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. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Smarter Process
IBM Limited Edition

by Vijay Pandiarajan and

David Millen

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

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Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book......................................................................... 1
Icons Used inThis Book............................................................. 2

Chapter 1: Understanding the Need for

Smarter Processes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Becoming a Customer-Centric Business and
Growing Your Topline............................................................ 3
Creating new business models....................................... 4
Serving new customers.................................................... 5
Expanding intonew geographies.................................... 5
Introducing IBM Smarter Process............................................. 5
A Smarter Process is instant........................................... 5
A Smarter Process is seamless....................................... 6
A Smarter Process is insightful....................................... 6

Chapter 2: Harnessing Four Major Disruptive

Technologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Delighting Customers with Mobile-Enabled
Smarter Process...................................................................... 7
Context, access, and process digitization..................... 8
Using mobile-enabled Smarter Process patterns......... 9
Accessing Smarter Process onthe Cloud.............................. 10
Faster time tovalue onnew ways todo business...... 10
Improved access and collaboration on
how your company works......................................... 11
Greater scalability and flexibility forwhen
your business grows.................................................. 11
Security best practices handled bythe experts......... 12
Harnessing Data-Driven Smarter Process.............................. 12
Operationalizing insight intoprocesses...................... 13
Employing processes forthe knowledge worker....... 13
Deploying Social Technologies............................................... 14

Chapter 3: Capturing Processes with Blueworks Live. . . . . 15

Engaging Business Users......................................................... 16
Capturing Process Details........................................................ 17
Collaborating inReal Time...................................................... 17
Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness................................. 18

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iv

Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Chapter 4: Embracing Business Process Management. . . . 19

Understanding BPM.................................................................. 20
BPM onCloud............................................................................ 21
Knowing What toExpect from Your BPM Solution.............. 21
Successfully Developing and Delivering Your
BPM Projects......................................................................... 22
Working withUnstructured Processes.................................. 24

Chapter 5: Choosing Operational Decision

Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Introducing ODM....................................................................... 26
Understanding Business Rules using
Natural Language(NL).......................................................... 27
Testing and Simulating Business Rules.................................. 28
Uncovering Real-Time Actionable Insight............................. 29

Chapter 6: Adopting Case Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

What is Case Management?..................................................... 32
Looking atthe Requirements for Effective Case
Management.......................................................................... 33
Case Management Capabilities fromIBM.............................. 34
IBM Case Manager.......................................................... 34
Case capabilities inIBM Business
Process Manager......................................................... 34

Chapter 7: Looking at Business Monitoring Software. . . . 35

Monitoring Your Data............................................................... 36
IBM Business Monitor.............................................................. 37
Seeing theValue ofDashboards............................................. 38

Chapter 8: Taking a Fast Path to Success. . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Introducing Accelerators......................................................... 39
Deploying Quick Win Projects................................................. 40

Chapter 9: Ten Repeatable Smarter Process

Industry Use Cases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Banking....................................................................................... 41
Insurance................................................................................... 42
Healthcare.................................................................................. 42
Government............................................................................... 42
Travel and Transportation...................................................... 43
Telecom...................................................................................... 43
Retail........................................................................................... 43
Energy and Utilities.................................................................. 44
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Introduction

s it easy to do business with your organization? Do your

employees feel empowered to meet your customers
needs? These are questions that youre probably grappling
with as you face a perpetually changing business environment. You strive for operational excellence and need ways to
effectively acquire and retain new customers. You also need
to reinvent your business operations to foster growth.
Your customers are no longer passive in their quest to receive
services and buy products. They expect five-star treatment,
and if they dont get it, they search for alternatives. This
means that you need to create positive touch points on every
interaction with your customers while holding down costs
and growing your topline revenue.
Customers routinely tweet their displeasure and alert the
media to flaws in your companys ability to serve them. There
is no way to stay out of the spotlight when your operations
dont meet their high expectations. Every one of your business processes is intensely scrutinized and evaluated. Thats
why IBM Smarter Process was developed.
Smarter Process is a way for you to work smarter as you find
your way through all the operational challenges that the current business climate throws at you. It helps you use mobile,
analytics, and collaboration to empower your employees to
do their best work. It also empowers you as a leader to find
the right tools and solutions.

About This Book

In this book, you look at how the Smarter Process approach
helps you create a more customer-centric organization. You
discover how four major technologiesmobile, cloud computing, Big Data, and social collaborationare disrupting
the way you do business and how you can work through the
challenges. Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition,

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

also gives you a perspective on how to develop Quick Win
Projects processes. You also look at industry case studies that
demonstrate the use of Smarter Process so you can apply it to
your own particular project.

Icons Used inThis Book

This book is written to provide basic yet key information
about Smarter Process. To help ensure that this is the case,
we use the following icons.

If you see this icon on the page, it calls your attention to information that enhances your understanding of the topic.

This icon represents information that may help jog your

memory at the time you need it most.

This icon alerts you to serious situations to tread lightly

should you encounter them.

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Chapter 1

Understanding the Need for

Smarter Processes
In This Chapter
Applying customer-centric business practices
Getting and keeping customers
Developing a competitive advantage
Using flexible business design

o create a smarter process, cost cutting isnt enough.

Smarter Process is a method of working smarter through
operational challenges your business climate throws at you.
It helps you use all resources at your fingertips to focus on
service excellence, quality, and customer happiness. In this
chapter, youre introduced to IBM Smarter Process as an
answer to the ever-changing business environment you find
yourself in that requires your operations to be mobile, social,
data driven, and available through the cloud. You see how to
combine analytical insight with process flexibility to speed
ahead of the competition.

Becoming a Customer-Centric
Business and Growing Your
Topline
To understand why companies need to become more customercentric, you need only to look at how your customers use products and services on the web. Major retailers have raised the

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

bar regarding customer expectations. For this reason, you must
look more closely at the experience your customers have each
time they interact with you both online and offline. Users take
into account every aspect of the product or service. Many businesses treat this as a threat, but you should view it as an opportunity to stand out from the competition.
When done effectively, superior business operations that are
customer-centric lead to topline growth. Day-to-day operations then become a primary driver for revenue growth. This
fact is especially true in knowledge-intensive industries, such
as banking, insurance, healthcare, and telecom.
In this section, you discover some focus areas that are key to
creating customer-centric operations that can help grow your
company.

Creating new business models

To continue to grow, companies must seek out new market
niches to expand into. This opportunity starts with a flexible
business design and the ability to reinvent business operations. Whether its a claims process or a loan origination
process, many considerations go into creating new business
models every day. From rate changes in existing loan tables
to adding new providers into a claims service or even new
government regulations that require new reporting, the processes of change must be flexible and incorporated quickly
and effectively.
This same flexibility and ability to codify new concepts into
a process is an invaluable source of innovation that has the
potential for new business models. Take the example of a
credit-reporting agency that collects a tremendous amount
of information about customers on the behalf of financial
institutions to determine their credit worthiness.
The sheer breadth of information gathered includes shopping
habits and personal tastes that are all incorporated and managed by the credit scoring process. When this data is totaled
over millions of customers, the credit agency has a unique
perspective into the wants and needs of very distinct buyer
segments. Through its processes, the agency can create a new
product recommendation service that it can offer merchants.

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Chapter 1: Understanding the Need for Smarter Processes

Serving new customers

Enabling true self-service processes can completely change
how a new service is consumed and bring with it a new class of
customer that couldnt be served efficiently before. Consider
the example of offering low-cost insurance. Completely automating the purchasing and underwriting process now means
that the cost structure of the business has changed, so a new
class of customer can easily buy insurance online.

Expanding intonew geographies

The informational aspects of a logistics company are captured
within a set of processes, the resources are managed from
a number of transportation providers for the particular set
of goods that needs to be transported. The intelligence then
comes from combining the right set of transportation providers to match the constraints, which can include cost, time, the
need for customs clearances, and so on.
Expanding into a new geography now simply means updating
the process with the specifics for the new country. Perhaps
there are no Saturday deliveries, and the original process can
be easily modified to accept this new reality.

Introducing IBM Smarter Process

In this section, you take a look at the characteristics of a
Smarter Process that help you meet todays business needs.

Think about information you collect in every part of your

enterprise as a business strategy. Operationalize that data
to make a customer impact. The rest of this book helps you
understand how you can reinvent your business operations,
so they can truly be instant, seamless, and insightful.

A Smarter Process is instant

Smarter Process combines real-time automation and team collaboration to ensure tasks are completed quickly and easily.
For example, you want to ensure that your customers can

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

easily sign up online for your products and services instead of
abandoning the process before completion.
Ask yourself the following questions:

Where could the provision of real-time information

improve customer acquisition and retention?

How could you redesign your processes to take advantage of mobile technology? Which processes would you
tackle first?

A Smarter Process is seamless

Smarter Process integrates the control and visibility of the
process life cycle across lines of business, IT, and customers.
For example, you want to ensure that your customer is able to
do everything they want moving from a specific location to a
mobile one.
Ask yourself the following questions:

Is the customer experience integrated across all touch

points with your company?

In what ways could you support increased revenues

through easier, smoother cross-selling?

A Smarter Process is insightful

Smarter Process analyzes and optimizes performance and
behavior to improve outcomes. For example, you want to
make sure that you use previous information about the customers to provide more relevant offers.
Ask yourself these questions:

Where could stronger customer analytics provide you

with a greater competitive edge?

Which processes would benefit from applying real-time

benchmarks to constantly improve customer service?

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Chapter 2

Harnessing Four Major

Disruptive Technologies
In This Chapter
Using mobile processes for greater engagement
Accessing processes in the cloud
Dipping into Big Data
Adding social technologies to enhance customer relationships

echnology has changed the way you live and work, and
changes are happening faster than you can assimilate
them. It has changed both the context and the process by
which you do things. In the case of business, technology
has elevated customer expectations. Customers now expect
instant responses and better, more effective experiences, and
if they dont receive them, they move on to a competitor. Your
company cant afford to be left behind.
This chapter looks at four major technology disruptions that
have changed business forever. You look at each in turn and
see how Smarter Process helps companies deliver better
experiences for their customers in each of these areas.

Delighting Customers with MobileEnabled Smarter Process

Is the mobile experience that you provide customers timely
and relevant, tuned to solving the exact problem they were
grappling with at that moment? Does your app deliver a drop

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

of magic, or do your customers want to pull their hair out
when they try to use it? Does your mobile experience provide
high value and instant gratification? If not, you need to change
how youre using mobile to interact with your customers.
So what do you have to do to create this drop of magic? Take
a look at this list:

Deliver granular experiences designed for mobile

Provide context-rich interactions

Enable time-sensitive information and actions

Extend enterprise connectivity

Mobile computing effects how you conduct your everyday
life. Your customers may be shopping for personal items,
checking messages, and making business decisions all at the
same time on a variety of devices. Business moments arise
through these interactions, and simplifying how customers
work with your company through mobile is essential.

Context, access, and process

digitization
A mobile-enabled Smarter Process allows for new scenarios
because fundamental new capabilities are available. Three
mobile capabilities are key in creating a more engaging process.
They are covered in this section.

Mobile context
Mobile provides new context for participants and establishes
whats relevant to their next move. Context, whether it be
location, speed and direction, or even an understanding of
frame of mind, provides vital information that naturally makes
the process more relevant.
For example, travelers who step into an airport within an hour
of their flight that has been delayed must have the right type of
personalized remediation offered to them based on their loyalty level. The automated mobile-aware customer management
process can act in a variety of ways from automatically sending
the traveler a coupon for coffee at the airport to VIP lounge
access to a rebooking in business class on a later flight.

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Chapter 2: Harnessing Four Major Disruptive Technologies

Mobile access
Creating a business moment can only happen if the process
can act in the moment. Having access to a process participant
even for a second at the right instant in time ensures that
work progresses faster and more efficiently.
Examples include customers being able to be online to accept an
insurance quote in the go as theyre boarding the subway to managers being able to approve expense reports between meetings.

Mobile process digitization

The ability for users to provide input into a process has
never been easier. Typically, user input takes time and
wasted resources. Think about the time it takes to fill out
a paper copy of a signed form and fax it to your insurance
agent or how long it takes to mail pictures of a car accident
for proof of damage. With process digitization, users can
input new information directly into mobile processes.
Claims adjusters can take and immediately upload pictures
of accidents to speed up the claims process. Mobile access
even opens the process up to self-service where the consumer
may directly submit a picture of a cracked windshield to be
credited with the cost to replace it. Fingerprint scanners on
mobile devices now ensure that a person with verified identity
is interacting with the process remotely. This enables many
more processes to be simplified for the end-users.

Using mobile-enabled Smarter

Process patterns
So mobile is here to stay. How does that impact your planning? Focus for mobile should be in three main areas:

Customer engagement: By using mobile-enabled Smarter

Process, your company can create apps and other unique
mobile programs to benefit your customers, which can
create a competitive advantage.

Workforce productivity: Employees who are out in the

field can use their mobile devices to order parts or learn
of the location of their next service call. Smarter Process
also reduces employee down-time and makes them more
productive when using a mobile approach.

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10

Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Ecosystem-driven processes: These processes connect
your systems together. For example, they connect machines
to machines like those required for your logistics management. Managing processes driven by the Internet of
Things, regardless of where they are, opens up new process
innovation.
By applying Smarter Process in these three ways you can
more easily navigate the hurdles that your company faces.

Accessing Smarter Process

onthe Cloud
Cloud technology has changed the business landscape. Now
businesses that werent able to compete because of size or
resources can play big. They no longer have to build complex technology platforms and hire managers to manage
them as their business grows. Having a full-featured process
management system available instantaneously and continually available in a scalable manner provides the type of
turnkey capability that companies need to reinvent their
operations.

Most businesses recognize the value of the cloud to their own

operations. Cloud computing in the process space can offer
many benefits and is covered in this section.

Faster time tovalue onnew

ways todo business
One of the biggest benefits of running processes in the cloud
is the ability to experiment with new scenarios rapidly, without a significant upfront investment. Having the ability to
design and redesign how your processes should work and
being able to iterate, test out a hypothesis, and pick the best
course of action is a key competitive advantage.

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Chapter 2: Harnessing Four Major Disruptive Technologies

11

Cloud-based processes enable in-house technical expertise

to work on higher-value tasks and extend IT resources. At
the same time, justifying big capital expense outlays for infrastructure at the start of a project is increasingly difficult.
Today, you can experiment faster and deliver value quicker
without the upfront investment by running your processes in
the cloud and paying for what you use.

Improved access and collaboration

onhow your company works
Having a common understanding of processes across the
company is key to organizational alignment. Cloud-based
processes ensure that operational data is easy to share and
that people in the company can collaborate transparently on
designing and refining them. Process execution in the cloud
also enables easy visibility into process metrics and KPIs.
In addition there are many long-tail processes that benefit
from Cloud solutions where its easy to get access to a full
function lightweight environment that meets the needs for
these workflow patterns.

Greater scalability and flexibility

forwhen your business grows
Another key benefit of the cloud is the elasticity in the operating environment that allows more capacity to be brought
online exactly when needed. This is very handy in the cloud,
because it captures the actual execution and expansion of
your business.
A hybrid cloud process environment ensures that different
types of process workloads can be moved across from onpremise to cloud and vice versa. In addition, levels of privacy
can dictate where certain confidential data can reside, that
results in the need for flexibility in terms of where the process
can run. The scalability and flexibility of the cloud provides
huge benefits to process improvement.

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12

Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Security best practices handled

bythe experts
Security is a major topic for discussion any time the cloud is
in the picture, and process security in the cloud is no different. Its imperative to assess the levels of security and privacy
needed for each process. Look at regulations that govern
where different types of data must live. Look for vendors that
can provide datacenters in a wide variety of geographies, so
you can continue to conform to the laws as your business
grows. The added benefit is that cloud vendors are serious
about ensuring security and have the experience and skill and
best practices that protect your confidential data.

Read more about how IBM can help with your business operations in the cloud in Chapter3 with IBM Blueworks Live and
Chapter4 with IBM BPM.

Harnessing Data-Driven
Smarter Process
A Data-Driven Smarter Process covers two critical areas that a
business needs to tackle today: how it will cope with Big Data
and apply analytics to operationalize insight into its business
processes, and how it will empower its knowledge workers to
manage data-centric processes.

One of the main areas where Big Data can be employed is in

the area of process improvement. In fact, when companies
inject data and analytics deep into their operations, they can
deliver productivity and profit gains that are 5 to 6 percent
higher than those of the competition.
By the year 2020, a projected four times more digital data will
exist than there are grains of sand on the earth. You need a
strategy now so you can use this information to improve your
business execution.

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Chapter 2: Harnessing Four Major Disruptive Technologies

13

Operationalizing insight
intoprocesses
Not only must companies gain insight, but also they need to
automatically be able to act on it through their business processes. Applying Big Data to improve operations helps companies do the following:

Enhance customer experiences: You know more about

your customer, so you are able to provide customized
offers.

Gain insights from new data: One great insight can lead
to several others. Your ability to create a competitive
advantage could rest with your ability to generate better
insights in cases such as fraud detection.

Improve the efficiency of your operational platform:

Identifying new trends in existing processes can help simplify the process in many conditions and speed up the
end outcome.

Employing processes for

the knowledge worker
Another aspect of being data-driven is the ability for knowledge workers and experts to make better decisions that lead
to superior outcomes. Empowering employees at the edge of
the business with the right information means that they can
have more meaningful interactions with customers. Very often
this means that they must look at exception flows within processes and handle them appropriately. Sometimes, the entire
interaction is unique and a new unstructured workflow must
be created to capture the process.
In both these cases, all the steps in the process and the sequence
of steps may not be known ahead of time, and the company relies
on the expertise of the knowledge workers to manage the highly
variable process. Even in these situations, parts of the process
are very prescriptive and highly automated, and the knowledge
worker has to put these sub-process chains together quickly to
form an ad hoc process that is uniquely positioned to serve the
needs of a particular customer.

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14

Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Given that the process ultimately is made up of structured
pieces and ad hoc components, its vital that all forms of
process types are managed in a common way. Also, the continuum between structured and ad hoc pieces in a process is
continuously changing. As more unstructured process flows
become better known through continual repetition of the process, they can become more automated with higher levels of
straight-through processing, all within the same process management system.

Read more about how ad hoc processes can be managed

in Chapter4 with IBM BPM and Chapter7 with IBM Case
Manager. See how you can apply operationalize insight with
IBM ODM in Chapter7.

Deploying Social Technologies

Social networking allows people to connect from one corner
of the earth to the other. Theyre able to share their thoughts
and knowledge, join virtual groups, and collaborate on new
and innovative projects. This means that knowledge is being
created at a rapid rate.
When applied directly within your processes, actions taken by
your employees become part of a social interaction. Whether
it means reaching out to an expert within the company for
an answer or subscribing to new updates to a process, these
social interactions form the collective knowledge of the
extended team.
An essential need here is for the social interaction to happen
in the context of a particular task or process. As opposed to
firing off an email to handle a particular situation, where the
future value of that interaction is lost forever. In the case of
social task management within the operational process management system, it builds and becomes the collective knowledge of the organization. For example, it becomes clear why a
particular set of customers were given refunds, while others
werent based on the annotations in context from several customer service agents.

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Chapter 3

Capturing Processes with

Blueworks Live
In This Chapter
Engaging business users in process improvement
Capturing and documenting process details
Collaborating across large teams in real time
Improving process efficiency and effectiveness

f someone asked where the latest version of business processes is documented, would you know how to answer? If
your answer is that you wouldnt know where to look or that
the process is stored in an out-of-date document in some database, your organization is probably not communicating well
about its processes.

There are two immutable truths about business processes:

1. Every organization runs on them.

2. The real experts about how processes run today, or
how they can be improved in the future, are business
people.
You may not currently have an effective way to capture your
business processes. If youre using a whiteboard or sticky notes,
these methods are good ways to lose track of the information
you uncover. The information either gets erased from the whiteboard to clear space for the next meeting or is immortalized in a
barely legible picture taken by a cellphone.

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16

Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

To solve the vexing problem of capturing processes, IBM has
created a cloud-based program called Blueworks Live (BWL).
Its a Software as a Service (SaaS) application, so anyone across
the company can easily access it through a web browser. It acts
as a shared repository of business process models, as well as
business decision models. The repository houses everything in
one place and keeps it current.

Engaging Business Users

So what does Blueworks Live help you accomplish? You can

Involve business people in hands-on process

improvement

Collaborate across teams located anywhere in the world

Capture how your processes are done today

Create process models using intuitive mapping and diagraming features

Blueworks Live is intuitive and easy to learn and provides
many benefits to business users, as well as to their IT counterparts. You can easily capture all the details related to the
overall process and each of its steps. You collaborate on
process documentation and obtain expert information from
every stakeholder, and in addition to documenting business
processes, you also document business decisions. All of this
allows you to

Collaboratively improve your business processes

Understand and refine your business decisions

Close the gap between how your processes work today

and how you would like them to work in the future

Make your processes more customer centric

You can continually improve your processes and leverage the

knowledge and experience of your business people. Its easy
to get started with Blueworks Livego to blueworkslive.
com and sign up for a free 30-day trial.

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Chapter 3: Capturing Processes with Blueworks Live

17

Capturing Process Details

One of the best ways to analyze a process is to make it visible,
which is easier said than done. Blueworks Live offers a complete environment for capturing, analyzing, and improving the
way your business works by providing a single process for all
your business models.
As you document your process, the process diagram is developed for you. You can see and analyze all the details behind
each task. For example, who performs the task? Who is the
business owner? How much does it cost? How long does it
take? Does it create value? And so on.
This documentation also makes it much easier for other
stakeholders to add their knowledge and modify the model as
needed. With Blueworks Live, youre creating a living, breathing
document that can easily be updated as the team captures more
and more detail about how your organization does business.

Collaborating inReal Time

No single person ever knows how an entire end-to-end process works or how it would ideally work. Process modeling is
a team sport that typically includes numerous departments,
roles, functional areas, and points of view. Capturing a process requires synthesizing a wide variety of information that
may come from existing documentation, standard operating
procedures, internal and external regulations and policies,
systems of record, systems of engagement, and perhaps most
importantly, peoples heads. After the process is accurately
captured (which is no small feat in itself), the team can then
collaborate to improve, transform, and ultimately automate it.
Blueworks Live enables diverse teams to collaborate on live,
real-time models that can easily be shared across all project
stakeholders. Colleagues from across the company and the
world can work together and see changes dynamically. Users
can post comments to make suggestions, share ideas, and ask
questions about any aspect of the process. They can follow
the items theyre working on to see all the changes and comments pertaining to that item. Teammates can see who else
is online in their account and can chat will their colleagues
without leaving the Blueworks Live environment.
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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

One of the key challenges in process modeling is to keep
files up to date. Gone are the days when the process model
you create today is the same process model you will use six
months from now. When models are stored in static file systems, they go stale very quickly. Blueworks Live takes a different approach and uses a central repository that is always up
to date.

Improving Efficiency
and Effectiveness
Being able to capture and analyze your business processes
puts you in a position to improve them. Capturing processes
in Blueworks Live ensures that everybody understands and
agrees on how things are done today, which is a great starting
point for improving how they should be done in the future.
After you have a clear picture of your current business processes, you can modify them to be more efficient and effective
going forward.
As you begin to document a business process, you should ask
yourself the following questions:

Is the process efficient, or should it be simplified? Taking

out unnecessary steps helps everyone get the job done
quicker and more efficiently, with better results.

What are the bottlenecks standing in the way of success?

Everyone wants to remove bottlenecks, but its often
hard to determine whats getting in the way.

Where would resources do the most good? Sometimes

the loudest voice gets the most resources, but thats not
always the best place to invest.

What tasks could be automated to reduce costs and

free up employees to do value-added work? Employees
should spend their time doing work that helps grow revenue and delight customers. Blueworks Live can help you
get started with process automation so you can serve
more customers with your existing employee baseand
provide better customer service.

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Chapter 4

Embracing Business
Process Management
In This Chapter
Getting to know BPM
Looking at BPM on Cloud
Understanding what your BPM solution should provide
Delivering BPM projects with confidence
Working with unstructured processes

f you started with a clean sheet of paper, do you think you

would organize your enterprise the way it runs today?
Probably not many of your current business processes may
have become inefficient and redundant as a result of changes
in business environment, organizational goals, and strategy.
Todays customers, employees, and partners are demanding interactions that are instant, seamless, and insightful.
You need to respond to these emerging opportunities in real
time by using agile business processes that span across the
organization from customer-facing processes to back-end
applications.

Theres a need to continuously reinvent your business

operations to meet constantly rising customer expectations
and ensure that theyre aligned to your business goals and
strategy. Business process management (BPM) can help you
achieve these goals by enabling greater visibility into processes and offering the ability to change them quickly and
reliably as needed.

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Understanding BPM
First and foremost, BPM is a process and a management discipline. BPM involves managing the end-to-end work that organizations perform to create value for their customers.
BPM brings together technology and process improvement
methodologies to improve operational effectiveness and efficiency, which in turn drive better business results. Over the
years, BPM has moved beyond IT-enabled process automation
to integrate human-driven workflows with traditional business
processes.
BPM helps you operationalize business process innovation
through collaboration between business and IT. You can also
realize return on investments that go beyond traditional measures of efficiency to now grow revenue for the company.

Employing BPM has several benefits:

Increased productivity: You see improved efficiency and

effectiveness by optimizing your business processes.

Measured processes that were previously hidden: You

discover, analyze, and optimize underlying structure and
processes that drive your business operations.

Ensured compliance with regulations: You achieve

compliance with regulatory and corporate governance
requirements through improved process monitoring and
governance.

Increased agility: You realign your business process

quickly to respond to market opportunities and challenges.

Heightened speed to market: You use a subscriptionbased BPM Cloud service like IBM BPM on Cloud to rapidly design and deploy process applications.
BPM is available as an on-premise solution, so you can install
the product on your own servers within your company.

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Chapter 4: Embracing Business Process Management

21

BPM onCloud
If BPM was offered as a service, you could try BPM and see if
it was right for your company. If you wanted to move forward,
you could simply start without worrying about capital expenditure, hardware, development, and maintenance of systems,
and focus just on your unique process.
BPM on Cloud gives companies the ability of developing and
deploying process applications that are available anytime and
from anywhere, which results in greater flexibility, faster time
to value, and early adoption.
The key benefits of BPM on Cloud include the following:

Faster deployment times

Ability to scale up and down according to your needs

Low startup costs

Predictable long-term costs through subscription-based

models

With IBM BPM on Cloud, you can get a full life-cycle BPM environment, including development, testing, and production with
tooling and run time for process design, execution, monitoring, and optimizationall in less than 24 hours.
Remember, IBM BPM is also available on premise so you can
make the choice thats right for you.

Knowing What toExpect from

Your BPM Solution
Your BPM solution should offer the ability to correctly model
business processes, translate those processes into implementation, and iteratively improve the process using tools such
as modeling, workflow, simulation, and so on. You should also
have the flexibility to scale seamlessly from your first project
to an enterprise-wide program when you need to so.

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Your BPM solution should provide you with

Visibility into your business process through real-time

alerts and dashboards for managers using analytics
capabilities

Content management, workflow, and collaboration capabilities between departments and across the enterprise

Support for multi-form, factor-design views to customize

the user interfaces for phone, tablet, and desktop

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to reuse and integrate business processes, human tasks, and business
rules as service components

Decision management technologies to increase process

automation and facilitate maintenance of decision logic
that guides business systems

Successfully Developing
and Delivering Your
BPM Projects
Okay, so youre ready to take action on your first project. You
want to use a BPM rollout methodology like Smarter Process,
which uses an iterative life cycle of planned and predictable
releases aligned to measurable business outcomes. Begin
your adoption roadmap by forming a steering committee composed of business analysts, IT staff, and business department
executives.
If you dont get business and IT buy-in at the outset of the
project, youre more likely to fail. More often than not projects
fail because business and IT goals arent in sync.

After this steering committee is in place, check out these tips:

Choose the first process. For your first project, choose

a process that is not only important but also quick to
completeaim for 90 days or less. You want to maintain
interest levels and show a quick win that encourages

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Chapter 4: Embracing Business Process Management

23

everyone to attempt a second project. You also want to

choose a project thats confined to one line of business or
department to avoid making the project overly complex.

Choose the tools and technology. Look at and shortlist

the BPM technology you think is suited to the job at hand.
The committee should also establish governing principles,
standards, and guidelines for program delivery.

Define a project team. Defining a project team is a key

part of the process. You want to have cross-functional
team members that understand the issues and can partner with one another. Its recommended that they understand agile principles.

Establish lightweight governance. Start with a small

governance footprint. You can increase it as you become
more familiar with practices and methods.

Use or create a BPM delivery engine. You want to use a

BPM delivery engine so you can extend your project to
the next one. IBM Smarter Process Method (SPM) helps
you scale for delivery of larger, complex, and geographically diverse initiatives.

Drive the solution by using different project types.

Project types dictate different solutions. Project types
include Quick Win pilots, line of business projects, projects that cross multiple lines, and program and enterprise transformation efforts. Your choice depends on
how the project is defined.

Secure executive-level sponsorship. Without executive buy-in, its unlikely that youll be able to scale your
projects. Make sure you get the chief operating officer
or another senior-level business owner to sponsor the
project.

Maintain central project statistics and benchmarks. To

be able to document real improvement, make sure to accumulate, analyze, and benchmark project data. This process
helps determine return on investment (ROI) measures.

Dont rely on big-bang integrations. You want to be able to

course correct and accommodate changes as they happen.
Small, agile projects demonstrate value quickly. Ensure you
have a clear roadmap of BPM adoption by starting small with
a project and then ramping up to a program and realizing
business value.

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Working withUnstructured
Processes
You cant ignore unstructured processes; theyre used to innovate, imagine, and solve problems like launching new products, entering new markets, and so on. Often your most highly
skilled employees are the ones who use these unstructured
processes to create value more easily.

The characteristics of an unstructured process are as follows:

Not all the activities or steps in the process can be predefined, and more often than not they arent repeatable.

These processes happen infrequently and sometimes

only once.

They often involve human judgments, which arent based

on predefined rules and policies.

Its difficult to assign performance measures during

designing such a process.
By using IBMs Smarter Process approach, you can manage a
spectrum of processes, including automated straight-through,
procedural or task-based, and dynamic or goal-driven processes by using case management features in a BPM solution.
To find out more about case management, see Chapter6.

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Chapter 5

Choosing Operational
Decision Management
In This Chapter
Making operational decisions at scale
Understanding the power of natural language business rules
Identifying the best policy with testing and simulation of business

rules

Uncovering real-time actionable insight

ecisions control the heartbeat of your company. Every

day, critical decisions are made in every corner of your
business. In fact, the repeatable, automated business decisions you make can be considered a tangible asset for your
company.
These automated decisions determine whether your department will meet its goals, increase productivity, or grow your
revenue. Its important to consolidate and make decision
conditions visible to your business experts so you can control
the outcome. This is done by pairing software to automate as
many of the operational decisions as possible, leveraging the
experience and expertise of your subject matter experts and
key knowledge workers to define what will be automated.
In this chapter, you look at how to use concepts such as business rules, events, and operational decision management
(ODM) to increase the speed and consistency of day-to-day,
automated business decisions. As a business, you discover
how to deal with these operational decisions that include
things such as settling a claim, opening a bank account, or
dynamically pricing a vacation package.

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Introducing ODM
You may have very effective experts who make some critical
decisions, but how do you scale these up? Typically one-off
applications are written to automate these business decisions,
but this becomes unmanageable quickly, especially when your
decisions change often.
For example, claims policies may need to change every quarter, insurance rates may need to change every month, and
there could be a new pricing promotion every week based on
the occurrence of key events like an abnormally cold stretch
(in a retail scenario). When hundreds or thousands of these
types of decisions are embedded in an application, it becomes
very hard to understand them and change them.
At the same time, these decisions are very involved and
complex and must be made with all the expert knowledge in
the company. They cant be coded and forgotten. What if you
could have these types of operational decision-making within
your automated systems but with the fidelity and knowledge
of your best expert? Clearly, theres no way to know the best
way to handle these decisions without externalizing them and
making them visible end to end. Thats where ODM comes in.

ODM makes it possible to take what used to be hard-coded

rules and turn them into flexible ones that can be easily modified. This management is accomplished by using ODM to
create business rules in natural language that can be read,
understood, and changed by a business expert.

To see why you should consider implementing ODM, take a

look at some of the benefits:

Agility: You can quickly change policies instead of holding up operations for weeks and months waiting for an
application to be recoded. You also decrease the costs of
implementation.

Efficiency and productivity: Business users requests for

changes have built-in collaboration with other experts,
change management, and governance.

Decision quality and precision: You can modify existing rules and perform what-if analyses to arrive at better
decisions.

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Chapter 5: Choosing Operational Decision Management

27

Consistency: You can ensure that policies are uniformly

enforced across business units or processing centers.

Transparency, auditability, and compliance: You can

look back and see why decisions were made and see how
policies were changed and who changed them.
Unless theres a way to analyze and codify decisions, theres
room for a great deal of confusion and miscommunication.
Writing reams of specifications is a common response in the
attempt to add clarity, but typically theyre too hard to consume and keep accurate. Both business and IT teams clearly
want to accomplish their goals, so what stands in the way?
Here are some conditions that may apply:

The expectations for the speed of making changes is very

different between business and IT teams.

Business teams dont know about the unexpected consequences of outdated business logic.

Decisions cant always be detailed and stated precisely

enough for developers.
Business groups and IT have to accommodate each other to
keep things moving forward. Business rules make it easier for
both types of departments to collaborate. The actual business
rules can be directly written by the business, and IT manages
the execution environment.

Understanding Business Rules

using Natural Language(NL)
A business rule is a statement of what will happen if a particular
condition is metor a particular event occurs. When you automate your decisions, you immediately reduce their complexity.
You need to meet conditions to construct a business rule:

It must use natural language like English or Dutch that

your business experts use and yet must express unambiguous intent of the business expert.

The natural language rule should be directly executable

so the human readable rule is exactly what executes.

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Business rules also have to be written to accommodate variables such as pricing, claims, and credit authorization. By
using ODM, you have the flexibility to modify as necessary.
The thing that makes modification easy is the use of natural
language (NL) rules and the decision center repository where
all these rules are stored and managed.
NL rules are written by using everyday phrases so they can be
understood by all business users. You dont have to be a programmer to create or understand them. They have a distinct
advantage over non-natural language rules because theyre

Easily understood: NL rules can be read and understood

by business people.

Easily modified: Externalized rules are easily changed.

Reusable: Centralized rules allow reuse and consistency.

Testing and Simulating

Business Rules
One of the key aspects of dealing with business rules is the
need to modify them when necessary. In many cases, youre
dealing with data that could impact millions of customers
or processes. For this reason, every good businessperson
knows that testing or simulating a solution before going live
can avert disaster. By running what-if scenarios, you can make
adjustments until you achieve the results you expect.
ODM provides users with an easy and flexible way to accomplish that. You have the option of creating simulations using
all types of data available to you to ensure success. When
selecting a scenario to simulate, make sure that

You first establish a business goal. This will help clarify

your reason for making the simulation.

You set parameters for the simulation. You want to

understand the scope of your test.

Your goals can be achieved by modifying a specific rule

or set of rules. You want to be able to apply the simulation using variables that are under your control.

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Chapter 5: Choosing Operational Decision Management

29

You know how you will measure the goal. This is key to
understanding what the impact will be.

You know how you will communicate the outcome of

the simulation. Be clear about how you will report your
findings after you obtain them.
The value of using NL is that the rule can be written so business users can understand and modify it. This means that
business users can use their business vocabulary to describe
what the rule should be. These vocabularies are set up once
by the IT department at the beginning of the project, and they
enable business users to combine them to create new rules
and make updates through the life cycle of the project.

Uncovering Real-Time
Actionable Insight
Key to decision making is the ability to uncover unique insights.
Does this customer have a high propensity to buy because hes
engaged with your organization in several distinct but unrelated
activities; or is this patient in danger for health complications
based on the combination of medicines that shes currently prescribed? Not only that, but also insights need to be something
that can be immediately acted on.

ODM is key to helping uncover real-time actionable insights.

And heres why: Decision making can be broken up into several stages:

Sense whats happening

Build your context

Decide what to do

Act quickly and consistently

And ODM is key to several of these steps (or has a key handoff to the others).
The event capabilities within an ODM platform help capture
data points and events of things happening both inside and
outside your firewall. Supporting capabilities like context

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

computing can then take those data and events and put them
into context to help understand and evaluate how everything
relates.
Business rules and analytics then drive the actual point-intime decision. For example, streaming analytics can enhance
your decisions by providing analytics of data in motion such
as geo-spatial position. Your decisions are made smarter as
your business rules are enhanced with up-to-the-second analytics. Lastly, integration with tools like a Business Process
Management System (BPMS) provides you with the ability to
act when and where you need to over a given period of time.

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Chapter 6

Adopting Case
Management
In This Chapter
Defining case management
Looking at requirements for case management
Introducing the case management capabilities from IBM

odays market dynamics puts increasing pressure on organizations to reduce costs while seeking new opportunities
to grow and differentiate their products and services. Armed
with the ability to communicate and manage across multiple
channels, organizations must find new, innovative ways to
deliver more effective customer experiences and better business outcomes through the value of data. Because business
content lies at the heart of every organization, effective leaders can deliver growth, profitability, and customer engagement by maximizing their data content.
In this environment, knowledge worker effectiveness has
emerged as a top priority to optimize the customer experience and help employees work more efficiently by focusing
on business content. Knowledge workers are people who
must make real-time, complex decisions with various types of
frequently changing information, often working interactively
with others inside or outside of their organizations to obtain
the most effective outcome. Customer service reps, social
workers, loan officers, case managers, healthcare workers,
analysts, and investigators are all examples of knowledge
workers.

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How much would productivity increase and costs decrease if you
could provide an environment that could aggregate all this data
in a single, intuitive view, automate routine activities, and provide a managed way to efficiently handling exceptions? What if
you could improve customer service, cross-selling and up-selling
with a single view of all of a customers transactionsacross
different locations and departments, including both structured
and unstructured content? How much time and money would
you save if you were able to audit only those parties that actually
needed to be audited?
The answer is case management. Case management provides
the systems of engagement that can empower knowledge
workers with a 360 degree view of information in a flexible,
dynamic environment. By delivering the right information, at
the right time, in the context of your business process, knowledge workers can achieve real time actionable insight and
make better decisions for your organization.

What is Case Management?

What constitutes a case? A case is a type of business transaction that involves multiple people, organizations, departments, decisions, and processes before it can be resolved
and closedwhether the transaction is an insurance claim,
a loan application, or a patients care plan. A case folder
includes all the documents, data, collaboration artifacts, policies, rules, analytics, and other information needed to process
and manage the case toward a prescribed goal.
So it makes sense that case management is the process where
people must make real-time, complex decisions with this
changing information, often working interactively with others
inside or outside of their organizations to obtain the most
effective outcome. Organizations that manage cases collect a
tremendous amount of information over a cases lifespan. An
advanced case management solution allows an organization
to link all of this key information about people, processes, and
information to facilitate positive outcomes.

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Chapter 6: Adopting Case Management

33

Looking atthe Requirements for

Effective Case Management

Effective case management contains three important areas:

Access to the right information: The need to access,

work with, and manage content is critical. In this context,
content refers to both structured and unstructured information that can include documents, images, video files,
audio files, and so on. The ability to recognize relevant
content, associate it with the correct case, understand
the role it plays within the case, and enable the case
worker to view, augment, comment on, and manage its
life cycle is crucial. Its also important to be able to retain
all the documents, including edited versions, plus all the
decisions made or tasks executed in an automated audit
file for real-time history and long-term compliance.

Process control: Process control puts the knowledge

worker in charge. The knowledge worker is the decision
maker. With case management, the knowledge worker
can break up all the potential repetitive tasks into a
series of small, discrete, individual processes and decouple them from any predetermined sequence to enable
flexibility while still providing process efficiency and
standardized process control. Best practices can be built
into the process steps, allowing for added effectiveness
and control, but ultimately it will be the case worker who
decides what to do in what order.

Analytics: Analytics help professionals make betterinformed decisions. Organizations can optimize case
outcomes by utilizing advanced analytical tools such as
similarity analyticseffectively analyzing one individual
or circumstance in the context of all like individuals or
circumstances. This process helps organizations derive
even more value from new and existing information and
facilitates consistent decisions based on best practices.
Combining analyses of structured information with
unstructured information further enhances an organizations ability to glean insight from cases and improve
decision-making.

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Case Management Capabilities

fromIBM
No matter what type of work patterns you have in your company, working with IBM Case Manager and IBM Business
Process Manager can be a case management path thats right
for you.

IBM Case Manager

IBM Case Manager unites information, processes, and people
to provide a 360-degree view of case information and drive
optimum outcomes and results. The flexible framework, cohesive approach, and integrated tools from the IBM software
portfolio help organizations work smarter while addressing
auditing and regulatory requirements. IBM Case Manager
empowers knowledge workers to use integrated business rules,
collaboration, and analytic tools to extract more value and
insight from critical information. Workers can make better and
faster decisions whether it originates as a customer request,
loan application, or complex compliance procedure.
As business goals change and grow, IBM Case Manager offers
an extensible platform for enhancing capabilities and protecting investments with additional value-added Enterprise
Content Management (ECM) capabilities from IBM, and its
business partners.

Case capabilities inIBM Business

Process Manager
IBM Business Process Manager also comes with basic case
management capabilities that help knowledge workers be
more effective. It enables them to work toward a specific
goal, while letting them decide the necessary interim steps to
achieve the outcome through a case management approach
by using ad hoc processes.

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Chapter 7

Looking at Business
Monitoring Software
In This Chapter
Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs)
Introducing IBM Business Monitor
Understanding the value of dashboards

nterprises are looking for improved visibility into fast breaking trends in business situations. They want to proactively
respond and drive greater efficiency and productivity, resulting
in improved business outcomes.
Customers typically make choices based on the speed and
the quality with which services are delivered. And they
expect continuous improvement in services, such as on-time
orders or payments, faster quotes, same-day shipments,
speedy customer service, or multi-channel distribution.
To sustain and grow in business, business managers need
real-time operational intelligence the ability to anticipate
changes in business conditions and to the critical operational processes that run the business.
Operational intelligence represents a key tool for process
improvement because its chartered with examining whether
current operations are delivering value in the context of the
intended corporate strategy. This means that operational intelligence provides a window into the current state of operations,
supporting the evaluation of whats necessary to transition
from the current state to a desired future state. The visibility
into the state of business operations can provide crucial feedback into the evaluation and reformulation of business strategy.

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IBM Business Monitor can provide your business leaders and
Line of Business and IT managers with real-time, end-to-end
operational intelligence. This gives you the agility you need to
respond quickly and effectively in todays fast-changing business environment.
The IBM Business Monitor is designed to gather business
event data, which is filtered, measured, and correlated to
create key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide insight
into the volume, variety, and velocity of selected business processes. These KPIs can be organized into a dashboard tailored
to the users interests. Additionally, IBM Business Monitor can
be configured to generate alerts and initiate automated remedial actions.

Monitoring Your Data

Monitoring business activities throughout their life cycle
allows you to keep your eye on those key performance indicators. Business Monitor allows business users to track their
entire business operation, receive alerts, and drill down to get
to the details so you can understand and act on whats going
on. Take order fulfillment as an example.
How do you know that order fulfillment is running effectively?
What if you could see key performance indicators such as
order accuracy rates (error-free orders/total orders), order
cycle time, partial fill rates, back order status, and rates of
returned goods? Would you want to know which exceptions
are delaying order cycle times, and whats the change in the
daily, weekly, or monthly numbers? IBM Business Monitor can
gather and show you what you need to know.
Access to solid, accurate, and current operational intelligence
is a requirement for success across industries. Consider the
following scenarios where operational intelligence can make
the difference:

Customer churn: A marketing or customer service agent

for a telecommunications provider receives notification
of an event or series of events that signals the potential
churn of a key customerin time to deliver a special
offer in an effort to retain the customer.

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Chapter 7: Looking at Business Monitoring Software

37

Supplier performance: A merchandise manager for a

retailer is notified that the performance of a supplier has
suddenly degraded based on a measure of return rates
for its products in time to negotiate with the supplier
and/or identify alternative sources for the goods.

Predictive maintenance: A maintenance manager is

informed that a pump is showing early signs of potential
failurein time to deploy another pump and also to
schedule the problematic pump for priority repairs.

IBM Business Monitor

Monitoring business indicator trends enables early warning of
business changes in time to identify root causes and address
them before they impact your business. In addition to rapidly
identifying KPI trends, IBM Business Monitor can flag specific
events, such as a rush order from a key customer that may
require reprioritization over other orders to meet the promised delivery schedule. In your business, you enhance customer satisfaction by resolving problem situations fast. Are
you experiencing any of these process problems?

Inadequate visibility across and into end-to-end systems

Unexplained bottlenecks in different parts of your

operations

Inconsistent service-level agreement compliance

If so, deploying IBM Business Monitor gives you visibility
into your business process behaviors. With IBM Business
Monitor, you can organize the information that you need
tailored to your business teams, giving them the ability to
respond more quickly and effectively to change. By consuming and correlating events seamlessly from multiple sources,
IBM Business Monitor provides comprehensive visibility of
your business processes, end to end.
You could lose business opportunities and run into problems
simply because you have no visibility into what your business
is doing right now. When you monitor your operational KPIs,
you can

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Smarter Process For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition

Trigger alerts when a problem occurs or when predicted

values indicate a potential problem in the near future

Remain aware of critical events happening in real-time

along with monitoring specific situations and metrics

Create custom dashboards that speak directly to your

current issues
IBM Business Monitor offers enhanced visualization and reporting features. A dashboard can display a workflow graphically
in a milestone view with up-to-the-minute statistics that show
actual performance versus expected (or planned). By using the
Cognos Business Intelligence capabilities included with IBM
Business Monitor, your team can see the information in business terms, using colorful and state-of-the-art business graphics with the ability to alter and drill down as needed. Consider
how your business teams can benefit from this kind of real-time
operational intelligence.

Seeing theValue ofDashboards

As new, more effective ways to analyze data are created, dashboards have gained wide acceptance because they help business users see whats going on now rather than read what was
going on later.
IBM Business Monitor automatically generates a dashboard
that facilitates both rapid development and playback so
employees can effectively collaborate. A dashboard helps you
look at the real-time status of a variety of applications from
end to end. You can view reports, KPIs, and status alerts. This
helps you see and understand whats going on so you can
achieve timely completion of work projects reduce costs.
Dashboards also let you customize what you see so youre
always on top of your specific area of responsibility. You can
see how your latest marketing campaign is doing as well as
look at the information of a specific customer.

One of the key benefits of using a dashboard is that you can

see the big picture and drill down to the details from one
place. The sales department can see which territories are
doing well and can go down to the customer level to see who
isnt buying.

These materials are 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Chapter 8

Taking a Fast Path to

Success
In This Chapter
Utilizing Smart Process accelerators
Developing a Quick Win Project program

n todays business climate, you have to be agile and

responsive to market conditions. When you undertake a
project, you need to show results fast. Smart Process accelerators speed your solutions to the marketplace.

Introducing Accelerators
Accelerators offer a way to get started by using a proven set
of techniques and software through a portal. Each accelerator
is a set of packaged tools that addresses your specific business needs. The goal of each accelerator is to

Optimize business processes

Allow content delivery and capture across channels,

including mobile

Embed risk management into the process

Find meaningful insights that you can use to deliver value

to your customers
Accelerators have been developed in a variety of areas. One of
the accelerators demonstrating excellent results is the Financial
Services Mobile-enabled Smarter Process Accelerator. For

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example, banks can use IBM Smarter Process Accelerators to
enhance

Institutional account opening: For institutional

accounts, you can reduce cycle time and provide realtime status. You can also use workflow management to
reduce costs and accelerate revenue realization.

Retail account opening: For retail accounts, you can

deliver a customer experience that reduces cycle time
and cost with real-time status reporting. You will also see
processes improve in quality.

The use of mobile devices and mobile enabling processes

can create challenges for your organization. These challenges
include more specific and atomic access to processes, application security, the added costs of platform development, and
integration between cloud computing and mobile devices. IBM
mobile accelerators help you manage these issues.

Deploying Quick Win Projects

A Quick Win Project (QWP) allows you to break through
department barriers and develop solutions in approximately
ten weeks or less. Youll also deliver quick return on investment (ROI), which is the key to gaining project acceptance.
So what happens when you undertake a QWP? Follow this
timeline:

1. A team of experts begin the QWP process.

They engage both your business and IT stakeholders

to define an end-to-end process solution by using process management software, rules management software, or both.

2. You identify best practices, roles, and methodology.

Within ten weeks, you produce a Quick Win, using a

first-step pilot program. Youre on your way.

The QWP will jump start the project and allow you to gain
acceptance from process owners and stakeholders. This puts
you on the path to a broader solution that provides sustained
change.

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Chapter 9

Ten Repeatable Smarter

Process Industry Use Cases
In This Chapter
Enhancing credit and loan processing
Improving healthcare process management
Applying dynamic pricing and bundling
Extending power grid management

kay, so weve given you eight industries instead of ten.

Its still an even number. These industry use cases show
the impact Smarter Process has on the companies that use it.

Banking
A leading U.S. bank with $300 billion in assets, 57,000 employees,
and about 2,900 branches took several days to provide new customers with a loan, and users were having an inconsistent experience due to differing employee interpretations of the policies.
When the banking company implemented Smarter Process,
it was able to create an automated loan processing system
with straight-through processing. The bank saw the following
results:

Faster loan origination with 85 percent straight-through

processing

Faster onboarding of new customers

A greater ability to comply with regulations

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Insurance
A leading general insurance company that operates worldwide employs approximately 1,250 people. It needed to generate real-time quotes that required the company to manage its
policies for eligibility, underwriting, and rating.
The insurance companys solution with Smarter Process was
to offer real-time quotes to its customers, which gives the
business a competitive advantage. The results from Smarter
Process included the following:

Expended 70 percent less development effort to create

and maintain a dynamic website for real-time insurance
quotes

Had significant business growth

Healthcare
One of the largest academic teaching hospitals in Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada needed to improve the quality of care and
key metrics that included patient wait times, discharge rates,
and instances of relapse.
This Healthcare Process Management company used Smarter
Process to create a Circle of Care visual interface that
improved communication and collaboration among the care
team members. The hospital became a top 10 percent performer in quality of care and patient safety in North America.

Government
One of Spains regional government agencies administers a
broad range of social programs through its Social Services
agency. A new Spanish law brought a huge increase in applicants. New social services were also introduced with complex
criteria. To supply these services, the agency had to consistently apply the same criteria to everyone who came for
services.

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Chapter 9: Ten Repeatable Smarter Process Industry Use Cases

43

To determine eligibility, the agency used Smarter Process

and developed a rules-based service that effectively scored
applicants and developed a centrally managed content repository to all managers across the system. With this process,
the agency dramatically reduced the time it took to process
claims so it could spend more time with exceptional cases.

Travel and Transportation

A development company that designs, builds, and implements
IT solutions, such as booking sites and business intelligence
systems for travel and tourism professionals throughout
Europe and North America, had some unsatisfied clients.
Clients complaints included pre-priced vacation packages,
and they requested self-service booking engines.
With Smarter Process, the company was able to create business rules that allowed for custom options and daily price
options. Clients then enjoyed the availability of dynamic pricing and bundling, and the company greatly reduced its time to
market (to hours not weeks).

Telecom
A well-respected international business conglomerate operating in the telecom industry wanted to gain first-mover
advantage by being the first to launch direct-to-home satellite
TV broadcasting. With a solution using Smarter Process, the
business built a customer onboarding system that provided
for faster service installation and immediate activation. This
resulted in the addition of one million customers on its satellite TV network in one year.

Retail
An upscale Chinese brand with revenues in the billions of
yuan each year and 215,000 square feet of retail space needed
to increase competitiveness, provide suppliers with critical
buying information, and improve order acceptance rate and
on-time delivery rate.

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Through Smarter Process in order management, the brand
developed a first-of-its-kind supply chain management platform and achieved the following:

Realized ROI of nine months and reduced order error

rates from 9 percent to 1 percent

Reduced order lead time from 2.5 days to 4.5 hours

Improved order acknowledgement rate from 80 to

99 percent

Energy and Utilities

A progressive energy utility company in Germany wanted to
create an intelligent grid services platform that would serve
as the foundation for a marketplace of smart grid services.
With Smarter Process, the company used IBM to design a
framework for integrating devices and energy sources across
the grid. Now, customers can extract real-time information
from the grid and automatically optimize power consumption.

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