Category: process

business process management

Circuit City’s broken sales process

Maybe I’m just ultra-sensitive to particularly stupid business processes that I run across because I spend so much of my time helping customers to fix their processes, but yesterday I ran afoul of a completely inane sales process at Circuit City that probably would have had most people walk away.

I’m in San Francisco for a few days of R&R before BlogHer (although I’ve had both conference calls and business meetings in the past two days so not sure if this really qualifies as vacation). Tuesday, when I arrvied, was great weather and I toured around town, but yesterday was cool and foggy in the morning, and I decided to do a bit of shopping. Clothes, shoes and other bits and pieces later, I hit a “discount” camera store to look at finally acquiring a digital camera. Although I want to replace my old Canon EOS 35mm film camera with a prosumer digital eventually, I was looking for a pocket-sized camera to just carry around with me and snap all the weird things that I see happening. The camera store was offering refurbished Canon Digital Elphs and I decided to check online to see if the prices were reasonable before buying, when I found that Circuit City had better prices on brand new models and offered a discount for ordering on the web. They also offer order for pickup, meaning that you order online to get the web price but can pick it up in a store in less than 30 minutes — perfect, since I don’t live here, and there was a store within walking distance.

I entered my order on the web, camera plus a bigger memory card, selected the store close to where I’m staying, then went to the checkout page. Uh-oh, only U.S. addresses accepted. Okay, I get that they would only deliver to a U.S. address, but I had already indicated that I was going to pick it up, so this was just the address to validate my credit card. I decided to call the 800 number listed on the page — the one that says “Order anytime at 1-800-843-2489” — and had a discussion with a customer service person who told me that it was true, only credit cards with a U.S. address can be used. He suggested that I just go to the store and make the purchase, but said that I wouldn’t get the web discount (about $125). I whined, and he suggested the following workaround: go to the store, buy a gift card for the amount of the order, call the 800 number from the store and place the order using the gift card, then hang around in the store and pick up the order. He said that talking to the manager in the store might help, since they would see that the gift card nonsense was just a time-waster, and give me the web price on the spot.

His suggested workaround seemed completely daft, and I was going to just give up on the whole thing, but thought that I’d try the store first. I called the local store and talked to someone in the camera department and explained the problem. He said that they couldn’t give me the web price, then amended that to say that a manager would have to approve it. I gently urged him to go get a flipping manager already, and a few minutes later I had a committment that they would honour the web price.

I hiked the 10 blocks to the store (the thing that I love about San Francisco is that you can walk from point A to point B and back, and it’s uphill both ways), found the manager, and she filled my order at the web price.

So what’s broken about this business process?

  • First of all, unnecessary restrictions on the customer-facing portion of the web order entry process, such as requiring a credit card with a U.S. address even if the purchaser has indicated that she will pick up the items at a U.S. store. Not only did this frustrate me, and probably caused some other non-Americans to just walk away from purchasing at Circuit City, but it took up the time of a customer service person who had to deal with me on the phone and couldn’t even solve my problem. Cost: some loss of sales with no feedback (i.e., shopping cart abandonment) and/or increased customer service time without added value.
  • Second, a suggested workaround for the process that most potential customers would be unwilling to do, and which causes a significant amount of extra work for the in-store staff. Cost: further loss of sales even after the aforementioned customer service person’s time was spent, since most people wouldn’t be willing to do the gift card/call to order/wait for pickup dance.
  • Lastly, the fact that the entire situation could have been avoided since the in-store manager had full authority to just give me the web price in the first place. Giving people the authority to create process exceptions is practically useless unless you make that exception path easily available during the process.

Definitely an interesting look at a process that is not resiliant to exceptions. Meanwhile, I’m happy snapping away.

Paul Harmon on BPM state and trends

I’m in a webinar (sponsored by Proforma) with BPTrends‘ Paul Harmon discussing their recent survey of business process trends. I expect to meet Paul face-to-face next week at the ABPMP chapter meeting in San Francisco, where he’ll be speaking on “Business Process Today and Tomorrow”.

The first part of the webinar is pretty much just a review of the report itself, with a minor degree of added value, although it’s good for those who find it hard to plough through a 54-page report and find the high points without nodding off. He highlighted that most people are still doing their process modelling in Visio or PowerPoint (see page 29 of the report), although sees that as an indicator that an organization isn’t yet fully serious about their process modelling efforts because of the lack of an enterprise view that you can get with a repository-based tool such as Proforma’s. He sees many of the survey results as indicators that the BPM market that is still developing, not yet mature, and calls the market for tools “confusing” as he discusses the diagram on page 45. Considering that analysts tend to redefine “BPM” every couple of years, causing a vendor feature catch-up scramble, neither of these points is surprising and I agree with him. Furthermore, I think that the large percentage of Visio modelling is also an indicator of an immature market as much as it is of immature BPM initiatives within an organization.

He went through some results that I don’t recall seeing in the report that summarized what people would be doing less, the same, or more of in 2006 (the survey was taken in February), grouped into enterprise, process level and implementation activities as per their pyramid (page 41-42 in the report). He sees most of these trends as further proof that we’re still in a developing market for BPM, such as the large number of companies that are planning more of BPM systems, major process redesign and automation projects, and process analysis and design training in 2006 than they’ve done previously, as well as developing an enterprise architecture and enterprise performance management. I like the fact that he doesn’t show any bogus hockey stick projections for BPM growth; those of us in the BPM business have been seeing those for many years now and are understandably wary.

The webinar will be available for replay at some point; check the original registration link or the Proforma website to find it in a few days.

Slightly off topic, I appreciate the collaborative spirit of many recent webinars that I’ve attended of opening up the dial-in line so that any of the attendees can speak up with their questions (rather than using a chat window), but it doesn’t work so well in practice due to the large number of people who can’t find the mute button on their phone or just don’t consider the listening experience of others on the call. I can hear background conversations, papers rustling, computer noises of all sorts, and even a dog barking, all in spite of the speaker’s repeated request for people to mute their phones. Even on an online demo that I attended the other day with only two other attendees besides myself, one of those two put his phone on hold during half of the demo which treated the rest of us to the periodic “beep-beep” that most phone systems emit to the party on hold (and gave the speaker a pretty good indication of just how unimportant the material was to that attendee, since we could easily identify who had hit the hold button).

ABPMP in San Francisco

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about our startup meeting of the Toronto chapter of the ABPMP. I checked around for the other North American chapters and have now found myself invited to the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter next Thursday evening. Paul Harmon of BPTrends will be speaking, which should be interesting; I always enjoy his online writing.

Before you surmise that I’m a complete travel junkie (which I am), I had already planned to be in San Jose next weekend for BlogHer and fly in mid-week to spend a couple of extra days in San Francisco (one of my favourite cities), making the timing perfect for the ABPMP meeting. Time and place as provided to me by the chapter organizer are here on Upcoming.org; note that the address on the ABPMP website is incorrect.

If you’re in the Bay area and are interested in business process improvement or business process management, you should consider dropping in for the meeting — it’s free and open to all. You can also check out the chapter’s Yahoo Group, although it doesn’t appear to be very active yet.

Bluespring webinar

True to my expectations from our earlier interaction, I received an email today from Bluepring:

As well as reminding me about the webinar today, it gave me a link to the in-flight process, which now showed that the reminder had been sent. Unfortunately, a second (manual ) email was required to send out the Microsoft Live Meeting invitation instead of that being embedded in the email auto-sent by the process, so the process reminder served little actual purpose aside from reminding me how cool it was to see my webinar registration process online.

I’ve never spent any time with the Bluespring BPM suite before — it’s at the lower end of the range, and most of my clients are financial services and other large organizations that tend to buy big — so today’s webinar was a “first look” for me. The PowerPoint presentation at the beginning was thankfully short, but, predictably, included the same list of key differentiators as every other BPM vendor lists (ease of use, deployment speed, zero-code design, web services enabled), which leads me to think that someone is secretly telling vendors that the word “differentiator” is synonymous with “feature”.

The Bluespring product looks a lot like most of the other lower-end BPM products that I’ve seen, so I’ll just touch on the things that I liked and didn’t like about it. Keep in mind that I had a 20-minute demo, so this is not a formal review:

The integration with desktop applications, including email and Excel, looked good. For example, emailing to a pre-determined email address could instantiate a process that included the email attachment (an Excel spreadsheet, in the case of the demo) as an attachment to the process. I know that many of the other vendors could do that as well, but many of them would have to write a bit of code to do so. I also liked the Excel integration: an activity in the process could read data directly out of a spreadsheet attachment, then use that as a data parameter in the process. In the demo, which was (of course) an expense report approval, the process sucked the expense report total directly out of a specific cell in the spreadsheet and used it to decide if a second level of approval was required for the expenses. Very clean and easy integration.

In spite of the nice integration of the spreadsheet data, I wasn’t really happy with the explanation that I heard for how the attachments are handled. It appears that they are saved to the local drive of the BPM process engine server with no specific security beyond just not creating a drive mapping to that location. Presumably, an admin on that server could browse the disk and open the CEO’s expense report, or any other documents that were used as attachments. There should be a way to have the attachments in a secure repository, but still allow the level of integration that truly differentiates Bluespring.

The sales engineer who did the demo didn’t know about any plans for BPMN (in fact, it wasn’t clear that she even knew what BPMN is), and was totally derailed when I asked if they were using XPDL for moving process maps from Visio to their process designer. They need to not only get on the standards bandwagon, but educate their sales teams about it as well — there were two customers on the line in addition to me, although most likely the BPMN/XPDL conversation went right by them.

The last issue that I have is that the process designer is a desktop (thick client) application rather than web-based, with no plans to make it web-based. A few of the BPMS vendors have gone to a web process designer already, and I’m convinced that this is the wave of the future.

Process Analysis Models

Also from BPTrends, today’s Email Advisor has an article on Alternative Process Analysis Models (direct link to PDF):

There are a number of process analysis models that are designed to focus on more complex human interactions. One example is the RAD approach of Oulds and Harrison-Broninski and another is the Closed-Loop Business Interaction Model of Winograd and Flores. Both are useful in special circumstances, but neither replaces a basic workflow diagram.

I definitely agree with their premise that a single, common notation should be used for describing business processes for both business and IT.

Mashup Camp 2 Day 1: Mashdowns

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had to do all my blogging today offline because of the spotty wifi in the Computer History Museum, and I have to say that Windows Notepad makes a pretty sucky offline blogging tool. However, I’m relaxing back in my room listening to the newly-downloaded and extremely enjoyable Veneer (just available on iTunes, after I couldn’t buy the CD after a month of trying on Amazon.ca), cleaning up the blog posts and paper notes from today.

Following the kickoff session, we headed off to breakout sessions proposed by anyone and everyone during the kickoff. Each session was supposed to update the wiki with notes from anyone at the session, and you can find the grid of sessions here with links to the wiki pages with the notes. I’ll link to the notes for each of the sessions that I attended.

The first one that I headed to was “Mashdowns: mashing for competitive advantage in rich client/enterprise applications”, led by Mike Fisher and Ben Widhelm from ElephantDrive. They see this as a second generation of mashups: more tightly integrated into desktop or enterprise applications, and more focussed on “doing” rather than “consuming” — which seems pretty much aligned with my ideas about BPM and mashups. I hate their term “mashdown”, however, preferring the more-commonly used “enterprise mashup”. Really, the distinction between first and second generation mashups is primarily between consumer mashups and business/enterprise mashups.

We gathered a number of ideas about the difference between first and second generation mashups:

  • First generation mashups are about the “what”, and are primarily about aggregating/joining/federating data. They’re generally seen as useful by users (consumers), and because they’re focussed on the consumer market, they tend to be public, and developed rapidly and a bit loosely. The revenue model is usually based on ad revenues, since few end-users pay for the mashups.
  • Second generation mashups are about the “how”, and are about aggregating external and internal (enterprise) services. They’re useful to business for all the usual business ROI reasons: improving process efficiency, reducing IT costs and increasing business agility; like any other plan that reduces technology capital investment, they also tend to level the playing field for smaller companies since they can use the same technology as the big guys but not have to build it or buy it outright. Unlike the consumer mashups, however, they have to be industrial-strength, private and secure. Equally importantly, they have to be supported by some sort of service level agreement backed by appropriate high availability and disaster recovery scenarios, which most of the current API vendors are not willing to provide.

The key difference for me is that second generation mashups are about integrating into the business processes. This breakout was a significant conversation since it’s the first one that I’ve heard at either Mashup Camp where business processes were a major focus. I’m feeling very positive about BPM and Web 2.0 today.

We had a conversation about one of the main problems of enterprise mashups, which is their current lack of acceptance by IT. Part of this is IT attitudes: not trusting the external APIs, either in terms of data integrity or in terms of reliability, plus the NIH problem. An equally important part is the relatively lack of readiness of the APIs themselves in terms of SLAs, authentication and other indutrial-grade issues that would have external APIs be on equal footing alongside internal ones. Even with internal-only mashups, that use lighter-weight mashup techniques on internal APIs, there’s resistance to a new way of doing things. That really comes back to the question of the the difference between a mashup and any other web services orchestration, especially as lightweight (non-WS-*) integration methods are used for faster application assembly internally.

This was a great session for focussing my thoughts on how to talk to my enterprise customers about mashups.

Michael Scherotter was also there from Mindjet, distributing copies of their application on flashdrives. Haven’t had a chance to install and try it out yet.

BPM = Car and motorcycle tax?

Tonight I found a new BPM blog in Dutch, BPM Scriptie, from the Netherlands. My Dutch being non-existant, I used Babelfish to try and get the gist of what he’s writing (Google Translation doesn’t do Dutch, unfortunately). All machine translations are a bit funny, but this one was especially weird: “BPM” is being translated as “car and motorcycle tax”, making the blog title “Car and Motorcycle Tax Scriptie”.

I’m assuming that scriptie is Dutch for blog, but I’m still trying to figure out the car and motorcycle tax part…

ABPMP Toronto — first meeting

I’m heading off to the first meeting of the newly-forming Association of Business Process Management Professionals Toronto chapter. I had posted a comment about ABPMP somewhere, and heard back from the organizers about starting a Toronto chapter, leading to today’s meeting of like-minded people here in Toronto.

If you’re interested in getting involved, check the ABPMP Toronto chapter page or join our Yahoo discussion group. If you’re an ABPMP member in another region, I’d love to hear about what your chapter does.

Cardiff’s TeleForm V10

I had a discussion last week with Mark Seamans, the general manager of Cardiff, about their V10 release of TeleForm and where it plays in the BPM market (you can find the full press release here).

They’re really a content capture company, both from paper and e-forms, and they do that well — I’m familiar with them from years ago when workflow always involved imaging, and Cardiff was used for both intelligent paper document capture and e-forms in order to greatly improve productivity — I’ve written before about the powerful combination of BPM and e-forms. However, Autonomy/Cardiff now seems to be lumped into the ever-expanding BPM space and it might be hard for them to get the attention that they deserve in such a diverse market, most of which does not compete with them at all.

Gartner’s latest report on BPM classifies them in the “Vendors That Warrant Special Mention”, which sounds a bit like getting the congeniality award at a beauty pageant, but qualifies that by saying that BPM specialists like Cardiff have some capabilities that could compete with true BPMS vendors but that they’re focussed on a specific use case. For Cardiff, that use case is as a lightweight, forms-centric, document-processing flow that provides intelligent/automated data entry to back-office systems such as SAP. Typically, this might include hybrid processes such as printing barcoded forms, then the subsequent rendezvous of the scanned form when it returns to the data entry flow, or purely electronic e-forms data entry. Their focus is on “scan to process” rather than “scan to capture”, where the scanned image is not necessarily required for processing once the data has been captured from it, and may even be discarded. Cardiff can use the IWay adapters for connecting to various systems, or invoke web services, or take advantage of what their partner channel has built for integration where the former two methods fail.

I still think that this is a case of a vendor in a niche market — albeit a successful niche — getting swamped by the Tower of Babel effect from an overly-wide range of products all being classified as BPM. Cardiff holds an important piece of the puzzle for some customers, especially in highly-regulated industries with strict compliance rules, and it would be good if the customers could figure out which pieces to fit together.