With New Patents, BP Logix To Focus on Expanding Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) Sector
Heading into 2013, BPM software vendor BP Logix is looking to build out the business process as a service (BPaaS). The company was awarded U.S. patents for two key technologies to power next-gen business process management. IDN speaks with BP Logix’s VP of Business Solutions, E. Scott Menter.
Heading into 2013, BPM software vendor BP Logix is looking to build out the business process as a service (BPaaS). The company was awarded U.S. patents for two key technologies to power next-gen business process management.
The newly-patented BP Logix technologies let process owners better predict when deadlines will be missed and better track and enforce SLAs, Menter told IDN. The approach, Menter added, deals with two main shortcomings with traditional simulation:
- Accuracy. Simulation is an inexact method and can lead to a garbage-in, garbage-out problem.
- Rarely Used. Even if companies that paid for access to a simulation capability in their BPM, they rarely use it because, “simulation is overhead that uses up time and resources prior to automation, and because organizations rightly suspect that the results are unreliable,” Menter said.
In Menter’s words, here’s how BP Logix’s patented technologies differ from simulation:
Predictive BPM (we call it pBPM) isn’t simulation: it’s an analysis of how a given process has actually performed over time, which, when applied to running process instances, results in a credible assessment of when any given step (or the process as a whole) is likely to complete. The information is always available to process owners, graphically in real time, and to the process itself; that is, the process can change direction based on those predictions. That’s not simulation: that’s actionable data based on real-world behavior.
With another patented technology, BP Logix’s Process Timeline technology (within Process Director) integrates a “time dimension” into BPM. The approach looks to drives a new level of BPM benefit, Menter said.
E. Scott Menter
vice president business solutions
Because Process Timeline is constantly evaluating running processes and updating its predictive model based on their behavior, over time it builds a pretty good picture of how the process actually runs. The process engine simply feeds that data into our patented algorithm – think of it as a fancy weighted average – to determine likely time of completion for each step, and for the process as a whole.
Further, BP Logix’s “predictive analytics” lets process owners predict when deadlines will be missed using real-time metrics. Menter described how this technology “translates” those metrics into predicting about performance, SLAs, etc.
“Using Process Timeline, the most important metrics – time and dependence – are easily determined. “We created Process Timeline because that information is extremely difficult to extract from the standard, flowchart-style workflow model,” Menter said.
Taken together, BP Logix technologies provide users simple-to-access real-time data and insights on the performance of their processes, according to Menter. With a single click, process owners gain the ability to view an entire business process and see at a glance which steps are running long, which run on time and which may be in a critical path – where they may be in danger of not meeting SLAs, he added. For diagnosing issues, BP Logix also lets users drill down into their data to see which users have performed a given task.