NYC BPM Event: Process Efficiency World Tour 2013 with Bonitasoft

Last Tuesday, November 5^th, I had the privilege of attending a live Open Source BPM event hosted by Bonitasoft in New York City. It was the 11^th stop on their 2013 Process Efficiency World Tour, and was geared towards organizations looking to maximize business processes and information systems with BPM.

A big focus of the event was the “future of BPM” and the value of the user experience. With the evolution of mobile, big data, packaged apps that utilize BPM, and cloud computing, Bonitasoft stressed the importance of customer facing applications and creative “design” thinking when creating BPM tools.

Click here to view slides from the Process Efficiency World Tour Workshop

Clay Richardson, Principle Analyst at Forrester Research gave a presentation at the event, and referred to business processes today as existing within the “Age of the Customer”. He emphasized the value of forward facing BPM tools, and referred to Bonita BPM as being at the forefront of this “New BPM” movement.

“Tools like Bonitasoft are lighter weight than traditional BPM tools, so when you’re looking at systems of engagement platforms, that have lightweight workflow, really good task management, and optimize for rapid development, you can do some very quick roll out, and don’t have the traditional overhead. You don’t have the need for simulation or a long ramp up period that you see around some of the bigger vendors, where it can take 6 – 12 months to get people up to speed and over the learning curve. With tools like Bonitasoft, you’re talking 2 – 4 weeks to be up and running quickly. That’s really what businesses want when it comes to creating an engaging customer experience…that’s the key.” – Clay Richardson, Principle Analyst, Forrester Research

Click here to listen to a podcast interview on this topic with Clay Richardson

I also had the pleasure of speaking to several current Bonitasoft customers about their experiences working with Bonita BPM. Below are their comments relating to the business value of working with these solutions:

“For us/our client, it is all about efficiency, auditability, and accountability. Ensuring the process moves forward in an efficient manner, and that it can be tracked/audited are the primary objectives and benefits.” – Joel Schaefer, Director of Enterprise Solutions, Opera Solutions

“Bonita BPM solutions offer continuous improvement in a shorter timeframe compared to traditional software development. In addition, we can utilize BA’s to implement solutions while allowing software developers to focus on writing business…Bonita provides that for us.” – Douglas Farmer, IT Manager and Software Architect, Corporation Service Company

“Bonita will help us automate portions of our back-office processes that require lots of manual processing (such as verification of completion of tasks in disparate systems, manually sending out email reminders, collating data from various sources, etc.). It will also be a tool that can help enable us to serve unique user experiences to segments of our user base.” – Faizan Subhani, Director of Business Analysis, Teach for America

There was a good turn out for the event, and no question that all in attendance benefitted from this informative BPM workshop hosted by Bonitasoft.