What Is BPM and How Can It Help Me Make Smarter Choices for My Business?

Last month, we talked about how business leaders struggle with risk and how they can lower their risk by using Cincom Smalltalk. We also talked about using the 3X Methodologyto help them succeed further in their planning. This month, we want to look at the process of understanding all of their business processes.

Where It All Began

The task of understanding and defining business processes is not a new concept. In fact, nearly eight years ago, we introduced a subject on our website called Business Process Analysis (BPA). BPA used to be considered as simply analyzing an organization’s current processes and designing a concept of it through a modeling tool, like the modeling tool in Cincom® ObjectStudio®. The goal of this concept was to deliver a working model of the necessary features for the benefit of IT personnel, since IT was where the proper system was created, tested and implemented to automate these processes.

• To see a demo of this using Cincom ObjectStudio, click here.

In recent years, this predominate IT focus of BPA shifted to encompass the business user’s broader understanding and perspective of the overall business, shifting from the term Business Process Analysis (BPA) to Business Process Management (BPM). However, just a few short years ago, the concept of BPM was considered to be at a crossroads and was struggling to remain relevant due to how fast technology and business innovation was growing. But analysts were encouraged and positive that this struggle would change. 

In fact, in 2016, Forrester forecasted that BPM would continue to be a dominant and important force in the drive toward automation, collaboration and engagement. Forrester also predicted that as part of this drive, BPM practitioners would rapidly shift to a digital business transformation rather than focusing on business process transformation programs. Forrester went on to predict a strengthening in AD&D leaders’ investments and roadmaps as they strive for leaner BPM programs and software programs.

Fast-forward to the present, and Forrester’s three-year forecast holds true. Business leaders have indeed shifted their focus to improving their customer experience through digital business transformation. Forrester now claims:

“Organizations’ primary process attention has turned to enabling digital transformation, increasing the need for process agility and a broader landscape of process technologies and features.”

How Can Cincom Smalltalk Help Me with BPM?

As the need for process agility and digital transformation increases, Cincom Smalltalk is helping business users through various services and programs we offer our customers and partners. Cincom Smalltalk Services Partners offer:

• Product Upgrades
  The first step in improving your business processes is making sure your product is up-to-date. Don’t risk a critical upgrade to a learn-as-you-go, in-house approach. Our Services Partners know the small, impossible-to-document steps that make the difference between an unresolved task and a completed process. Whether you have been successfully using Cincom ObjectStudio or Cincom® VisualWorks®, an assessment of the environment, interfacing systems and available resources provides you with a reliable estimate of effort and cost for the upgrade itself, and includes a report on your Cincom Smalltalk application environment and the steps needed to upgrade to the current product release.
• Mentoring
  It’s easy to learn the basics of using Cincom Smalltalk. However, the most productive use of this sophisticated, pure object-oriented application development suite is achieved best through customized mentoring that is developed to meet your business-process needs at your level of experience.
• Troubleshooting
  Whether it’s identifying and resolving a processing glitch or improving a performance drag, we have experts who can work with you remotely and/or on-site to re-create the problem and then provide an alternative viable approach.
• Performance Enhancement
  Cincom Smalltalk development environments provide a wide range of functionality. However, we human beings tend to lock in the capabilities we know and miss out on the performance ability of those dimensions of the tool we don’t know. A performance-enhancement service reveals how a team is using Cincom Smalltalk, which aspects of the tool they are not using and how they could energize so many more existing capabilities. This service is shaped to meet specific customer needs with defined objectives, clearly delineated areas to review and documented results and recommendations.
• Proof-of-Concept
  We can take a user’s idea and provide them with a proof-of-concept—whether it’s a business person with great ideas but lacks technical chops, or a new solution a Smalltalk enthusiast wants or needs but lacks the cycles to develop on their own. Sometimes, it’s even a management challenge to see whether Smalltalk, Java or Python is the right solution internally to take their company to the next level.

More information about how Cincom Smalltalk Services Partners can help with managing business processes can be found here. 

Listen to Suzanne Fortman, the Program Director and Engineering Manager of Cincom Smalltalk, describe how Cincom Professional Services helped one of our customers here: