Business Process Management

Hello, thanks for joining us. I'm going to show you a business process management solution from IBM based on Service-Oriented Architecture. It can provide the flexibility you need to innovate and win in your marketplace.

For the sake of example, I'll play the role of a claims manager for an insurance company. Now, I realize not everyone here is in the insurance industry, and that's okay, because this approach to BPM adapts easily to any industry.

Now, there are only two things you have need to know about my business. One, some claims can be expedited through a low-cost express claims process. The rest require more personal attention and go through a traditional high touch process.

And two, our service partner, Acme, Inc., handles some claims for us. All the rest are handled completely in house. And that's it. If you have additional questions, there will be an opportunity to learn more at the end of this demo.

Okay. So each day I log on to my claims workspace. The customizable, flexible portal interface brings together all of the information, applications, and people I need to do my job.

Now, here's my main dashboard page. Up to date bar charts at the top of the page track claims throughput for all of our adjusters as well as for Acme. Whenever I roll my cursor over an element, I can see the underlying data values. So with just a few clicks I can inspect other time periods or drill down into the underlying numbers.

Gauges at the bottom of the page are updated near real time, so with a click glance I can tell when measurements are outside targeted ranges. I also receive process alerts. These aren't just e-mails from colleagues; these are near realtime system generated alerts that help me handle the small problems before they become big problems.

I know, I know, portals, dashboards these are not new ideas, but with this solution I get more complete and timely measurements of process effectiveness. And as I'm sure you know, it's hard to improve a process if you can't measure it. And I have greater flexibility to react to changing preferences and business conditions.

We chose from a variety of process-related portlets that came out of the box and reconfigured and rearranged them without coding to create customized views for me and my colleagues, even partners and customers. Here's my personal score card.

Now, on top are my key performance indicators or KPIs. They show me how I'm doing against my performance plan and figure into the bonus I get at the end of each month. And the nice thing is I don't have to wait until the end of the month to see how I'm doing. The KPI on the top is a red indicator because their average claim amount is well above goal. This is hurting my paycheck. I'll show you one of the contributing factors.

The bottom graphs show that average claim payments are higher for claims adjusted internally in blue than for claims adjusted by Acme, so maybe our internal adjusters are just paying out too much in claims. But you can't always judge a book by its cover.

Drilling down, I'm reminded that none of the more complex and costly bodily injury claims are handled by Acme. For every other claim type we're paying out more for the claims that are adjusted by Acme. So contrary to the summary charts, it's actually Acme who's over adjusting claims and contributing to my KPI losing its mark.

Now, you may wonder how I'm able to measure and delve into a business process like this in real time. Well, I tell you what, let's open up the hood and I'll show you.

First we modeled our claims process using this BPM modeling tool. We imported an existing Microsoft Visio diagram and quickly transformed it into the model you see here. We established business rules that control which adjusters are assigned to new claims and whether or not a claim can be expedited.

Express claims flow along the uppermost path and high touch claims flow along the bottom. The tooling gives us the flexibility to innovate at reasonable cost. Model segments can be modified and reused in other process and can be nested at multiple levels to create more complex and sophisticated models.

We associate cost and resources with activities, run simulations to see the comparative impact of flow options, and can see process bottlenecks prior to implementation.

So what about measurements and alerts? We use the same tooling to create a claims measurement model. We easily defined our measurements and alerts, timed them to the design points of the process model.

We add great flexibility in what we chose to measure. In fact, we added one KPI after the process was already running in production without having to redeploy the system.

And when we were done designing, we exported the process model to IT as a Business Process Execution Language or BPEL model. IT then used more BPM tooling to wire together services from several sources and convert business rule elements into flexible decision tables transforming the entire model into a running composite application.

So now I can redirect the flow of claims to our innovative insurance adjusters and between high touch and express routes on the fly without having to reengage IT. We exported the measurement model to the monitoring environment.

From that point the system collected the correct information to display on our portal pages, which reminds me I need to get back to my workspace and do something about Acme.

So with a few clicks I can e-mail these charts to the Acme executives as food for thought. But actually I can do better than that. Along the top I have records for all the active claims in the system. Now, the third claim down is being handled by Acme. Below I see a visualization of the process flow.

Now, when I click the Acme claim, red highlights indicate the route the claim has taken. And I can drill down and see that the claim is in the high touch settlement phase.

Now, with two more clicks I can suspend or even terminate the claim in flight without having to get anyone else involved. And through my browser I can quickly change the relevant business rule to reduce or even cut off the flow of claims to Acme all together. Now, that's what I call flexibility.

Periodically I can expert our metrics data back to the modeling environment, and voila! I can recalibrate my process model with real data on percentages and durations so our modeling assumptions get replaced with measured results.

Not only are we managing claims more effectively but we're well on our way down the path to continuous improvement. That's a direction we'd all like to be going.

Before I go, I'd like to thank you for your time today and ask you to remember one final thought. Business is more competitive than ever, and it takes flexibility to stay in the game.

A BPM solution from IBM based on the Service-Oriented Architecture can not only keep you in the game, but offers the flexibility you need to compete, win and outlast your competition. You've taken the first step by watching this demo.

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