BPM in the trenches

Burckhardt says Pulte had to clear several implementation hurdles. The most dramatic problem arose during deployment, when the realization came that the Lombardi software would need two-way integration with the company's apps. When someone made a change in the loan origination system, for example, that change might also need to trigger a new BPM workflow process such as a review of loan terms, which would require writing agents to monitor each app and feed events back to the BPM system. "It's one of these things you don't really think through until you're in there," Burckhardt says.

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What has Pulte learned from its BPM experience so far? "It requires much more of a partnership between business and IT. It raises the bar in terms of IT's participation," Burckhardt says. "This is really about changing the way the business works, talking about how we want the business to operate, so you have to be a player at that level."

Loral Skynet: Merging complex processes

When two divisions of Loral Space & Communications merged in 2002, Charles Bihler's life got a whole lot more complicated. At the time, Bihler, process manager at the Loral Skynet division, was already deploying a BPM system to automate the workflows associated with selling the company's satellite-based video and data transmission services.

But when Skynet absorbed Loral CyberStar, a networking services company, Bihler had to refocus the BPM effort midstream in order to optimize the much more complex set of processes required for delivering customized network services. In particular, his team turned its attention to modeling Loral Skynet's critical sales and fulfillment processes, base-lining the status quo and creating scenarios for improvement. "We focus on cycle time in service delivery, efficiency, reliability, and eliminating rework, such as poorly written contracts or equipment sent to the wrong site," Bihler says.

As part of a quality group within Loral Skynet's finance department, Bihler and a few others are the primary users of a stand-alone planning tool from Proforma, used for modeling potential process improvements and clarifying existing process flows in order to facilitate the company's Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts.

When fully deployed, the system will enable Loral to assign time, cost, and resource utilization properties to process objects and to run Monte Carlo or other discrete event simulations to determine cycle times within a statistical distribution. "It models the real-world variability you have in the process," Bihler explains.

Although Loral maintains some legacy process models in Microsoft Office, SPSS, and Visio, Bihler strongly advocates use of an object-oriented BPM package to enforce a rigorous sequential model with predefined rules, thereby avoiding any ambiguity about the details of workflows and transactions that can result from free-form drawing tools.

Bihler says enterprises will get the most out of BPM if they are also using a methodology framework such as Six Sigma, ISO 9001, or PQMI (Process Quality Management and Improvement), which prescribe steps such as base-lining processes, finding critical path activities, and looking for ways to break bottlenecks. "The key to doing any kind of business process improvement is you have to have a methodology," Bihler says. "The value of a BPM tool is using it to enforce a methodology."

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And finally, Bihler stresses the importance of getting the right people involved in the modeling process up front. "I do it the old-fashioned way, I pull the people who need to make the decisions into the room, with multiple versions of the same process flow," he explains. "We don't force processes on people from the top down -- everybody needs to feel like they're a co-creator of the process."

District of Columbia Municipal Government: Project greenfield

When you're a 210-year-old city, you don't get a chance to do too many greenfield projects. But that's exactly what the municipal government of the District of Columbia did recently, deploying a phalanx of new IT systems and a BPM system to boot.