abas BPM Drives Value Through Standardization, Transparency and Integration

Your employees perform routine activities every single day. With ​abas Business Process Management (BPM), these everyday processes can be improved, standardized, and integrated across your entire business. By having standardized workflows, your processing times are cut, errors are reduced, accountability is enhanced, and reliable release processes are guaranteed. And abas BPM is user friendly, providing a graphical tool for intuitive modeling, automation, and monitoring of individual workflows, all without the need for any programming knowledge whatsoever.

All businesses today face globalized competition, constant pressures to reduce costs, and increasing demands for quality from customers. As a result, companies must continuously optimize their processes and workflows to gain competitive advantage. Thriving today and tomorrow means acting and working faster, with more flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and higher quality. Efficient process control can help you get there, and abas BPM is the productivity tool you need to work smarter.

We spoke recently with Nicolas Dormont and Milad Shah (both of abas USA), who have been involved in the development and implementations of the abas BPM tool. They had a lot to say about the many benefits abas BPM offers to organizations like yours.

1. Enabling Efficiency and Integration with BPM

The abas BPM tool helps businesses work better in so many ways. Milad Shah describes abas BPM as “a workflow tool where the user can start a business process, such as the creation of a sales order or purchase order, and then put and keep users on a standardized path.” The workflow gets carried out, with deadlines and approval processes made clear along the way. “For instance, if there’s a sales order that always has to get approved at a certain threshold,” explains Shah, “the tool makes that clear and always follows the same path.”

The benefits of standardization include more certainty, fewer errors, clearer accountability, simpler compliance, and enhanced efficiency. With the analytics function, businesses can also see how efficient their processes are and can make changes to optimize workflow productivity.

And abas BPM integrates workflows seamlessly across your entire organization. As Nicolas Dormont explains, “abas BPM doesn’t just document what your workflow process is, but also standardizes processes and integrates them within your entire business.” So you not only optimize workflows but connect them across your enterprise in a transparent way that drives greater organizational productivity.

2. Enabling Control and Accountability

By adding transparency into standardized workflows, manufacturers gain greater control and the capacity to hold people accountable for doing what they need to do. The tool breaks down every process into its specific parts, which are connected logically in a time sequence. Each component task is given a deadline and a priority, then is assigned to an individual employee or a processing group, who are sent reminders of what they need to do and when. With the Analytics Dashboard currently being developed, managers will have complete oversight regarding pending workflows and their statuses. In just a few clicks, managers will be able to evaluate processing times for each individual step. “You are in control of what you are doing every step of the way,” explains Dormont.

The tool is enabling accountability, integration, and visibility.

The abas BPM tool is also a big help for business planning, notes Dormont: “It’s just a matter of putting down what your processes are so that you can do them efficiently and optimize them as you go.”

The tool gives managers a sure way to hold users accountable for assigned tasks. As Shah explains it, “users get a task in their dashboard. They have a certain time period to do that task, and it’s visible on their dashboard. They're encouraged to finish it on time because the metrics get captured. Managers can track where bottlenecks are happening and why certain tasks are taking too long. So the tool is enabling accountability, integration, and visibility.” If something or someone is slowing a process down, managers know it quickly and can make changes to bring the workflow back on track.

3. Enabling Collaboration

The standardization of BPM allows both front-end users and back-end users to work efficiently together, and the standardization gets managed by a third-party organization that oversees the established BPMN 2.0 standard. But BPM standardizations cuts across systems too. “If it’s BPM standard,” says Shah, “then if your company chooses a different workflow tool, you can import that design into your new system.” Exporting and importing are enabled by BPM standardization.

Adds Shah: “Not only do front-office business owners have the ability to design workflows, but it also simplifies that business process for technical end users on the backend, who can configure that process into an ERP system. The simplicity of the design enables both front-end users and back-end users to collaborate and move the project along.” For businesses with multiple, global locations and strategic partners around the world, abas BPM supports convenient integration and collaboration.

A Different, Better Workflow Management Tool

We asked both Dormont and Shah how the newer abas BPM tool is different from the older abas Workflow tool. “Our new tool is cloud-based and scales better,” explains Dormont. “And we re-worked a lot of the front end in order to use some newer and easier frameworks.”

The new tool is also easier for users to navigate, notes Dormont: “It has a smart menu, so anyone could use it. You just have to give it a task and it opens the screen and you can view all the effects. So it’s very easy and automatic.”

What kind of feedback has abas BPM gotten so far? Shah answers quickly, with clear enthusiasm in his voice: “Everybody wants it. Everybody that sees a demo of it, they immediately recognize the value it offers. We started a couple of projects using the new tool and the demand for it is only growing over time.” What’s most obvious after talking with Nicolas Dormont and Milad Shah is that the abas BPM tool offers tremendous value to users and businesses, especially in providing workflow standardization, transparency, accountability, and integration. Business process management has never been more important or more easy than with abas BPM.