Look Beyond the Trees

“Cutting annual paper use by 500,000 sheets can save a company $515,000 a year (more than $1 saved per sheet)”
Source: JP Morgan.

It is estimated that: It costs $20 to file a document, $120 to find a misfiled document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document.

7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder are misfiled.

The average document is photocopied 19 times.

Professionals spend only 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% of their time looking for the right information

6000 pages equal 1 tree. For  large companies and government agencies that have several hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, that does translate to a lot of trees.

Of course, the benefits of migrating from a paper-based system to a paperless system go beyond saving trees. Other benefits include increasing productivity, reducing operating cost, improving customer satisfaction, and even increasing sales.

Regardless of the industry you are in, or the size of your company, the benefits are definitely there. The real challenge is migrating to an efficient paperless system. In order to attain the benefits, you must streamline your existing processes first. The worst thing you can do is mirror your paper-based system to an automated system. I have heard it too many times where companies implement their existing system “As-Is” onto the new software that they just bought. Don’t make that same mistake. Being able to streamline and optimize your process is more valuable than any technology you end up buying.

To streamline your processes means eliminating unnecessary steps and combining tasks. For those who have been doing process optimization already know what I’m talking about. For those who are new to the concept, here are some basic steps towards achieving the benefits of a paperless system.

• Identify specific processes that you would like to improve. For instance, registration of a new member or customer, response to a customer question, delivery of a product, or collecting payment of a service or product.
• List or map out all the “As-Is” steps. If you have used tools like MS Visio, you can draw the process. Make sure to list all steps including 5-30 minute tasks like reviewing a document. You can also decide to combine multiple tasks into a single task. For instance, scanning a document might take 3-5 steps but you can decide to combine them as a single task called “scanning the invoice.”
• Understand each step. Each step in your process by itself is a mini-process. You need to identify the task, the performer (including manual or automated), estimated time, and actual average time. There are other details that you can also gather. For the purposes of this blog, these initial information is sufficient for now.
• Now comes the fun part or in some cases, the hard part. Identify the tasks that can be eliminated or combined. If you are using business process analysis (BPA) tools from SAP, EMC, IBM, or others, you’ll be able to analyze the effects of your changes through simulation. Alternatively, you can simply use a spreadsheet or a good old calculator with pen and paper.
• When you’ve made your analysis, you should see a reduction in processing time, cost, with less paper. When you’re ready, then start implementing your changes. You do not need to implement all of them at the same time. You can through a business process life-cycle methodology, make a change, generate analysis reports, re-model your changes (if needed), then implement the new model. This life-cycle methodology has been practiced by successful companies regardless of size.

-Erwin Chiong

Lean Implementation with Sharepoint and Documentum

Is it possible to have a lean implementation with enterprise applications like Sharepoint and Documentum?

I recently saw a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco by Eric Ries called Lean Startup. While the focus was on startups, it certainly applied to new products and new systems/application. In his presentation he talked about “Stop Wasting People’s Time.” For those who have gone through or are going through the painful implementations of Sharepoint and Documentum, you know what I’m talking about.

Ask yourself, are you wasting people’s time with your implementation? Will that new system you’re implementing actually be used? Are you taking too much time to implement it? Was it developed using the traditional waterfall project development approach or have you started adapting agile development? Ries evolved agile development with customer development. In today’s enterprise consumer adaption, the software that is able to provide consumer-owned applications with consumer IT management will win the market.

Sharepoint and several SaaS software such as Salesforce.com and Caspio.com have certainly proven this approach. Enterprise application consumers want it lean. And BTW, lean, does not necessarily mean cheap. It means small cost of entry, fast deployment, and most of all dynamic capability to change it’s parameters. Your consumers want their applications in a KISS mode – “Keep is Simple and Stupid”, they want it yesterday, they want it cheap, they want it to work, and they are not exactly sure what they want.  Sounds familiar?

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 introduces a lot more new and improved features that help make lean implementation possible. Among the features include their improved Sharepoint designer with rich features that can be configured by a consumer power user/administrator.

EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) 6.5 offers a fresh new approach versus the traditional Documentum implementation. As advertised

“xCP sets a new standard for rapidly building applications, offering a single composition platform that combines a fully integrated set of technologies with modeling and configuration tools, best practices, and a design emphasis on configuration versus coding.”

After talking to some long-time Documentum customers, it’s obvious that there is some hesitation on whether this is just a marketing hype or something that will actually meet the lean implementation methodology.  From the time xCP was introduced last year, there have been several successful implementations of xCP. Are you surprised? The one thing to remember is xCP is just a platform. How you implement it is what will make it lean.

The Challenge:
Lean implementation does have its pains. They include but are not limited to:

• adapting agile and customer development and release cycles
• providing appropriate corporate governance infrastructure
• providing sufficient training and support to consumer business units
• providing a dynamic enterprise platform that meets the lean consumer requirements

-Erwin Chiong, Trends Global LLC

Process Management

Wikipedia defines BPM as a field of knowledge at the intersection between Management and Information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.

“Think of BPM as simply technology-enabled support for business interactions, much like email is technology-enabled support for business communications”
-Peter Fingar, Extreme Competition

The classic scribbling on a dinner napkin as shown here is where great ideas begin. Often enough, these ideas are around process improvements that consist of activities to meet a specific goal such as faster processing of an application.

When you start thinking about why it takes too many steps for a task to be accomplished or wonder why you have to enter the same data in 2 or more different systems, you come to a realization that things could be better and faster if only the systems and human tasks could be combined somehow without costing an arm and leg. This mindset is what Erwin calls “get it done faster, better, and cheaper” paradigm. With today’s BPM, SOA, and Mashup software, this goal can be achieved if implemented successfully.

“Whenever a program did not deliver the anticipated benefits, the problem was not a skill or knowledge deficit. Invariably, the problem was related to the underlying business process.”
-Andrew Spanyi, More for Less and Business Process Management is a Team Sport

Latest update on BAM D6.5 SP1 – by Ailen …

Latest update on BAM D6.5 SP1 – by Ailen Polan
Latest D.6 SP1 release (with the latest patch releases) of Business Activity Monitoring in Documentum Process Management 6.5 is a big leap from the BAM that was released last year. I remember my co-developer encountered quite few problems back then from the installation up to generating reports. Now, it’s a different BAM. It is easy to manage and configure.

It basically does what we expect BAM to do but now with ease. I am surprised that the installation and the creation of Pre-Configured Reports could now be done within 1-2 weeks with the help of installation and implementation guide. To generate accurate BAM reports, make sure that business data are readily available and that Process Administrator had already activated process monitoring in Taskspace. That way, you can keep project schedule on track.

In handling custom reports, plan to do it for about 1-2 months so there is enough time to create source views. Do not forget that it is necessary to have a complete perception of the BAM data model and DQL. There are sample reports in the guide that are easy to follow. Chart properties inside PRS are simple to manipulate. I also observed that the bugs reported before are already fixed. Thanks to the active support of the TAP Issue Tracker Team.

Does Documentum BPM 6.5 Offer Anything New?

We recently created a Healthcare application on Documentum Process Suite 6.5. We used the latest versions of Taskspace, Process Builder, Process Integrator, Process Engine, Business Activity Monitor, and the new Composer. Here’s my review of Process Suite D6.5…

As the former Group Product Manager for the Documentum Process Suite, I was pleased to see the improvements in the product. Of course, I was disappointed with some shortfalls on the quality of the BAM (formerly Proactivity) products, which until now, to my opinion, has not met the quality required by its customers and the industry.

My favorite addition to the package was the high-fidelity forms. For those who have used previous versions of the Documentum Forms Builder, I’m sure you have the scars to prove it. The good news is, in Forms Builder D6.5, a lot of bugs have been finally fixed and works much better with the latest version of Taskspace. With the high-fidelity forms capability, Forms Builder is now a much better product. So if you’re wondering if you should attempt to use Forms Builder D6.5 or migrate your current Webtop to Taskspace with Forms, I strongly suggest you do it. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. What used to take us days & even weeks to develop on WDK with Webtop, only took minutes of configuration on Taskspace.

Just like any other software though, Taskspace D6.5 has its limitations. Some of which, I will attempt to discuss in this blog. So still expect to get some challenges if you do not know the pitfalls of this version.

With Taskspace, you can easily configure the search, folder view, file view, attribute display, and content image display components. In addition, Taskspace has a much better transactional perspective versus Webtop. Some of the limitations that you must be aware of is its lack of menu options. The fly-over menu options are very limited and do not really fit well in the overall usability perspective. As for the toolbar menu options…it does not exist. You’re better off customizing the folder and node structure to launch custom components. There is a built-in Adobe Reader, which automatically displays the content images. With the built-in viewer, you’ll be limited to viewing PDF and TIFF images only. All other content formats will be viewed using the application assigned to the document format, which is launched outside Taskspace. You do have the option to buy one of the supported viewers – Brava and Snowbound where you have additional features like annotations and viewing various content formats. For our healthcare application, we created a custom interface to support a shareware viewer for DICOM images.

One of my favorite feature with the high-fidelity form is the ability to use a paper form images as the interface for data entry and review. By using this high-fidelity feature, adaptability to the new application is improved. If you’re converting a paper-based application, you can use high-fidelity forms to have the exact image of your paper forms. This allows you to convert your paper-based system onto a mirrored system in a more efficient electronic application. Another cool feature with high fidelity forms is the ability to print it, use it offline and re-import (or scan) it using a built-in barcode to automatically categorize it. Per my experience, these features greatly reduces the total cost of ownership and accelerates your ROI on your investment.

The Process Builder now allows multiple entry points. For those who have tried Process Builder D6.5, you’ll notice that the Start activity template is still there. Unfortunately, even if you do not need it, it cannot be removed. It is a product bug, which I believe will eventually be fixed in the succeeding SP releases. The new builder also has the ability to group activities. This is a feature that you’ll see in other BPM products with Oracle and IBM. With D6.5, the builder also provides better error handling for integration problems such as connecting via Web Service. The queue management feature now has skill set capabilities. In the previous versions, skill level was available allowing you to set controls based on the user’s skill levels like beginner, intermediate, and professional levels. With skill sets, you have a better feature with matching skills against tasks. Configuring queue management needs a lot of work but the feature is extremely powerful.

Managing rules is still a limitation of the Documentum Process Suite. It supports rules engine products like Ilog (which is now owned by IBM), Corticon, and RulesMachine. There is the basic if-then-else capability and built-in policy configurations for managing queues, content, automated tasks, and people tasks. However, for handling complex rules (such as bank fees, loan rules, and insurance policies) with multiple permutations, you will need one of the rules engines.

As for the BAM products (which were an acquisition from Proactivity), the new version has fixed a lot of bugs from the 5.3 versions. The 5.3 version was developed with a loosely-coupled design to help get the products integrated at the fastest possible time. Unfortunately, for those who attempted to use the 5.3 and D6 versions, you would (like me) have really deep cuts…some of which are still bleeding. The good news is, BAM D6.5 removed the need for the unreliable Jboss Portal, often failing Documentum publishing job, poorly designed Process Analyzer and report designer, the problematic Observation Point activity template. With the new version, the reports are viewable on Taskspace with an easier configuration tool that actually works. The reports can be easily be configured with the updated report builder and built-in Crystal Report. Unfortunately, the installation and configuration is still difficult, synchronization of transactions still fail and creation of custom business reports are still limited. Perhaps in the SP versions, most of these bugs are eventually fixed. The Process Analyzer, Simulator, and Navigator were not upgraded and do not really work in harmony to provide a complete Process Lifecycle model. Until then, do not expect much from Documentum BAM.

The biggest challenge you need to address though is to determine the type of business reports that makes sense for you. Chances are, most of your reports are often immature in design and are constantly refined using tools like Excel. This begs the question…what is the TOC and ROI of using BAM versus good old fashion Excel? I would love to hear your opinion… Perhaps, Documentum BAM can eventually address that challenge correctly.

As for my wish list, I would like to see Taskspace upgrade to a Web 2.0 interface, which is the direction CenterStage and DAM 6.5 have taken. I would also like to have Documentum workflow web services that can be integrated with other applications.