Simplify Business Process Management with Bonitasoft BPM

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Simplify Business Process
Automation with
Bonitasoft
Copyright © 2014 Evoke Technologies. All Rights Reserved.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary.………………………………………………………………..…..….…..….….....1
Introduction.………………………………………………………………..…..….…..….….........….....1
Need for Process Automation……………………………………………………….………..…..........1
Business Process Illustration….…….…...….…….….…………………………….……..…..……2
Solution Approach.…………………………………………………………….…………....….….........3
Automated Workflow.…………………………………………………………………….................3
Increase efficiency and productivity….………………...………………..…………..…...........3
Ensure compliance, security and disaster alertness.……….…………….……….…...….....3
Increase ROI on IT investments…..……………………….....…………..….…….….............3
Bottlenecks in the Business Process.…………………………………..………………...............4
Proposed Solution………………………………………………………………...………….….….......4
Bonitasoft and Its Usage...………………………………………….………….….………….........5
How Evoke Utilized Bonitasoft?.....…..……….……….....…….………..……….……...........5
Measurable ROI Elements.……………………………………………..……………………….……...6
Benefits.……………………………………………………………..………………………………...6
Direct Benefits..………………………………………………….……………...………...………7
Indirect Benefits..………………………………………………….……….…….………............7
ROI Estimation……………………………………………………….……...….……...…...….........7
Conclusion...……………………………………………………………..…………...…………...….…..8
Evoke and BPA ……………………………………………………………………………..….….…..…8
Business Scope..………………………………………………………………………….…...….....9
Process Automation and Management Solutions..…………………………………….…....…...9
Evoke Technologies Approach………………………………….………………….…….....…......9
About Evoke Technologies.………………………………………………………………….…..…..….9
Contact Information.…………………………………………………………………………………...10

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SIMPLIFY BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION WITH BONITASOFT
Executive Summary
In today's dynamic and competitive business
environment, organizations across the world face
a common business challenge, which is optimizing
their processes and improving their operational
effectiveness. In order to overcome these
emerging business challenges and gain a
competitive advantage, you need a technology
partner having deep-domain expertise in Business
Process Automation (BPA). Your technology
partner would be able to understand your core
business challenges and work with you to
automate your processes, which would allow your
organization to improve a wide-range of processes
that involve people, systems, and data.
Business Process Management (BPM) is now an
integral part of organizations world-wide. It has
become increasingly challenging for businesses to
sustain growth without utilizing business process
management practices / tools to align their
processes effectively. BPM solutions allow
businesses to improve their process effectiveness
and at the same time align their processes. The
white paper aims to cover important aspects of
improving business processes by utilizing BPA
solutions. This white paper is intended for
business executives and process owners
responsible to improve the quality and efficiency of
business operations.
Introduction
Business success largely depends on the
effectiveness of process management. Manual
processing can often lead to costly errors, delays
and omissions. While working in teams, members
would require access to the latest information,
irrespective of their location, whether they are
located within the same building or across the
globe.
Evoke Technologies workflow team can assist
Businesses by automating their processes, which
would help them optimize, control and implement
business solutions effectively. Process automation
helps businesses improve their efficiency by allowing
real-time status reporting, which helps in better
coordination among geographically diverse teams.
Need for Process Automation
Business processes often evolve as manual,
undocumented procedures, but later turn complex
enough to be managed without automation. As the
business expands these processes turn out to be
laborious and require constant maintenance. In order to
mitigate these challenges, businesses must continually
improvise their processes to align with changing
business dynamics.
In the current economic scenario most of the
businesses are aware of the evolving concept of
Business Process Management (BPM) and the wide-
ranging benefits it offers. Some of the immediate
benefits include automation, better visibility, and
improved efficiency. Although, businesses recognize
the importance of BPM they are hesitant to implement
these solutions for reasons such as cost, time and
effort.
In today's rapidly changing business scenario, it is
essential for an enterprise to take advantage of
Business Process Automation (BPA). It is a concept
that is helping businesses manage complex tasks
efficiently with greater accuracy and also allowing faster
execution time.
Businesses may typically try out one of the three
approaches to Business Process Automation (BPA):
a) Extending IT service management systems.
b) Implementing specialized Business Process
Automation tool sets or
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c) Creating automated process workflows on
the back of a business process management
(BPM) implementation.
Business Process Automation (BPA) is often
considered as a subset of Business Process
Management (BPM). BPM has been referred to as a
“holistic” management approach that strives to
promote efficiency at an enterprise-level for the
processes that matter the most to a business. In the
illustration cited below, the process automation
mostly focuses at a department level.
Both BPM and BPA are treated as major initiatives,
whose complexity and scope limits their suitability to
major or core business process workflows. Business
enterprises have hundreds or even thousands of
smaller process workflows, sometimes involving only
a handful of individuals or single departments. Many
of these workflows include numerous manual
processes. The manual nature of these processes
may result in costly errors, delays, and increased
inefficiencies, which makes a good business case to
automate workflows. However, business enterprises
believe that their processes are too small to justify
the development effort and cost incurred for process
automation.
Business Process – Illustration
Let’s take a classic example of a standard "Order
Management System" (OMS), which is typically
managed by an operations team. The order
management system covers several modules, out of
which "customer account tracking" is one of the most
important activities.
While working on customer account tracking sub-
process the operations team will have to manually
track various changes that took place in relation to
permanent address details of their customers (names
and addresses of individuals and businesses). The
process also contains details of individuals, who have
filed for a new address with State Postal Service
(SPS).
The operations team compares the data against SPS
database utilizing the data provided by an external
vendor (the vendor supplies OMS operations team
with records of customers, whose address on file
differs with that listed in the SPS database).
Below is the process in relation to the way change of
address records are handled by the operations
team, after receiving the data from the vendor.
Step 1
Identify the list of customer records (with the help of
a third party vendor) whose address details stand
changed with reference to State Postal Service
(SPS).
Step 2
Post receiving records from the vendor, operation
team member’s add the records onto their online
database software and each row (customer record)
is treated as a separate case.
Step 3
The operations team search internal records of the
customer (using a unique customer account
number) to obtain the customer's current status.
Based on the current status the following activities
are performed:
a) Inactive Customer: If the customer is
inactive (i.e. If a customer is no longer
registered with the company), a note is
made in a spreadsheet [under the "notes"
column] and the case is marked as "closed".
b) Active Customer: If the customer is active,
the following actions are performed:
i) The operations team member compares
the customer's address shared by the
vendor with customer’s address held
with the company.
ii) If the address matches, the operations
team makes a note in a spreadsheet
and the case is marked as "closed".
iii) If the address does not match, the
operations team sends out emails to the
concerned departments (internal) to
verify and confirm the new address of
the customer.
iv) When a customer responds to the email,
an action is taken based on the
response – i.e. either updating the
address or marking the case as closed.
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v) If no email address is mentioned in the
customer’s profile, the operations team
makes a call to the customer to confirm the
change of address. If the customer
mentions any changes to his/her address,
they are asked to send out an email to the
operations teams with their new address.
Solution Approach
We follow a structure solutions approach to Business
Process Management. Our business process
automation solutions focus on the intersection of
human-based and automated workflow processes, this
allows businesses to:
a) Increase efficiency and productivity of the
business processes.
b) Continuous improvement in the business
processes.
c) Improves quality, consistency and compliance
of the business processes.
d) Enhances company’s agility and flexibility to
handle the business processes.
Automated Workflow
The first step in implementing a fully automated
workflow in conjunction with BPM is to identify the
bottlenecks in a process, which inevitably occur as a
result of existing manual processes, if not addressed
theses start affecting the productivity of the business
process.
There are three major business factors that any
business enterprise will focus on while implementing
process automation, which include:
a) Increase process efficiency and productivity.
b) Ensure business compliance, security factors,
and disaster alertness.
c) Increase return on investments (ROI).
To identify bottlenecks in the existing process, we can
frame the following set of question targeting the
business process executives and management teams,
which allow us to find ways to improve the current
process resulting in process optimization.
Following are the list of questions specific to each
business factor:
Increase efficiency and productivity
a) How many records or what is the size of
data handled, while managing business
process or workflow?
b) How many stages each record has to
move in the entire process and how it is
being moved?
c) Where are the records (data) stored and
which user types need the access to the
records?
d) How is the tracking of the records (data)
being done?
Ensure compliance, security and
disaster alertness
a) How secure are the records (data) existing
in the current system?
b) What is the criticality / importance of the
records (data) stored in the file?
c) How can you retrieve the record (data) /
files lost in an unforeseeable disaster?
d) How expensive is it to implement control
access / procedural controls of such
records (data)?
Increase ROI on IT investments
a) What is the size of the team that is working
on the current business process?
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b) What is the success rate (number) of
records being successfully updated based
on the response from a customer?
c) What is the average time spent by the
operations team for closure of each
customer record?
d) Is this data available in any existing
business software application?
e) How long does it take for records (data) to
be updated onto the system?
f) Is the data manually being re-entered?
Bottlenecks in the Business Process
With reference to our sample order management system
process, we have observed that the following manual
steps are making the activity cumbersome for the
operations team:
a) Customer address change comparisons.
b) Customer detail’s verification.
c) Notification about the address change to the
customer.
d) Customer notification, follow-up and tracking.
The existing manual process is not scalable, which is
leading to certain services being undelivered and the
company is losing discount points from the State Postal
Service (SPS).
Proposed Solution
The current process is completely manual and data is
being maintained manually using spreadsheets. It is
difficult to guarantee security of the data and it is also
complex to track the progress of records using the
current process flow. It is also complicated to track and
measure the efficiency of the process as a whole.
After carefully analyzing the current process, we strongly
recommend automation of process to enhance workflow
and streamline the process, which would benefit the
company.
The customer account tracking sub-process needs to
be automated by enhancing the existing workflow.
The proposed solution should be able to perform
following tasks automatically:
a) Ability to read the address change data from
external (third party) vendor’s file and create
a case for each of its existing customer
records by utilizing a unique customer
account number.
b) Compare the address reported by the State
Postal Service (SPS) with company’s master
data.
c) Auto-generate address change notification e-
mails (on a weekly basis) to all customer
contacts.
d) Track customer confirmation (reply /
feedback) e-mails and automate reply e-
mails with relevant customer case details.
e) Provide an online form (alternate option) to
customers, which would help capture
feedback about the address change process.
The workflow would automatically update the
customer feedback onto respective customer
case details.
f) Create simple steps to update customer‘s
profile (by operations team) based on the
customer feedback.
g) Analytics view to monitor case history details
with the help of 'key performance indicator'
(KPI) and provisions to generate status
reports.
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Bonitasoft and Its Usage
Evoke Technologies utilized Bonitasoft – An open source workflow and BPM software for the workflow design of
this business process.
Bonitasoft includes the following set of components - Studio, Execution Engine, and Portal. The Bonita Studio is
widely used by process analysts to create a design using the industry standard BPMN 2.0 notation, it further allows
them to automatically generate workflow related documentation. Bonita Execution Engine allows developers to
easily implement the proposed workflow solution and design process related web forms, and also allows them to
use it as a multi-user repository. Bonita Portal helps process related business users to interact with the newly
designed workflow-based applications and perform process related activities.
How Evoke Utilized Bonitasoft?
a) We utilized the 'Event Management' feature to schedule process-related activities (e.g. auto-generated
email notifications to customers).
b) Customized various connectors for interaction between Bonita engine with line of business (LOB)
applications.
c) Effectively managed business processes using Bonita REST (Representational State Transfer) API
integration.
d) Used Bonita Analytics feature for extensive reporting.
The following (figure-1) diagram depicts the integration of different components utilized to achieve the proposed
solution.
Figure-1: Solution Approach - High-level Component Architecture Diagram (Integrations View)
Here’s a look at some high-level details of the architecture Evoke Technologies incorporated into the proposed
workflow design.
The proposed workflow solution can reuse the existing components available in the company’s existing workflow
platform for 'customer record processing' and 'email notification processing'.
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Additionally, the solution can reuse the existing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs') that are available from
Line of Business (LOB) applications to fetch the domain data into a workflow.
The following diagram (figure-2) depicts the automated business process workflow that needs to be implemented in
the Bonita workflow engine.
Figure 2: Process Workflow (Implementation) Diagram Defined using Bonitasoft - Open Source Workflow & BPM Software
Measurable ROI Elements
Automation and standardization of process helps businesses to a great extent. Major benefits include:
a) Improve and optimize process efficiency.
b) Continued process improvement.
c) Reduce time to resolution.
d) Mitigate process gaps.
e) Quick response to emerging business challenges
f) Maximize business profits.
Benefits
Management teams require concrete information and quantifiable business benefits before they take any decision.
Vague references to the possible benefits of business process automation may not be sufficient for them to decide
whether to go ahead and automate their processes. Below are some substantial benefits to support the cause of
automation:
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a) Firstly, the benefits of business process automation
projects are multi-dimensional. There are no clear
models available to exactly map the cost
associated with BPA projects and there are no
proven metrics to calculate ROI.
b) Before making an investment on any automation
related projects, ROI is a critical factor that needs
to be closely looked into.
c) Most of the businesses understand the need to
optimize their processes to save costs. However,
they lack a clear idea on the ROI factor, which
would give them complete confidence to go ahead
with BPA implementation.
However, there are few indicators which would help
businesses measure ROI such as 'direct benefits' and
'indirect benefits'. Some examples pertaining to these have
been cited below.
Direct Benefits
a) Improvement in the operating structure and
efficiency due to process automation.
b) Cut-down process gaps, failures and re-work
factors.
c) Better staffing model, which will frame re-allocation
of roles and responsibilities as part of business
process modelling exercise.
d) Cut-down risk factors by having effective controls
on the processes.
e) Standard and enhanced end-to-end process maps
to reflect the company’s policies and procedures.
Indirect Benefits
f) Easy to handle change requests for future
enhancements (as existing and standardized
documentation and process mapping are in place).
g) Centralized repository of policies and procedures
with details of end-to-end process mapping for
cross reference.
a) Seamless integration between different
business processes reflects in direct contact
and interaction with IT and business staff.
b) Ease of developing new strategies to
accommodate new clients on board.
c) Centralized business analysis and better
project management with little effort and lot
of control.
d) Expansion of Business Process
Management to other departments with
minimal effort and reduced external
expertise.
e) Regulatory and compliance benefits and
support to compliance certifications.
ROI Estimation
The table on the next page (figure-3) outlines the
ROI estimation based on the process automation.
The figure also provides data of pre and post
workflow implementation.
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Figure 3: ROI Estimation – Before and After Automation
Conclusion
Businesses worldwide are expected to provide customers with world-class service, higher reliability, and greater
agility than ever before – which results in increased spending for them. However, we also have alternative ways to
meet these goals i.e. by automating business processes. Businesses can leverage technology to their advantage.
The easiest way is to automate their business processes, which after implementation would result in a host of
savings, including cost, effort, time, improved resource utilization, security, compliance, improved response times,
and agility. Before taking a decision to go ahead with BPA, businesses should spend considerable time finding the
right technology partner who can assist your business in achieving process automation objectives and goals.
Evoke and BPA
Evoke Technologies offers comprehensive Business Process Automation (BPA) and Business Process
Management (BPM) solutions that enable organizations to effectively manage their business processes. Evoke has
been immensely successful in recommending process improvements to their existing workflow. BPM is now a
widely accepted practice world-wide, as it helps in effectively modeling business processes and delivering a
practical solution to key business issues. The smart BPM solutions offered by Evoke help businesses to streamline
their processes and improve efficiency.
Evoke Technologies uses Bonitasoft an open source workflow and BPM software for the workflow design and
development. Bonitasoft allows users to design and optimize business processes using the industry standard
BPMN 2.0 notation. It allows users to generate process documentation and KPI reports on the process data. It also
offers the provision of connecter, which is a great value-addition. Bonitasoft is a highly flexible and powerful BPM
suite for all types of organizations, which helps in developing flexible workflow applications.
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Business Scope
Business process improvement and alignment is an
ongoing challenge faced by businesses worldwide.
Guaranteeing customer satisfaction, reducing costs and
increasing efficiencies across the board is the primary
objective of every business enterprise. Evoke
Technologies has been assisting its clients by suggesting
practical BPM solutions to manage emerging business
challenges effectively. Business Process Management has
now evolved to the next level and is now a widely
accepted practice. BPM is allowing software companies to
provide smarter solutions by creating workflows around
business processes utilizing latest BPM tools.
Process Automation and Management
Solutions
Evoke offers multiple BPA & BPM solutions that
standardize and accelerate the deployment of software
solutions, which helps businesses to enhance their
processes. Successful business process management
solutions require direct communication with the business
process stakeholders. Evoke Technologies experienced
BPM process consultants understand the entire process
flow and chalk out a process oriented strategy to identify
the best possible solution for each industry domain. With
their unique BPA and BPM solutions, they can effectively
integrate business processes, which results in significant
time and cost savings for your business enterprise.
Evoke Technologies Approach
Evoke’s business process management solutions enable
businesses to manage changes in their workflow
effectively. Evoke follows a unique approach towards
Business Process Automation, which allows businesses to
optimize their processes by blending traditional business
models with emerging technology practices. Utilizing top-
of-the-line business process management tools, Evoke
Technologies has been offering effective workflow
solutions, which have helped client’s meet their process
automation goals. Evoke has created an IT and
management environment that reacts more quickly to
changing business dynamics, through a process that
involves a cycle of design, modeling, execution, monitoring
and optimization. This helps in improving information flow
and efficiency of business process.
About Evoke Technologies
Evoke Technologies is an innovative Information
technology firm offering value driven software
services that help businesses save significant costs
and amplify their business systems. Evoke has been
actively assisting its clients to constantly innovate
and gain competitive advantage in the global
marketplace. It has always laid greater emphasis on
core technology practices that has helped them to
consistently maintain quality standards in their key
deliverables.
Evoke Technologies is a certified SEI-CMMI Level 3,
ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 compliant IT enterprise,
which focuses on building long term relationships
with its clients. Evoke has always been on the
forefront of offering cutting-edge technology solutions
that enable its clients to meet their automation goals.
Its project delivery and engagement models allow
significant operational savings, thus adding value to
its clients.
Evoke Technologies has gained strong expertise by
assisting its clients across various industry verticals.
It has built a strong governance and project delivery
methodology that provides its clients with a superior
edge. Evoke has a strong technical team that
develops and deploys tactical solutions for all
complex IT requirements of their clients. Evoke
strongly believes in the offshore development model
as it allows it to pass on considerable savings to its
clients. Evoke is a preferred software development
outsourcing partner for various businesses across
North America.
For further information about Evoke Technologies,
business process management services, please visit:
www.evoketechnologies.com
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Simplified Solutions for Everyday Business Challenges
7106 Corporate Way,
Dayton,
OH, 45459
www.evoketechnologies.com
Email: sales@evoketechnologies.com
Toll Free: 877-616-2597
Sales: 937-242-6270
Fax: 937-312-1205
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All information presented in this document is the exclusive property of Evoke Technologies.
No information must be copied, modified, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted or
distributed in any form without prior permission from Evoke Technologies. Unauthorized
use of the content/information is strictly prohibited.
Copyright © 2014 Evoke Technologies. All Rights Reserved.

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