evening at the Austin Music Hall with an interesting presentation by Phil Gilbert at the Opening Reception.  This was followed by the 2010 Lombardi Science Fair, an event that has been at Lombardi for 5 years now and is something we hope IBM will continue well into the future.

Phil's presentation during Science Fair

Science Fair Passport and Program

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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.

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.

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.

In the spirit of our “How To”  blog, I found a very useful article that Kristen Caretta from SearchCIO Midmarket wrote that discusses some of the steps that organizations can take to evaluate BPM vendors!

“Evaluating a Business Process Management solutions vendor: What to ask” offers suggestions from analysts at Forrester and Gartner about what questions people need to ask BPM vendors up front to ensure we are providing a good technology fit for them. 

The article recommends that people check into the vendor’s industry experience, understand their service and technology offerings and provides a number of other useful tips.

We especially appreciate the suggestion for companies to use cloud-based collaboration tools like Blueprint to help with strategic mapping and planning, as well as to help them build their business case for BPM.  In fact, we have a series of whitepapers that further explain how to get started quickly with your process documentation and prioritization, as well as what to do next. You can access them here

Information Age magazine in the UK recently published an interesting article about how social software is changing the way companies design and execute business processes.

The author, Pete Swabey, points to the dramatic events of late as proof that collaboration software and online social networks are rewiring the fabric of society.

Here at Lombardi we agree, and have spent a lot of time and effort looking at ways to further expand the role of BPM to more people through social technologies. They are manifested in Lombardi Blueprint and Teamworks in many ways. You can learn how each incorporates social capabilities here and here respectively. 

The article also interviewed both Phil Gilbert (Lombardi’s President), and Aviva’s CIO, Toby Redshaw. It is a very good article – I encourage you to read it 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).