Home Group Limited Chooses SEQUENCE - PNMsoft's Business Process Management BPM and Workflow Platform
The Programme is Estimated at GBP1 Million Pounds (US$2 Million) Plus Home Group Limited, UK's largest social house builder and management organisation has selected PNMsoft's BPMS and workflow product SEQUENCE as its Business Process Management and workflow platform for a multi million pound programme.
LONDON ----- Home Group's programme involves the cross-organisational deployment of SEQUENCE starting with internet and extranet systems and processes. The benefits include internal and external customer satisfaction as well as savings to the company's infrastructure costs.
The Home Group Limited turnover is GBP230 million. The company owns 55,000 dwellings in 800 different sites, and is England's largest provider of social housing solutions for Local Regional Government.
Home Group's Project Manager Paul Kelly says "The SEQUENCE BPM solution will be at the heart of all future Web-based applications deployed by Home Group, and is considered to be one of the most strategic applications, and therefore investments, in terms of future IT/IS systems.
PNMsoft's SEQUENCE offered the best value for money to Home Group and key to this decision was the close alignment to Microsoft SharePoint, a strong user interface and a scalable platform."
Paul Sheridan, PNMsoft's VP Sales says "The objective of the deployment of SEQUENCE is to become the focal point of the company's internal and external process network. SEQUENCE will automate and manage a variety of business processes at Home Group, including handling residential customers, Local Regional Government customers, Human Resources and administrative affairs, and will reduce internal costs to the benefit of the Home Group's operational bottom line."
About PNMsoft
PNMsoft offers flexible business-user oriented BPMS and workflow solutions. Focusing 10 years on Business Process Management, PNMsoft has achieved a position of subject matter expert in the BPM/Workflow product arena, and is a member of Microsoft's BPM Alliance. SEQUENCE is installed at over 250 companies worldwide.
PNMsoft's SEQUENCE facilitates rapid end user acceptance via the Microsoft UI, providing business users operational KPI and simulation capabilities as well as the automated management of business processes and organisational information. The system enables automated management of a multitude of business processes (Production, Development, Purchasing, Finance, HR and more) while dramatically reducing time and resource expenditures.
PNMsoft is headquartered in Watford England with offices and business partners across Europe an N. America. For more details on PNMsoft, please visit www.pnmsoft.com or call Paul Sheridan: +44-207-953-0262 (UK) or +1-646-290-5063 (USA)
For more details on PNMsoft, or call Paul Sheridan: +44-207-953-0262 (UK) or +1-646-290-5063 (USA)
I have written a great deal in my TV Technology columns about change. This is because it is so critical that TV organizations be prepared to change and change often going forward. As Winston Churchill said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
That is the only way to even remotely stay close to that ever-elusive “perfect” alignment of the technology with the business goals.You can’t just change your technology, though, and expect success. With technological changes should ideally come process shifts.
There are many organizations I know of that made a “smooth” transition to file-based technology, but left in place the same tape-based processes. This is not ideal because it fails to take advantage of many of the real capabilities for improvement that the file-based system was intended to bring.
What we need is Business Process Management to manage our processes successfully through these kinds of changes.BPM is a term that, like Service-Oriented Architecture, does not have clear boundary lines defining what it is and what it is not. BPM combines workflow with software integration. It is a way of developing and improving systems that starts with the process, not with the technology! A business process is a sequence of tasks that extends across the entire facility. This example shows a process used to ingest new material. BUSINESS PROCESSWith the advent of process automation (not broadcast automation) or orchestration technologies, BPM has become very popular. BPM concerns itself with both the development of business processes and the links that those business processes have with the underlying technology. In some ways, it is a larger concept than SOA, which considers mainly the architecture and technology itself. BPM all comes down to the business process. An example process appears in Fig. 1.
Just as the service is the fundamental building block of SOA, the business process is the fundamental building block of BPM. A process can be of many timescales—short ones that may run for a few minutes to put a news story on the Web, all the way to long ones that may run for many months as a major business goal is realized. A business process should not be limited by technological or organizational lines but should represent, as well as possible, the way that business is really done in a facility.Obviously we have many, many processes in our facilities. Some examples of processes we do that could be targets for BPM include edit a package, ingest a tape, master control changeover or distribute to Web. Basically, anything that people would say that they “do” is a candidate for a business process.
Note that these are not low-level tasks like assign a unique ID. Again, BPM, like SOA, is focusing on bringing process and technology more in line with the way the business and its people work.ORCHESTRATION TECHNOLOGYEven without actual process orchestration of any sort in place, BPM brings agility into an organization. Formalization of workflows and processes alone makes changing those processes easier simply because the current processes are now documented. Having a methodology in place to formalize processes, a standardized way to document them and an excuse to keep them up to date will make it easier to address each change as it comes.However, if process orchestration is in place, then there are other agility-related benefits.
Fig. 2: Continuous Process Improvement is critical to maintaining processes. Process or-chestration technology can help with that by versioning processes and managing their lifecycle. A facility can have many variations of a single pro-cess running at once. This is how it is in many facilities when change is implemented: one or two groups test out a new process or workflow while the bulk of the participants continue to use the existing, tried-and true process. Once the new methodology has been working successfully for a period of time, it can be rolled out to everyone. BPM and related technology also provide the benefits of increased visibility to those who do it. This visibility takes a variety of forms from a general increase in workflow awareness to specific, available products that track process status and statistics.
This is the area of BPM that has been most explored in recent years by IT vendors and is also one of the most exciting parts. Communication is increased when processes are formalized because each participant in the process now has situational awareness of what is going on around him or her. A producer now knows that the editors take advantage of logging notes in a particular way, so she will endeavor to capture the most useful information for them. If all producers use a single, backlogged transcoder because it comes up as default, this work can be load balanced through orchestration across all of the transcoders in the facility.
CONSTANT IMPROVEMENTAn important point is that in order to maintain agility, you are going to need to continuously seek to improve your processes, (see Fig. 2). You need to regularly reexamine processes and occasionally make additional changes to them. It is important to get started with a BPM program in your facility. The first step of this doesn’t have to involve the purchase of anything. You can start by getting people together and documenting your existing processes. Once this is done, you can consider which of your processes would most benefit from orchestration and start a small SOA/BPM project there. Putting in some sort of BPM technology doesn’t magically make everything run smoothly.
There is a Chinese proverb we have all heard that says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” But what that proverb doesn’t help us understand is which step. Yes, all of our organizations could use better process management, and if you begin making smart choices to bring that about, the returns will be tremendous.
You can count on IT!
John Footen is a vice president at National TeleConsultants and the head of its Software Solutions Group. He is also the co-author of the book, “Service-Oriented Media Enterprise.” He can be reached at jfooten@ntc.com.
OBG Consolidates It’s Practice Management Systems with PNMSoft BPM Software
Orchard Brayton Graham the top 50 IP Law Firm has announced that it had started a working relationship with PNMSoft the Workflow & BPM software platforms and solutions provider.
Full deployment of the system is expected in December. OBG who have recently expanded their practice with a number of acquisitions, will be using the PNMSoft SEQUENCE™ software tools to create a functional workflow environment as part of the change management process it is undertaking.
David Orchard, Orchard Brayton Graham LLP’s CEO said, “This is an important part of our process to build a world class provision of legal and ancillary services to international mid cap companies. Law firms must be aware that as more regulatory emphasis is placed on due diligence, firms are being required to adopt a range of policies and procedures, the operation of which must be monitored. PNMSoft’s excellent BPM software allows us to regulate this in an organised and consistent manner, reducing our risks and creating more consistency for our clients.”
Paul Sheridan, PNMsoft’s VP of Sales said: “Working with a leading legal organisation such as OBGLaw achieve their aim of reducing risk and creating consistency to improve performance is another example of how companies and organizations are benefiting from our leading BPM and Workflow product -SEQUENCE™.
The ability to utilise the Microsoft Office environment means that the user acceptance is high and reduces training costs.”
Since PNMsoft's foundation in 1996 by experts in human workflow processes, PNMSoft BPM software has focused on developing Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Automation solutions that are specially oriented towards business users.
From the start, PNMSoft BPM software has applied our expertise and experience in BPM and BPI to build long-standing relationships with our customers and partners. PNMSoft BPM software products are complete projects, not shelfware, with the emphasis on reducing risk and enhancing incremental improvement. To this end, our activities extend far beyond the software itself, covering critical issues such as the speed of implementation, customization, risk reduction and fast ROI.
PNMSoft BPM software believes that BPM can lead to greater business efficiencies and increased revenues when it involves everyone. Consequently we have developed the SEQUENCE family of BPM products for rapid, easy and effectively deployment across the entire business environment. A key factor in this philosophy has been our close integration with Microsoft and its products. Liaising frequently with Microsoft developers, we have ensured that new BPM users – from every culture and background - can leverage their Windows experience to rapidly become skilful in applying our BPM tools without the need for coding or programming.
PNMSoft BPM software's growing penetration within world markets is testimony to this successful approach. Business users gain numerous advantages by using our automation technology and benefiting from our strong service orientation. They save over 60% in process development time, cut their administrative costs in half and gain greater control within their challenging multi-national business environments.
Profile
PMNsoft is a multi-national company with our marketing headquarters in the UK, our R&D centre in Israel and a network of business partners and associated offices around the globe. We have solid financial backing from Goldrock Capital, an institutionally-backed fund specializing in high-tech companies that show strong growth potential.
The executives leading PNMsoft's direction have a rich track record of expertise in computer science, information systems and workflow processes. Working in close unity with our employees and business partners, they have built a reputation for their responsiveness in providing intelligent, customized BPM solutions.
As an active player within the community, PNMSoft BPM software contributes to Tmura, a charitable venture fund that supports local educational initiatives and youth opportunities. Alongside other 'green companies' we encourage our employees to be environmentally conscious, conserving resources and moving towards a paperless office.
Leading Microsoft partners join forces to offer innovative BPM solutions to growing market in the Northeastern U.S.
Twentysix New York, a leading business and technology consultancy specializing in innovative enterprise integration, business intelligence and custom application solutions, and PNMsoft, developer and marketer of software products and professional services for business process management (BPM), announced a collaborative partnership to market and deploy PNMsoft’s flagship product, SEQUENCE in the Northeastern U.S.
SEQUENCE is a powerful, business user-oriented tool for managing information and dynamic BPM workflow procedures, including workflow processes, business rules, databases, and cross-sectional analyses in the simplest, most efficient manner in any web environment.
SEQUENCE offers an intuitive user interface, flexible and open-ended components, Microsoft based architecture, and unrivaled cost–benefit advantages. Kent Brown, twentysix New York’s Enterprise Integration Practice Manager, stated “I am excited about the addition of PNMsoft’s SEQUENCE to our toolset for providing BPM solutions to our customers.
SEQUENCE complements the SOA and Business Process Automation capabilities we have with BizTalk Server, WCF, and SharePoint. With SEQUENCE, we can deliver on the true promise of BPM – business users will be able to model and automate their key business processes and monitor the processes in real time so they can make better-informed decisions. And, with the SEQUENCE tools, the processes can be automated and modified rapidly without undue technical costs and complexity, while being well-integrated with a company’s back-end systems.”
“The BPM market in the Northeast holds enormous potential for PNMsoft. It’s a market that’s constantly energized, and there’s a great demand for BPM solutions to automate and manage a range of critical organizational business processes. Implementing PNMsoft’s BPM solution in a variety of processes in a variety of industries, including financial services, healthcare, and legal services among others, guarantees immediate and clear ROI by cutting costs and labor. Our collaboration with twentysix New York will enable us to supply a perfect response to market demands, and provide an advanced, cutting-edge solution,” offered Adi Hofstein, PNMsoft’s Vice President of Business Development.
Twentysix New York’s CEO, Jay Harris Rabin stated, ”twentysix New York views this alliance with PNMsoft as a strategic opportunity to leverage our strengths in enterprise integration, business intelligence, and core development skills using Microsoft technologies. The native integration PNMsoft offers customers will enable them to attain maximum benefits from their investments in the Microsoft product suite with a quick ROI. This partnership will also assist twentysix New York in attaining the growth goals we have set to meet our customers’ needs going forward.
Gal Horvitz, PNMsoft’s CEO, stated “Being one of the ten members of the worldwide Microsoft Business Process Alliance, it is of great importance for PNMsoft to partner with leading Microsoft Collaboration and Integration business partners. Our business model for business partnerships is all about quality over quantity, so we focus on a selected group of top performing business partners , and support them with all the resources they need in order to provide the best solutions and services to our mutual clients.“
Bill Gates, Microsoft Endorse PNMSoft Business Process Management BPM Software
By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency
Tel Aviv ----- July 15, 2008 ....... Shortly before Bill Gates stepped down from his full time position at Microsoft, Gates attended a software developers conference in the US. Gates spent time articulating about a few elite and rapidly growing applications including PNMSOFT Sequence BPM and its workflow platform.
"PNMsoft have done a great job on fast deployments," said Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Business process management (BPM) is an efficient system for aligning an organization with the wants and needs of their clients. It is a practical and time, cost effective management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. As organizations strive for attainment of their objectives, BPM attempts to continuously improve processes to define, measure and improve HR and financial processes - a ‘process optimization' process.
BPM Software Suites (BPMS) market, for products like SEQUENCE, are estimated by leading research companies such as IDS, Forrester and Gartner at about 1.5 to 2 billion dollars at present, with very rapid growth rate, is estimated to reach 5 - 6 billion dollars in 2011. BPM is one of the fastest growing software markets.
In addition, BPM Software has become very popular where one can find related groups at both LinkedIn and Facebook.
"We were very proud of the fact that Bill Gates, in his last days working full time at Microsoft and before dedicating more time to philanthropy, took the time and effort to mention PNMSoft," said Gal Horvitz, of the UK headquarted with offices in Israel and the US.
"Gates chose his words very carefully as he spoke about the contributions and financial impact that PNMSoft has made within the business world. PNMsoft’s Sequence is intuitive BPM software, based on a graphical flowchart-based platform and developed primarily for business users. This BPM software suite leverages Window’s Workflow Foundation and focuses on human workflow and systems integration. It interacts with people through Outlook, Windows SharePoint and in other ways."
Horvitz added: "The Sequence BPM software has powerful options to enable users the maximum flexibility in taking an existing business process and converting it from a manual flow to an automated flow. As users gain proficiency in this BPM software, they are guided by day-to-day forms, task lists, automated integration into systems, emails and more. Sequence has many predefined wizards that help users to enable and reuse elements within the BPM software - a key factor in making customer applications easy to deploy."
"It allowed SwiftTrade, a leading company involved with Financial Services, to grow from 27 to 65 offices within one year," said Horvitz.
"Without an effective and easy BPM software package, that would not have been possible. A global telecom, a world leader in customer management solutions, used PNMsoft’s BPM software suite to respond quicker to new customer projects in the Teleco industry and as a result increase the value of each project. Tnuva, one of Europe's largest food corporations, was wasting a great deal of money in setting up new customer accounts and running promotions. Sequence BPM software allowed their dairy division to rapidly identify production problems, speed handling time for quality assurance issues and enhance customer service processes. We have so many more examples - stock exchange that speeds up the process of filling to an IPO, defense and homeland security organizations that practices better decision management processes and operations room tasks prioritization, a world leading engineering company using SEQUENCE BPM Software for project management and compliance , the list goes on and on. From our experience our BPM Software has proven its return on investment (ROI) again and again. It's always about revenue acceleration, cost reduction and organization governance."
In addition to the above industries, education, energy, travel and transportation are benefiting from the use of BPM software.
"BPM software from PNMsoft offers users a highly flexible and convenient approach into Business Process Management software. It incorporates a set of integrated BPM software modules that are 100 percent web - based which make it perfect for software as a service (SaaS) and which require minimal or no coding or programming. This enables everyone in an organization to apply BPM software in their daily tasks and contribute towards greater corporate efficiency."
Enjoying international success and rapid growth, the staff of PNMSoft have much to smile about.
Bill Gates described PNMSoft BPM software as follows: "I have selected to describe PNMSoft, a Microsoft company partner in Israel. They have a business process management solution called Sequence. And they connect to Microsoft Biztalk server. If you have workflows that relate to transactions or analysis, you get rich visualization on the information and they get much of their information from Oracle applications which work with HR, purchasing and finance."
"We have a huge amount of innovation relating to workflow and business intelligence," says Gates as he points to colorful presentation of PNMSoft BPM software. "The data that you want to perform business intelligence on comes from many sources. It comes from ERP, internal, external sources, it comes from things that were done bottoms-up in an Excel type analysis. Being able to pull that all together into a horizontal platform that is very simple to use and yet has all of this data - it makes a very big difference. Microsoft has had a lot of customers take PNMSoft Sequence into their Oracle environment."
Gates continued: "They have done a great job on fast deployment, so after 3 months working with a global telco company they were able to connect up over 30 processes inside this company being used by over 15,000 employees. And these processes without the connection to the ERP from this workflow environment could not have been done without Sequence. It could not have been done by workflow alone or by ERP alone. It was by bringing these processes together that they could be made digital and simple for this large number of employees. PNMSoft Sequence is a great example of how BPM can work."
Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft 33 years ago will now turn his full-time attention to philanthropy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world.
Gates recently spent more than an hour in an open, emotional reminiscence with his friend, business partner and successor, Steve Ballmer.
"My life's work really is about software and working with incredible people," Gates said with tears in his eyes at a gathering on the company's Redmond campus. "And I love working with smart people. I love working with Steve. I love working with all the incredible people here."
Earlier in the week, Gates learned that the company's software development tools business had passed $1 billion in sales for the year.
In the fiscal year that ends last week, Microsoft is expected to have total sales of more than $60 billion. As of last week, Microsoft employed over 91,192 employees worldwide.
Founded in 1996, PNMsoft. develops and markets BPM and workflow software platforms and solutions. Combining innovative process integration with field-proven tools and applications, PNMSoft BPM software offers flexible business - user oriented solutions: from end-user organizations, through horizontal and vertical solutions for various industries, to OEM integration of the platform into software products.
PNMsoft, which has been growing at over 500 percent in the last 5 years, specializes in the establishment of dynamic web-based applications that operate as logistic nerve centers and provide tools for improving organizational business processes. The company’s main product, Sequence, is used to build, run, and manage Workflow and BPM applications in a web environment.
PNMSoft BPM Software integrates with several hardware and software giants including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, EMC, Symantec and Intel."
In recognition of its innovative technology and solutions, Microsoft has accepted PNMsoft as a Gold Certified Partner and participant in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Microsoft Technologies. PNMsoft is a Microsoft Information Worker (IW) Solutions Partner and has a .NET-certified product that seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft Office system and BizTalk. PNMsoft is a member of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance which consists of only 10 members worldwide.
PNMsoft has vertical expertise and an abundance of experience and customers in industries including: defense, telecom, local government, high tech, manufacturing and financial services. Among horizontal applications used are Sarbanes Oxley (SOX).
The company's headquarters which is located in the United Kingdom are dedicated to the company's business developments and partnership ventures, while the R&D offices are located in Israel.
PNMsoft is working in West Europe, the UK, Israel, Canada and the United States. In the last few months PNMsoft and its business partners have closed deals in various locations including South Africa, Japan, India, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium and Australia.
It was recently published that the Goldman Investment Group, by one of its funds Goldrock Capital, has invested in PNMsoft over 3.3 million dollars. The same group has built a giant company such as SAGE which is listed in the London Stock Exchange, one of Europe's largest software companies with a market cap of over 5 billion dollars.
PNMsoft has helped Homegroup PLC, UK leading providers of affordable and supported housing for people in the UK, to automate its critical business processes and drive efficiency.
PNMsoft BPM Software covers the full cycle of Business Process Management, from modeling and exploring process, through simulation, build, execution, integration and monitoring with the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), optimization.
Combining innovative process integration with field-proven tools and applications, PNMsoft Business Management software offers flexible business-user oriented solutions: from end-user organizations, through horizontal and vertical solutions for various industries, to VARs and OEMs.
PNMsoft is sponsoring and show casing its solutions in computer and business related trade shows such as the last Microsoft World Partners Conference (WPC) and Gartner's BPM Summit in London, England.
PNMsoft offers free information and consulting about BPM value. Requests for information about BPM can be submitted via their web site.
The above news content was edited and SEO optimized in Israel for the Internet by the Leyden Communications Group.
Joel Leyden, a native of New York, has practiced international public relations, public affairs, crisis communications, reputation management, Web 2.0 and journalism for 25 years.
As an Internet pioneer in Israel, he co-created Israel's first commercial Website - NetKing in 1995.
In addition, Leyden produced the first Website for an Israeli prime minister, established the first condolence website for assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, created the Israel Defense Forces Website, was the first SEO - search engine optimizer in Israel and serves today as both commercial PR / SEO and publisher of the Israel News Agency, Israel's first on-line news organization.
Joel Leyden, the proud father of three children, is a leading father's and children's rights activist in Israel advocating equal access and reforms in Israel's gender bias family court custody laws and public child welfare departments for children of separated and divorced parents in Israel.
Joel Leyden, who has university degrees in journalism, psychology and mass communications, resides in a suburb north of Tel Aviv, Israel and in New York City.
