The other day SearchCIO published a feature on BPM that included two Lombardi customers, Wells Fargo and NACCO Materials Handling.

The piece is notable as a case study because of the quantifiable successes it reports - for example, the $250,000 savings realized on a project with the centralized loan disposition group at Wells Fargo, and the cost authorization system that Bob Shallow and his team over at NACCO implemented in an unprecedented 15 days.

The author, Sarah Varney, is right in pointing out the many challenges companies face along the way - everything from internal politics, to an inherent distrust of IT tools on the part of the business, to issues of bandwidth and a lack of resources.  But as Wells Fargo and NACCO have shown, anything is possible with the right team and the right solution.

This short, 3-minute podcast features Peter Schoof, the editor of ebizQ, and Gene Rawls, VP of Continuous Improvement at Wells Fargo (a Lombardi customer). It was recorded last week at the Gartner BPM Summit in Washington, D.C., where Gene gave a talk titled “How Wells Fargo Built a Cross-Organizational BPM Capability.”

In the podcast, Gene goes over the three categories of gains that the company is pursuing with its BPM initiatives:

• Cost take-out, i.e. improving processes where the company doesn’t need to spend at the level at which it is currently spending
• Cost avoidance, i.e. where the company can avoid an expense altogether
• Revenue increase, which is self explanatory, but just as important as the other two categories, and in some cases even moreso

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The Lombardi team is gearing up for the Gartner BPM Summit next week, Sept. 10 - 12 in Washington to D.C. If you can make it there, the event will showcase some very interesting and compelling Lombardi customer stories.

Bob Shallow, director of global product development at NACCO Materials Handling Group will share his experiences on a BPM case study panel session during the conference. And Gene Rawls, vice president of continuous improvement at Wells Fargo Financial will present his company’s BPM experiences in a Lombardi-hosted case study session.

From Lombardi, Phil Gilbert, president, will present during a luncheon keynote. During his presentation, “Governing an Enterprise-Wide BPM Program” Phil will share insight into new structural capabilities in chartering and governance needed to make BPM an internal competency to scale the delivery of BPM projects. He’ll also propose five “Charters for BPM Governance” to help companies make the move from “project to program.”

Also from Lombardi will be Toby Cappello, vice present of professional services, to present, “Breaking Down the Three Major Barriers to BPM Success.”

If you’re planning to attend the conference, stop by and see us at booth #10. We’d love to see you there.

Last week, the BPM industry - and two Lombardi customers - gained some very nice attention in the Financial Times. Steven S. Smith, CTO of Wells Fargo Financial, talked about how he achieved adoption from the business side of the company. Another, James Thomas, IT Director at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), discussed how they are using Lombardi Teamworks to reduce the time it takes for a patient to receive medical treatment after a referral. Impressive stuff.

But I think the really interesting thing here is that people can use this article to help evangelize the value that BPM can offer their companies in terms that business people can actually understand: efficiency, effectiveness and agility.

While BPM has been covered for some time in IT-oriented publications that dive deeper into the technology, this story is fairly unique in that it talks at a business-level about some of the biggest issues companies face with getting success with BPM. It provides examples of successful approaches that other companies took to solve meaningful problems while connecting with the business - and it comes from mainstream business press source - not an IT journal.

What it doesn’t do (too much at least) is get bogged down by technical points that make business people’s heads spin. And that is the problem with a lot of the press attention that BPM has received in the past. Many articles either get totally side-tracked with technical ‘in the weeds’ points or only discuss the broad market trends.

So the point I am making is that if you need help making the case for BPM with your executives, or if you need concrete examples of the benefits companies are acheiving, have them read the FT article - it should really help. And they probably won’t even make that funny face when they read it (you all know what I mean). Let me know how it goes!

Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

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