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Business Process Management easily mastered.

At Contextware, Business Process Management (BPM) is simply the desire to understand, communicate and continuously improve how you do business. Sometimes it involves "modeling," sometimes it involves automation and information technology, but mostly it involves people.

Here's why our approach to BPM is superior:

Contextware is simply easier to use.
Contextware was designed from the ground up for business users, not for "process" experts. And, even though Contextware utilizes a robust, proven business process language, we've hidden it in Contextware's code and interface, so it's unlike any process modeling tool you've ever seen — highly usable. To use Contextware, you don't need extensive training in complex toolsets that ultimately produce wall-size diagrams that resemble electronics schematics — you only need to know your job. We do the rest.

Contextware gives you an "organic" deliverable.
As your processes are "modeled," your business activities and rules instantly become input to your enterprise portal, so your business processes are immediately published and communicated across the enterprise. Unlike traditional BPM consultants, who produce a paper or Powerpoint deliverable; or BPM vendors, who deliver requirements for automating granular flows.

Contextware validates your business processes.
Traditionally, once processes were modeled, workshops were held, manuals printed, and employees given motivational speeches about the "new way." Ultimately most everyone went back to doing things the way the they always did. There was no way to motivate and encourage adoption, much less evaluate and validate change. With Contextware, as your employees, customers and partners navigate, learn and access resources within Contextware, their actions are recorded, providing a rich breadth and depth of user feedback that gives you keen insight into the "usefulness" of your modeled processes. This explicit feedback can be aggregated, reviewed and analyzed so you can engage in continuous process improvement, or what we call "Real Time Reengineering."

The bottom line on BPM.
Businesses are organized around processes. Anyone who says otherwise is simply excusing their lack of discipline or avoiding the truth about how their organization operates. And you don't need to "optimize" your processes to benefit — merely capturing them and communicating them is a huge step in the right direction, especially with Contextware, because we let you see what your employees do, or don't do, so you can easily start to make improvements.

So when do you need consultants? Consultants don't know your business — they know the toolsets, and they excel at holding hands. But the more you take ownership of your processes, the greater the rate of adoption by your employees. Get your hands dirty, document your processes, then let your employees interact with them. Analyze the usage. Make improvements. Then think about bringing in consultants if and when problems start to emerge. The real value a consultant brings is as an unbiased observer, free from your politics and culture but with a deep understanding of how processes work within businesses like yours.

Business Services

Financial Services

Government

High Tech

Hospitality

Life Sciences

Manufacturing

Retail

Software

Utilities

Behind the "M" in BPM
As far as we can tell, there are two schools of thought regarding the meaning of BPM. In the classic version, which first emerged in the 1980s, "M" really meant "Model." Business Process Modeling helped usher in the First Golden Age of management consulting.

In the newest redefinition of BPM, we've come to believe the "M" this time stands for "Magic." Today's BPM is a grand and complex vision of massive enterprise integration and automation. Excellent notion, but the devil will be in the details (not to mention the costs) and it's going to take years, if ever, to see fully realized implementations.

The goal of BPM today is to automate everything possible. But, at the most only 10% of business processes are automation candidates. The rest are simply and elegantly human interaction (which is where Contextware excels, by the way).

Ironically, although process modeling fell out of vogue during the Bubble, companies today are returning enmass to the notion, but they're using BPM toolsets to create models. From our perspective, that's like using a solid platinum, diamond encrusted sledgehammer to crack eggs for an omelet.