A July 2005 Network Computing review of business process management suites, named three leading contenders in a crowded field:
"However, only Savvion, Lombardi, and Fuego provide simulation features that are useful in closing the process-optimization loop. All three offer a wide variety of variables for simulating a process, with Savvion and Fuego letting you run multiple scenarios--and processes--simultaneously. .. Simulation helps business process owners--and IT--find bottlenecks.
Hayman said Lombardi Teamworks will be incorporated into the WebSphere business process management line up this year. Some of its features will serve to enhance IBM BlueWorks, an online business process modeling and simulation system.
Teamworks includes business process modeling features. As an online service, BlueWorks lets a company explore what-if business process scenarios in a setting that matches their own software infrastructure. IBM first announced the availability of BlueWorks on Oct. 8.
Mark's Work Wearhouse is a Canadian retail chain specializing in work clothes and is a BlueWorks user, Hayman said. It lacked visibility into its inventory and use a manual ordering process when customers found an item out of a stock in a particular store. With BlueWorks it created business processes that gave it a view of inventory and a way to order a product from a store that both had it in stock and was closest to the customer, Hayman said, realizing $3.6 million in additional sales in its first 10 months of the new processes' operation.
At BlueWorks, "you can sketch out the strategy you are trying to achieve. We help you automate that process," said Hayman.
Services oriented architecture and business process automation have been cornerstones of what IBM calls its "smarter planet" initiatives. It has formed, for example, the Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition to seek ways to better manage utility energy grids. Austin Energy in Austin, Texas, and CenterPoint in Houston have implemented smart meters in homes and businesses and new grid monitoring systems that monitor consumption and alert the utilities to outages. The two utilities serve a combined three million customers.
Better grid business processes lower the utilities' costs and gives them a better understanding of how to manage their assets, said Hayman.
He said IBM's expanded business process management also fits into customer's interest in making use of more services on the Web and cloud computing in Internet data centers. Some observers think all computing will move into the cloud, he noted, but IBM believes "there will be a period where some things are done in the cloud and some on-premises. We see a lot of opportunity in integrating the cloud and non-cloud operations" through its business process management.
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