If you've heard about BAM but aren't exactly sure what it is, tune into my webcast on Thursday January 11 at 10am PT/1pm ET. The registration link is here. The sponsor is EMC, and after my (vendor-neutral) introduction to the benefits of BAM and how it works, EMC will demo its ProActivity BAM now integrated with the EMC Documentum Process Suite.
The previous discussion leads naturally into simulation use case 3, which deals with Activity Based Costing. A number of users have asked me if simulation provided activity based costing, and I always said yes, since I assumed it could. But it's not built into the tools at all. This turned out to be a really interesting part of the training to develop. All completely original, since the modeling tool vendors don't really talk about it (or at least correctly), and the ABC literature doesn't mention simulation, either.
Activity Based Costing is not just determining the cost of each process activity from its active labor costs, or even its total direct costs. Yes you get that directly from the simulation model, as in use case 2. ABC is about allocating the indirect costs, both labor - management/supervisory, plus ancillary functions - and fixed overhead, like plant and equipment. You can't get that from the simulation model!
Or can you?
Continuing my recent post re simulation analysis and BPMN... (Since then I've finished my BPMN training materials, including simulation analysis, and it's now in beta... almost ready to go! Also since that post, the histogram of costs and times is now out of the box. I told ITP Commerce how I did it and they put that in the standard simulation output. How's that for customer service!)
Use case 2. Here the problem is usually framed in terms of "bottlenecks." I'm not sure how typical that situation is in real life. Usually static analysis gives you a rough idea of the staffing requirement even without simulation. For example, if over the workday you create 100 instances an hour, and Task A takes 1 hour, you need "around" 100 people to perform Task A to keep up. But what if instead of creating 100 instances an hour, you are getting 800 instances overnight and your resource for Task A also is responsible for Task B? Then simulation gives answers you can't get from static analysis.
But it turns out simulation gives surprising results even in the case where static analysis says you have enough to do the job.
webMethods, who at the beginning of this year couldn't even break into the BPM analysts' magic circle/wave/whatever, ends 2006 taking top honors in the Forrester Wave for Integration Centric BPM. For you non-subscribers, you can get the report from the webMethods website. webMethods has put a lot into its new version of the offering, part of the Fabric 7.0 suite. In addition to a real SOA platform under the covers - a big part of why Forrester liked it - webMethods has put in some BPM features that will knock your socks off.
This month I'm going on tour with Savvion to talk about the business value of BPM, followed by a customer case study in each city, and Savvion's Pat Morrissey talking about driving innovation through business-IT collaboration. The dates are San Francisco Nov 9, Washington Nov 14, Chicago Nov 15, and New York Nov 16. The case studies look interesting: Micron (San Francisco), Level3 (Washington), Motorola (Chicago), and BearingPoint (partner re their SOX solution, New York).
The Forrester Wave for Business Process Modeling tools has been released, and you can see it here courtesy of ProForma. The 'clear leader' is still IDS Scheer ARIS, but ProForma and MEGA have narrowed the gap. ProForma actually leads on the 'strength of offering' axis, while ARIS leads on the 'strategy' axis. Making the list as strong performers are EMC (ProActivity), iGrafx, IBM, Telelogic, and Casewise. Now that I'm getting into process modeling via the BPMN training, this is a vendor space I need to begin tracking more closely.
For those of you who follow enterprise content management, the latest Gartner magic quadrant has been made available by one of the "winners," EMC. The link, via the EMC site, is here. EMC just noses out IBM, whose entry includes both the DB2 Content Manager family and FileNet. Rounding out the Leader quadrant are OpenText (including Hummingbird acquisition) and Stellent. Hovering nearby are Vignette and Interwoven in the Visionary quadrant, and Hyland in the Challenger quadrant.
This Thursday October 26 I am doing a webcast on BPM for IBM as part of their 2-day "virtual jam" on BPM and SOA. Interactive Q&A follows, and a chance to find out more about how IBM is putting the puzzle pieces together. Click here to register.
[This is next week's BPMS Watch column on BPMInstitute.org]
A central promise of BPMS is that process improvement can be projected and optimized in advance of implementation, using process modeling?s simulation capability. By including simulation analysis, process modeling tools can not only define the structure of the proposed to-be process but project its expected ROI. For that reason, nearly all BPMS offerings today include some form of simulation tool. But are these tools really fulfilling the promise? Not yet, in my view. Let?s look at what they do, and what?s still missing.
InfoWorld just came out with a head-to-head eval of the two leading BRMS offerings, ILOG JRules and FairIsaac Blaze Advisor. To sum it up, Blaze slightly outpointed ILOG overall, with better benchmark performance and documentation, while ILOG rated higher in rule management and developer tools. The new version of Blaze is speedier than the old largely through the implementation of a new RETE algorithm resulting from FairIsaac's acquisition of RulesPower last year.