Robert Lang of Global 360 to talk about an implementation at Carlson Marketing, a travel, meeting and event planning company. They had a lot of paper-based processes that included hand-offs between departments with complex approval processes; not only was the basic process difficult to manage, but changes to a customer proposal were difficult to execute efficiently.
They used Global 360, SharePoint (as a portal), InfoPath (for complex forms UI) and SQL Server to implement their travel proposal request process, including automating the routing of work requests related to the proposal process. They automated some operations, and made other operations considerably more efficient by maintaining a common folder for the proposal that could be accessed by any relevant participants. They allowed for spawning related but independently-executing processes.
Their benefits:
- Faster processing of proposal requests
- Better accuracy in data collection
- Less rekeying of data
- Consolidation of data into a centralized database for historical analytics
- Improved turnaround time by 30%
- Reduced number of personnel required to process a proposal request by 19%
- Ability to identify and address bottlenecks in the business process
- Dynamically reconfigure and reassign staff to optimize work
They plan to use Global 360 for other projects, including A/P, HR and their call center.
That’s it for me for this Gartner BPM summit: after spending most of the last 2 weeks traveling to 3 conferences, I’m skipping the vendors’ parties tonight and the last half-day of content tomorrow morning. I’ve been thinking about a wrap-up post comparing the 3 very different conferences — one academic, one vendor and one analyst — so watch for that over the next few days.