Process Master Ltd

When you do need to re-engineer or automate, your investment is secure: your processes can be exported directly into process analysis and automation environments, using Process Master Accelerators – automatically, with the press of a button, and without the need for expensive and error-prone manual translation.

All Accelerators support round-tripping: changes made to your process in other environments are re-imported into the original process model, for formal business approval, or just to ensure that your documentation remains current.  You can round-trip as often as you like – without losing any of the information captured in either environment.
Accelerated Analysis

When you want to re-engineer or optimize a mission-critical process, just use the appropriate Accelerator to export the process to your chosen Business Process Analysis Suite – such as Oracle BPA Suite/ IDS Scheer ARIS, Casewise and Telelogic.

Then use the suite’s analysis, optimization and simulation to capabilities to build, run, measure, compare and choose between different approaches.

Once you have selected and finalized your ‘To Be’ process, use the Accelerator again to bring the new version of the process back into Process Master Enterprise.

Why not just use a BPA Suite in the first place?

BPA Suites are highly complex. Even for a professional business analyst, it takes weeks of training and months of experience to become an expert in any one suite.

Since they are designed for use by a few specialists, they are prohibitively priced for widespread usage in the business.

Process Master believes that BPA Suites are excellent tools, in the right hands, for Business Process Re-engineering – but that they represent serious overkill for the more common requirements of process discovery and documentation.

And our large consultancy partners agree with us – they use Process Master to speed up the work of process discovery, and to ensure the results fit the real business requirements. Then they use their preferred BPA Suite to optimize the high-value or high-cost processes, before delivering the documented results back to the business using Process Master.

Accelerators speed up delivery – so you can move on to the next Business Improvement project sooner.

Accelerated Automation

When you want to automate all or part of a process, use the appropriate Accelerator to export the process to your chosen Business Process Management Suite or Workflow Management System – such as IBM Websphere, Oracle BPEL Manager, Microsoft SharePoint or Workflow Foundation, Infosys Ensemble, TIBCO iProcess and FlowCentric BPM.

If necessary, you can use the suite’s own development environment to add additional integration or other coding – the amount of work here depends on the BPMS you are using and on the extent to which your IT infrastructure is SOA-enabled. Your IT department will, in any case, want to inspect each process to ensure that it will not compromise the scalability or security of their infrastructure.

Then use the Accelerator again to bring the modified version of the process back into Process Master Enterprise.

Why not start in the target development environment?

BPMS and Workflow Management development environments are designed for use by programmers. Although some of the smaller vendors may pay lip-service to business users, they are never, in practice, used in that way.

In practice, people describe their processes in Word, Visio, PowerPoint and the like, then hand these over to IT for deployment.  There will be many ambiguities or omissions in these informal specifications, which IT will attempt to fill. The resultant system may or may not match the original requirements – and even if it does, you will have no matching documentation or training material.

More importantly, why should you choose what execution engine you are going to use when you start to discover your process?  There are many to choose from, and each has different ways of working. And many companies have more than one – whether locked into departmental silos, or used for different purposes, such as human-centric workflow versus formal back-office process management. As soon as you move to one of these environments, your process - and therefore your business - becomes locked in to that vendor.

It is far better to capture, design and document your processes in an independent way, deferring the choice of a deployment engine to the point at which you decide to automate. This also mean you have future-proofed your processes in case your deployment partners change.

Accelerators speed up discovery and documentation by separating them from deployment issues.