case – Column 2

Flowable’s FlowFest 2022

Flowable is holding their half-day online FlowFest today, and in spite of the eye-wateringly early start here in North America, I’ve tuned in to watch some of the sessions. All of these will be available on demand after the conference, so you can watch the sessions even if you miss them live.

There are three tracks — technical, architecture and business — and I started the day in the tech stream watching co-founder Tijs Rademakers‘ presentation on what’s new in Flowable. He spent quite a bit of the hour on a technical backgrounder, but did cover some of the new features: deprecation of Angular, new React Flow replacing the Oryx modelers, a new form editor, improved deployment options and cloud support, a managed service solution, and a quick-start migration path that includes an automatic migration of Camunda 7 process instance database to Flowable (for those companies that don’t want to make the jump to Camunda 8 and are concerned about the long-term future of V7).

For the second session, I switched over to the architect stream for Roman Saratz’ presentation on low-code integration with data objects. He showed some cool stuff where changes to the data in an external data object would update a case, in the example tied to a Microsoft Dynamics instance. The presentation was relatively short and there was an extended Q&A, obviously a lot of people interested in this form of integration. At the end, I checked in on the business track and realized that the sessions there were not time-aligned with the two technical tracks: they were already well into the Bosch session that was third on the agenda – not sure why the organizers thought that people couldn’t be interested in technology AND business.

In the third session, I went back to the tech stream and attended Joram Barrez‘ presentation on scripting. Like a few of the other Flowable team, Joram came from Alfresco’s Activiti core development team (and jBPM before that), and is now Principal Software Architect. He looked at the historical difference between programs and scripts, which is that programs are compiled and scripts are interpreted, and the current place of pre-compiled [Java] delegates in service tasks versus script tasks that are interpreted at runtime. In short, the creation, compilation and deployment of Java delegates are definitely the responsibility of technical developers, while scripts can be created and maintained by less-technical low code developers. Flowable now allows for the creation a “service registry” task that is actually a Javascript or Groovy script rather than a REST call, which allows scripts to be reusable across models as if they were external service tasks rather than embedded within one specific process or case model. There are, of course, tradeoffs. Pre-compiled delegates typically have higher performance, and provide more of a structured development experience such as unit testing, and backwards-compatible API agreements. Scripts open up more development capability to the model developer who may not be Java-savvy. Flowable has created some API constructs that make scripts more capable and less brittle, including REST service request/response processing and BPMN error handling. It appears that they are shifting the threshold for what’s being done by a low code developer directly in their modeling environment, versus what requires a more technical Java developer, an external IDE and a more complex deployment path: making scripts first-class citizens in Flowable applications. In fat, Joram talked about ideas (not yet in the product) such as having a more robust scripting IDE embedded directly in their product. I am reminded of companies like Trisotech that are using FEEL as their scripting language in BPMN-CMMN-DMN applications, on the assumption that if you’re already using FEEL in DMN then using it throughout your application is a good idea; I asked if Flowable is considering this, and Joram said that it’s not currently supported but it would not be that difficult to add if there was demand for it.

To wrap up the conference, I attend Paul Holmes-Higgin‘s architecture talk on Flowable future plans. Paul is co-founder of Flowable and Chief Product Officer. He started with a discussion of what they’re doing in Flowable Design, which is the modeling and design environment. Tijs spoke about some of this earlier, but Paul dug into more detail of what they’ve done in the completely rebuilt Design tool that will be released in early 2023. Both the technical underpinnings and the visuals have changed, to update to newer technology and to support a broader range of developer types from pro code to low code. He also spoke about longer term (2-3 year) innovation plans, starting with a statement of the reality that end-to-end processes don’t all happen within a centralized monolithic orchestrated system. Instead, they are made up of what he refers to as “process chains”, which is more of a choreography of different systems, services and organizations. He used a great example of a vehicle insurance claim that uses multiple technology platforms and crosses several organizational boundaries: Flowable Work may only handle a portion of those, with micro-engines on mobile devices and serverless cloud services for some capabilities. They’re working on Flowable Jet, a pared-down BPMN-CMMN-DMN micro-engine for edge automation that will run natively on mobile, desktop or cloud. This would change the previous insurance use case to put Flowable Jet on the mobile and cloud platforms to integrate directly with Flowable Work inside organizations. With the new desktop RPA capabilities in Windows 11, Flowable Jet could also integrate with that as a bridge to Flowable Work. This is pretty significant, since currently end-to-end automation has a lot of variability around the edges; allowing for their own tooling in the edge as well as central automation could provide better visibility and security throughout.

Tijs, Jorram and Paul are all open source advocates in spite of Flowable’s current more prominent commercial side; I’m hoping to see them shifting some of their online conversations over to the Fosstodon (or some other Mastodon instance), where I have started posting.

That’s it for FlowFest: a good set of informational sessions, and some that I missed due to multiple concurrent tracks that I’ll go back and watch later.

Microservices meets case management: my post on the @Alfresco blog

Image lifted from my post on Alfresco’s blog, charmingly named “analyst_meme1”

I wrote a post on a microservices approach to intelligent case management applications for Alfresco, which they’ve published on their blog. It covers the convergence of three key factors: the business requirement to support case management paradigms for knowledge work; the operational drive to increase automation and ensure compliance; and the technology platform trend to adopt microservices.

It’s a pretty long read, I originally wrote it as a 3-4 page paper to cover the scope of the issues and cover case management examples in insurance claims, citizen services, and customer onboarding. My conclusion:

Moving from a monolithic application to microservices architecture makes good sense for many business systems today; for intelligent case management, where no one supplier can provide a good solution for all of the required capabilities, it’s essential.

Before you ask:

Yes, I was paid for it, which is why it’s there and not here.
No, it’s not about Alfresco products, it’s technology/business analysis.

bpmNEXT 2019 demos: microservices, robots and intentional processes with @Bonitasoft @Signavio and @Flowable

BPM, Serverless and Microservices: Innovative Scaling on the Cloud with Philippe Laumay and Thomas Bouffard of Bonitasoft

Turns out that my microservices talk this morning was a good lead-in to a few different presentations: Bonitasoft has moved to a serverless microservices architecture, and the pros and cons of this approach. Their key reason was scalability, especially where platform load is unpredictable. The demo showed an example of starting a new case (process instance) in a monolithic model under no load conditions, then the same with a simulated load, where the user response in the new case was significantly degraded. They then demoed the same scenario but scaling the BPM engine by deploying it multiple times in componentized “pods” in Kubernetes, where Kubernetes can automatically scale up further as load increases. This time, the user experience on the loaded system was considerably faster. This isn’t a pure microservices approach in that they are scaling a common BPM engine (hence a shared database even if there are multiple process servers), not embedding the engine within the microservices, but it does allow for easy scaling of the shared server platform. This requires cluster management for communicating between the pods and keeping state in sync. The final step of the demo was to externalize the execution completely to AWS Lambda by creating a BPM Lambda function for a serverless execution.

Performance Management for Robots, with Mark McGregor and Alessandro Manzi of Signavio

Just like human performers, robots in an RPA scenario need to have their performance monitored and managed: they need the right skills and training, and if they aren’t performing as expected, they should be replaced. Signavio does this by using their Process Intelligence (process mining) to discover potential bottleneck tasks to apply RPA and create a baseline for the pre-RPA processes. By identifying tasks that could be automated using robots, Alessandro demonstrated how they could simulate scenarios with and without robots that include cost and time. All of the simulation results can be exported as an Excel sheet for further visualization and analysis, although their dashboard tools provide a good view of the results. Once robots have been deployed, they can use process mining again to compare against the earlier analysis results as well as seeing the performance trends. In the demo, we saw that the robots at different tasks (potentially from different vendors) could have different performance results, with some requiring either replacement, upgrading or removal. He finished with a demo of their “Lights-On” view that combines process modeling and mining, where traffic lights linked to the mining performance analysis are displayed in place in the model in order to make changes more easily.

The Case of the Intentional Process, with Paul Holmes-Higgin and Micha Kiener of Flowable

The last demo of the day was Flowable showing how they combined trigger, sentry, declarative and stage concepts from CMMN with microprocesses (process fragments) to contain chatbot processes. Essentially, they’re using a CMMN case folder and stages as intelligent containers for small chatbot processes; this allows, for example, separation and coordination of multiple chatbot roles when dealing with a multi-product client such as a banking client that does both business banking and personal investments with the bank. The chat needs to switch context in order to provide the required separation of information between business and personal accounts. “Intents” as identified by the chatbot AI are handled as inbound signals to the CMMN stages, firing off the associated process fragment for the correct chatbot role. The process fragment can then drive the chatbot to walk the client through a process for the requested service, such as KYC and signing a waiver for onboarding with a new investment category, in a context-sensitive manner that is aware of the customer scenario and what has happened already. The chatbot processes can even hand the chat over to a human financial advisor or other customer support person, who would see the chat history and be able to continue the conversation in a manner that is seamless to the client. The digital assistant is still there for the advisor, and can detect their intentions and privately offer to kick off processes for them, such as preparing a proposal for the client, or prevent messages that may violate privacy or regulatory compliance. The advisor’s task list contains tasks that may be the result of conversations such as this, but will also include internally created and assigned tasks. The advisor can also provide a QR code to the client via chat that will link to a WhatsApp (or other messaging platform) version of the conversation: less capable than the full Flowable chat interface since it’s limited to text, but preferred by some clients. If the client changes context, in this case switching from private banking questions to a business banking request, the chatbot an switch seamlessly to responding to that request, although the advisor’s view would show separate private and business banking cases for regulatory reasons. Watch the video when it comes out for a great discussion at the end on using CMMN stages in combination with BPMN for reacting to events and context switching. It appears that chatbots have officially moved from “toy” to “useful”, and CMMN just got real.

bpmNEXT 2018: Last session with a Red Hat demo, Serco presentation and DMN TCK review

We’re on the final session of bpmNEXT 2018 — it’s been an amazing three days with great demos and wonderful conversations.

Exploiting Cloud Infrastructure for Efficient Business Process Execution, Red Hat

Kris Verlaenen, project lead for jBPM as part of Red Hat, presented on cloud BPM infrastructure, specifically for execution and monitoring. Cloud makes BPM lightweight, scalable, embedable and able to take advantage of the larger cloud app ecosystem. They are introducing some new cloud infrastructure, including a controller for managing server deployments, a smart router for delegating and aggregating requests from applications to servers, and monitoring that aggregates process statistics across servers and containers. The demo showed using Red Hat’s OpenShift container application platform (actually MiniShift running on his laptop) to create a new environment and deploy an IT hardware ordering BPM application. He walked through using the application to create a new order and see the milestone-based monitoring of the order, then the hardware provider’s view of their steps in the process to provide information and advance the process to the next stage. The process engine and monitoring engine can be deployed in different containers on different hardware, in any combination of cloud providers and on-premise infrastructure. Applications and servers can be bundled into a single immutable image for easy provisioning — more of a microservices style — or can be deployed independently. Multiple versions of the same application can be deployed, allowing current instances to play out in the original version while new instances use the most recent version, or other strategies that would allow new instances of any version to be created, while monitoring can aggregate instance data from all versions in all containers.

Kris is also live-blogging the conference, check out his posts. He has gone back and included the video of each presentation when they are released (something that I didn’t do for page load performance reasons) as well as providing his commentary on each presentation.

Dynamic Work Assignment, Serco

Lloyd Dugan of Serco has the unenviable position of being the last presenter of the conference, although he gave a presentation of dynamic work assignment implementation rather than an actual demo (with a quick view of the simple process model in the Trisotech animator near the end, plus an animation of the work assignment in action). His company is a call center business process outsourcer, where knowledge workers use a case management application implemented in BPMN, driven by events such as inbound calls and documents, as well as timers. Real-time work prioritization and assignment is necessary because of SLAs around inbound calls, and the task management model is moving from work being selected (and potentially cherry-picked) by workers, to push assignments. Tasks are scored and assigned using decision models that include task type and SLAs, and worker eligibility based on each individual’s skills and training. Although work assignment products exist, this one is specifically for the complex rules around the US Affordable Care Act administration, which requires a combination of decision tables, database table-driven rules, and lower-level coding to provide the right combination of flexibility and performance.

DMN TCK (Technical Compatibility Kit) Working Group

Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (but presenting here in his role on the DMN standards) started on the idea of a set of standardized DMN technical compatibility tests based on conversations at bpmNEXT in 2016, and he presented today on where they’re at with the TCK. Basically, the TCK provides a way for DMN vendors to demonstrate their compliance with the standard by providing a set of DMN models, input data, and expected results, testing decision tables, boxed expressions and FEEL. Vendors who can demonstrate that they pass all of the TCK tests are listed on a github site along with information about individual test results, providing a way for DMN customers to assess the compliance level of vendors. Keith wrote an update on this last September that provides a good summary up to that point, and in today’s presentation he walked through some of the additional things that they’ve done including identifying sections of the DMN specification that require clarifications or additions due to ambiguity that can lead to different implementations. DMN 1.2 is coming out this year, which will require a new set of tests specifically for that version while maintaining the previous version tests; they are also trying to improve testing of error cases and introducing more real-world decision models. If you create and use DMN models, or make a DMN-compliant decision management product, or you’re otherwise interested in the DMN TCK, you can find out here how to get involved in the working group.

That’s it for bpmNEXT 2018. There will be voting for the best in show and some wrapup after lunch, but we’re pretty much done for this year. Another amazing year that makes me proud to be a part of this community.

bpmNEXT 2018: All about bots with Cognitive Technology, PMG.net, Flowable

We’re into the afternoon of day 2 of bpmNEXT 2018, with another demo section.

RPA Enablement: Focus on Long-Term Value and Continuous Process Improvement, Cognitive Technology

Massimiliano Delsante of Cognitive Technology presented their myInvenio product for analyzing processes to determine where gaps exist and create models for closing those gaps through RPA task automation. The demo started with loading historical process data for process mining, which created a process model from the data together with activity resources, counts and other metrics; then comparing the model for conformance with a reference model to determine the frequency and performance of conformant and non-conformant cases. The process discovery model can be transformed to a BPMN model, and simulated performance. With a baseline data set of all manual activities, the system identified the cost of each activity, helping to identify which activities would result in the greatest savings if automated, and fed the data for actual resources used into the simulation scenario; adjusting the resources required by specifying the number of RPA robots that could be deployed at specific tasks allows for a what-if simulation for the process performance with an RPA implementation. An analytics dashboard provides visualization of the original process discovery and the simulated changes, with performance trends over time. Predictive analytics can be applied to running processes to, for example, predict which cases will not meet their deadlines, and some root cause analysis for the problems. Doing this analysis requires that you have information about the cost of the RPA robots as well as being able to identify which tasks could be automated with RPA. Good integration of process discovery, simulation, analysis and ongoing monitoring.

Integration is Still Cool, and Core in your BPM Strategy, PMG.net

Ben Alexander from PMG.net focused on integration within BPM as a key element for driving innovation by increasing the speed of application development: integrating services for RPA, ML, AI, IoT, blockchain, chatbots and whatever other hot new technologies can be brought together in a low-code environment such as PMG. His demo showed a vendor onboarding application, adding a function/subprocess for assessing probability of vendor approval using machine learning by calling AzureML, user task assignment using Slack integration or SMS/phone support through a Twilio connector, and RPA bot invocation using a generic REST API. Nice demo of how to put all of these third-party services together using a BPM platform as the main application development and orchestration engine.

Making Process Personal, Flowable

Paul Holmes-Higgin and Micha Keiner from Flowable presented on their Engage product for customer engagement via chat, using chatbots to augment rather than replace human chat, and modeling the chatbot behavior using standard modeling tools. In particular, they have found that a conversation can be modeled as a case with dynamic injection of processes, with the ability to bring intelligence into conversations, and the added benefit of the chat being completely audited. The demo was around the use case of a high-wealth banking client talking to their relationship manager using chat, with simultaneous views of both the client and relationship manager UI in the Flowable Engage chat interface. The client mentioned that she moved to a new home, and the RM initiated the change address process by starting a new case right in the chat by invoking a context-sensitive digital assistant. This provided advice to the RM about address change regulatory rules, and provided a form in situ to collect the address data. The case is now progressed through a combination of chat message to collaborate between human players, forms filled directly in the chat window, and confirmation by the client via chat by presenting them with information to be updated. Potential issues, such as compliance regulations due to a country move, are raised to the RM, and related processes execute behind the scenes that include a compliance officer via a more standard task inbox interface. Once the compliance process completes, the RM is informed via the chat interface. Behind the scenes, there’s a standard address change BPMN diagram, where the chat interface is integrated through service activities. They also showed replacing the human compliance decision with a decision table that was created (and manually edited if necessary) based on a decision tree generated by machine learning on 200,000 historical address change cases; rerunning the scenario skipped the compliance officer step and approved the change instantaneously. Other chat automated tasks that the RM can invoke include setting reminders, retrieving customer information and more using natural language processing, as well as other types of more structured cases and processes. Great demo, and an excellent look at the future of chat interfaces in process and case management.

Vega Unity 7: productizing ECM/BPM systems integration for better user experience and legacy modernization

I recently had the chance to catch up with some of my former FileNet colleagues, David Lewis and Brian Gour, who are now at Vega Solutions and walked me through their Unity 7 product release. Having founded and run a boutique ECM and BPM services firm in the past, I have a soft spot for the small companies who add value to commercial products by building integration layers and vertical solutions to do the things that those products don’t do (or don’t do very well).

Vega focuses on enterprise content and process automation, primarily for financial and government clients. They have some international offices – likely development shops, based on the locations – and about 150 consultants working on customer projects. They are partners with both IBM and Alfresco for ECM and BPM products for use in their consulting engagements. Like many boutique services firms, Vega has developed products in the course of their consulting engagements that can be used independently by customers, built on the underlying partner technology plus their own integration software:

Vega Interchange, which takes one of their core competencies in content migration and creates an ETL platform for moving content and processes between any of a number of systems including Documentum, Alfresco, OpenText, four flavors of IBM, and shared folders on file systems. Content migration is typically pretty complex by the time you consider metadata and permissions mappings, but they also handle case data and process instances, which is rarely tackled in migration scenarios (most just recommend that you keep the old system alive long enough for all instance to complete, or do manual migration). Having helped a lot of companies think about moving their content and process management systems to another platform, I know that this is one of those things that sounds mundane but is actually difficult to do well.
Vega Unity, billed as a digital transformation platform; we spent most of our time talking about Unity 7, their latest release, which I’ll cover in more detail below.
Vertical solutions for insurance (underwriting, claims, financial operations), government (case management, compliance) and banking (onboarding, loan origination and servicing, wealth management, card dispute resolution).

Unity 7 is an integration and application development tool that links third-party content and process systems, adding a consistent user experience layer and consolidated analytics. Vega doesn’t provide any of the back-end systems, although they partner with a couple of the vendors, but provide tools to take that heterogeneous desktop environment and turn it into a single user interface. This has a significant value in simplifying the user environment, since they only need to learn one system and some of the inter-system integration is automated behind the scenes, but it’s also of benefit for replacing one or more of the underlying technologies due to legacy modernization or technology consolidation due to corporate acquisition. This is what systems integrators have been doing for a long time, but Unity makes it into a product that also leverages the deep system knowledge that they have from their Interchange product. Vega can add Unity to simplify an existing environment, or come in on a net-new ECM/BPM implementation that uses one of their partner technologies plus their application development/integration layer. The primary use cases are federated enterprise content search (where content is indexed in Unity Intelligence engine, including semantic searches), case management applications, and creating legacy modernization by creating a new front end on legacy systems to allow these to be swapped out without changing the user environment.

Unity is all about rapid development that includes case-based applications, content management, data and analytics. As we walked through the product and sample applications, there was definitely a strong whiff of FileNet P8 in here (a system that I used to be very familiar with) since the sample was built with IBM Case Manager under the covers, but some nice additions in terms of unified interface and analytics.

Their claim is that the Unity Case Manager would look the same regardless of the underlying technology, which would definitely make it easier to swap out or federate content, case and process management systems behind the scenes. In the sample shown, since IBM Case Manager was primary, the case view was derived directly from IBM CM case data with the main document list from IBM FileNet P8, while the “Other Documents” tab showed related documents from Alfresco. Dynamic foldering can combine content from different systems into common folders to reduce this visual dichotomy. There are role-based views based on the user profile that provide access to data from multiple systems – including CRM and others in addition to ECM and BPM – and federate it into business objects than can include records, virtual folder structures and related objects such as people or claims. Individual user credentials can be passed to the underlying systems, or shared credentials can be used in connectors for retrieving unrestricted information. Search templates, system connectors and a variety of properties are set in a configuration console, making it straightforward to set up and modify standard operations; since this is an XML-based declarative environment, these configuration changes deploy immediately. The ability to make different types of configuration changes is role-based, meaning that some business users can be permitted to make changes to the shared user interface if desired.

Unity Intelligence adds a layer of visual analytics that aggregates data from the underlying systems and other sources; however, this isn’t just visualization, but can be used to filter work and take action on cases directly via action popup menus or opening cases directly from the analytics interface. They’re using open source tools such as SOLR (search), Lucene (information retrieval) and D3 visualization with good effect: I saw a demo of a Sankey diagram representing the workflow through cases based on realtime data that provided a sort of process mining view of work in progress, and allowed selecting dates for past views of work including completed cases. For case management, in which processes are semi-structured (at best), this won’t necessarily show process anomalies, but can show service interruptions and opportunities for process improvement and standardization.

They’ve published a video showing more about Unity 7 Intelligence, as well as one showing Unity Semantics for creating pivot tables for faceted search on content repositories.

A Perfect Combination: Low Code and Case Management

The paper that I wrote on low code and case management has just been published – consider it a Christmas gift! It’s sponsored by TIBCO, and you can find it here (registration required).

This is an accompaniment to the webinar that I did recently with Roger King and Nicolas Marzin, which is available for replay on demand.

Fun times with low code and case management

I recently held a webinar on low code and case management, along with Roger King and Nicolas Marzin of TIBCO (TIBCO sponsored the webinar). We tossed aside the usual webinar presentation style and had a free-ranging conversation over 45 minutes, with Nicolas giving a quick demo of TIBCO’s Live Apps in the middle.

Although preparing for a webinar like this takes just as long as a standard presentation, it’s a lot more fun to participate. I also think it’s more engaging for the audience, even though there’s not as much visual material; I created some slides with a few points on the topics that we planned to cover, including some fun graphics. I couldn’t resist including a visual pun about long tail applications. Smile

You can find the playback here if you missed it, or want to watch again. If you watched it live, there was a problem with the audio for the first couple of slides. Since it was mostly me giving some introductory remarks and a quick overview of case management and low code, we just re-recorded that few minutes and fixed the on-demand version.

I’m finishing up a white paper for TIBCO on case management and low code, stressing that not only is low code the way to go for building case management applications, but that a case management paradigm is the best fit for low code applications. We should have that in publication shortly, so stay tuned. If you attended the webinar, you should receive a link to the paper when it’s published.

Low code and case management discussion with @TIBCO

I’m speaking on a webinar sponsored by TIBCO on November 9th, along with Roger King (TIBCO’s senior director of product management and strategy, and Austin Powers impressionist extraordinaire) and Nicolas Marzon (TIBCO’s director of strategic enablement group). From their registration page:

Supercharge your digital transformation – When low code meets case management

While digital transformation is likely on your company’s agenda, the demand for ever more enterprise apps is not slowing down. How can you both transform and meet this development need?

Process-centric applications that run your business involve content, events, decisions, and automation. Knowledge workers benefit from environments that integrate all of these capabilities in a case management paradigm, which combines automation with human reasoning. And new low-code development platforms will let your business users configure their own case management apps to meet their situational or strategic needs.

This is not a structured presentation or TIBCO demo: instead, I’ll kick off with a couple of level-setting slides on case management and low code platforms, then lead a discussion with Roger and Nicolas on a variety of issues facing us with low code and case management. Some of the things on my list of potential topics:

What are the business and technology drivers pushing us towards low code?
How do we reconcile citizen developers’ situational applications with a broader architecture and design vision?
How are low code platforms and their developers supported by a center of excellence without squashing innovation?
How do we handle governance of low code apps to make sure that they don’t do anything that might negatively impact privacy or performance?
What sort of organizational links do we need to bring together microservices developers and low code platforms?

If you have some other topics that you’d like to hear us discuss, please add them as comments below and I’ll try to work them in. Sign up for the webinar at the registration link above and join in on November 9th.

I’m also working on a couple of white papers for them on case management and low code, which is coming up in pretty much every business and technical discussion that I have these days. At least one of those papers will be available by the time of the webinar, with the other available shortly after.

Insurance case management: SoluSoft and OpenText

It’s the last session of the last morning at OpenText Enterprise World 2017 — so might be my last post from here if I skip out on the one session that I have bookmarked for late this afternoon — and I’m sitting in on Mike Kremer of OpenText and Kiran Thakrar of SoluSoft showing SoluSoft’s Active Client Management for Insurance, built on OpenText’s Process Suite and case management. SoluSoft originally built this capability on earlier OpenText products (Global 360) but have moved to the new low-code platform. Their app can be used out of the box, or can be configured to suit a particular environment.

The goal of Active Client Management for Insurance is to provide a 360 view of the client, including data from a variety of sources (typically systems of record for policy administration or claims), content from any repository, open tasks and pending actions, checklists and ad hoc notes. It includes the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding and underwriting, through policy administration and claims; basically, it’s user work management and CRM in one.

The solution is built on the core of Process Suite, using the full entity modeling AppWorks-style low-code development. It also includes process intelligence for analytics, Capture Center for document capture, and Streamserve for customer communication management. Above all of these OpenText building blocks, SoluSoft has built a client management solution accelerator that (I believe) they can use for a variety of vertical applications; below the OpenText layer is a service bus integration to line of business systems. For insurance, they’ve created a number of business processes and request types corresponding to different parts of the business, such as processing a new application, amending a policy, or initiating a claim; each of these can be configured for the specific customer’s terminology, or disabled if they don’t require specific functions. It’s not completely clear, however, how much of the functionality of other insurance systems might be replaced by this rather than augmented: clearly, the core policy administration system stays as the system of record, but an underwriting or claims system workflow might be replaced by this functionality. Having done this a few times with clients that use systems such as Guidewire, I have to say that this is a non-trivial architectural exercise to decide what parts of the flow happen where, and how to properly interact with other systems.

At the heart is a generic capture-driven workflow: scan, capture, index, data entry, process, approve, review, fulfill. The names of these can be aliased for different vertical applications — their example is that “processing” becomes “underwriting” — and steps can be skipped for a specific request type. Actions that can be performed at any of these work steps are configured using checklists. Ad hoc processes can be attached to steps in this master flow, either a single-step task or a more complex flow, and be executed before, after or in parallel to the pre-defined work step. Ad hoc processes can be created at runtime, and secondary request processes created for certain case types. The ability to make any of these configuration changes is restricted by role security. Relationships between clients, policies, brokers, claims, etc. are managed using folders for customers, policies and advisers, driven by entity modeling in Process Suite (AppWorks Low Code); this ability to establish relationships between all of these types of entities is critical for providing the complete view of the customer. They also have integrated iHub analytics for showing case statistics and workload analysis, as well as more complex analysis of risk or profitability for specific customer groups or policy types.

Although SoluSoft built some of this in custom code. a lot of the application is built directly in the OpenText low code development environment provided by Process Suite. This means that it’s fast to configure or even do some basic customizations, with the caveats that I mentioned earlier about deciding on where some parts of the workflow might happen when you have existing LOB systems that already do that. It also provides them with native mobile support through AppWorks, rather than having to build a separate mobile application.

We saw the version focused on insurance, but they also have flavors for pensions, financial services, government, healthcare and education. However, it appears that there is an existing legacy of the Global 360-based application, and it’s not clear how long it will take for this new AppWorks version to make its way into the market.