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!
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
I’m pleased to announce that the Blueprint July ‘09 Update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has addressed some of the top requests we’ve heard from you. We’ve expanded the ways you can leverage the models you create in Blueprint, given you additional ways to secure and control access to your account, and tackled several other improvements that you suggested in the Blueprint Forums.
Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:
Model Portability With XPDL: We’re committed to ensuring that you can leverage the processes you create in Blueprint in anyway you like. That includes giving you the ability to seamlessly execute the processes in Lombardi Teamworks, but also any other tool that you choose. To that end, we’re committed to supporting the BPMN 2.0 specification when it is released. However, we know that you need a way to use your models today, so we’ve introduced the ability to export your processes to XPDL 2.1 format in this release. You never need to feel “locked in” when using Blueprint — you can get your information out in any format you’d like, whether that be as a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or in XPDL.
I’m excited to announce that the Blueprint Spring ‘09 release is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! This update moves Blueprint from being a great modeling tool to be the place for everyone in your organization to go for business improvement conversations. We’ve leveraged social networking concepts to facilitate the discussion about how each person can make their job better. Everyone can see and be notified about changes that are relevant to their work, discover relationships between what they do and the rest of the organization, and contribute feedback and suggestions to the community.
Let’s take a look the new features in detail:
See Changes and Discover Relationships: Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can tell you when a colleague switches jobs or a long lost friend gets married. It’s news you wouldn’t have heard otherwise, or perhaps even known to ask about. Blueprint now does the same for process in your enterprise. The new Activity Feeds show you changes happening to your processes and helps you discover relationships between what you do and the rest of the company. Now you’ll know when something changes two steps upstream from you that will affect your job, or that the person in the next building over does something similar that you leverage.
One of the great pleasures of delivering Blueprint as a SaaS application is that we’re able to stay flexible and update the product approximately every six weeks. To that end, we dedicated the February Update of Blueprint to fulfilling the top three customer requests we’ve heard over the past few months on the forums and out in the field.
Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.
This morning I’m happy to announce that the year end release of Blueprint has gone into production. This is the culmination of our effort to make Blueprint a complete repository for all of your process related assets. The biggest change that you’ll notice immediately in this update is the ability to upload and store files as part of your documentation. We’ve also addressed several other top customer requests that we’ve heard on the forums and from out in the field.
Take a look at this screencast for a quick rundown or see the full details after the break.
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