Vendor Rating Updates: Process ERP, CRM, and Financials

Newly published TEC ratings are available for a number of software vendors. Individual reports are available for purchase, or you can review the ratings in-depth using the evaluation centers. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Take note if you’re in the process of evaluating any of the following systems.

* enterprise resource planning (ERP) for process manufacturing industries
* customer relationship management (CRM)
* enterprise financial software

Our public data on the BatchMaster ERP system is now up-to-date as of version 8.10, which targets medium enterprises in pharmaceutical, chemical, paint, food and beverage industries.

Version 2.0 of Vertical Marketing’s crmEZ.net covers a range of features, in particular account and contact management and opportunity management.

Following up on the financial system updates from last week, we have two more updates, this time from Infor. Our financial system knowledge base now holds the latest data on both Infor Masterpiece (previously SSA Global) and FMS SunSystems eXFM products (previously Systems Union).

Talent (Human Capital) Management and Sports? Sign Me Up, Please! – Part 2

Part 1 of this blog post introduced some mixed feelings and doubts that we might still have about the noble concepts of talent management and human capital management (HCM). This skepticism lingers in spite of the many indicators of the usefulness of these concepts in mitigating some imminent global workforce challenges, which were outlined in Part 1.

Accommodating “Generation Y”

Let us not forget about the looming demographic shifts, given that the baby boomers are on their way out. One group that has been receiving a lot of attention is the so-called Generation Y: the group mostly in their 20s that has recently entered or is about to enter the workforce. These dudes and dudettes haven’t just adopted the use of the Internet – they have grown up with it, and they rely (live and breathe) on it.

A key characteristic of basically all Gen Y candidates today (which might belong to earlier generations, like the Gen X) is that they are keen consumers of Internet technology. They are accustomed to using websites such as Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, Ask, LinkedIn, Twitter, Travelocity, and eBay (to name but a few), often on a daily basis, to buy what they want, go where they want, stay in touch with their friends and family, get their work done, and do it all and more with ease.

So, when it comes to looking for a job, they transfer their job-seeking experience to the corporate brand, and they draw on their consumer web experiences to set their expectations for their online job seeking experience. There are a number of characteristics associated with a technologically savvy generation of job seekers. These characteristics include:

* The ability to do job hunting, in a 24×7x365 manner;
* Expectations of instantaneous responses coupled with a short attention span (”That was so yesterday!”);
* Desire for immediate feedback and rapid results (“Dude, where is my offer/promotion?”);
* Demands for flexibility (often to be able to work in pajamas and sleepers, or at least to bring their pet iguanas to work);
* Assumed free exchange of information/access to more information for decisions (e.g., “A mate just sent another job opportunity via Facebook to my iPhone.”);
* Tendency to migrate towards better opportunity and growth (vs. loyalty); and
* The attitude to move back with parents and volunteer for a “higher cause” than to work for a jerk.

It is thus small wonder that recruiters are increasingly use LinkedIn and Facebook in their efforts, while talent management software providers begin to offer the integration to these social networking sites as a matter of course.

Talent Management and HCM Defined (Sort of)

The phenomena and factors outlined both here and in Part 1, coupled with every company’s need to align people directly with corporate goals, are forcing human resource (HR) departments to evolve from policy creation, cost reduction, process efficiency, and risk management (i.e., all those “paper and pencil pushing”) tasks to driving a new talent growing mindset in the organization. One important distinction is the evolution of the difference between tactical and administrative HR and strategic talent and human capital management.

In a nutshell, transactional HR activities are administrative overhead, whereas talent management is a continuous process that should deliver the optimal workforce for the company’s business. In this new model, instead of being the owners of mundane processes, forms, and compliance, the HR staff should transform into the strategic enablers of talent management processes that empower managers and employees while creating business value.

First of all, there is confusion about whether HCM and talent management are the same thing, or perhaps one area is bigger and broader than the other. I, for one, personally tend to believe that HCM is the broader concept that includes both the administrative HR & payroll functions and talent management as the strategic component. However, as it typically happens in this industry, the talent management’s scope of applications (that are needed to support HCM processes designed to manage a company’s greatest asset, i.e., people) is defined differently by industry analysts and consultants.

Still, most define talent management to include the following: recruitment, performance management, competency management, succession management, career development, and incentive and compensation management (ICM). Other talent management modules can include: workforce planning, learning management systems(LMS), as well as workforce analytics, portals, and dashboards.

Talent Management Software Examples

As an illustrative example, Taleo’s on-demand talent management applications suite currently comprises solutions for companies to assess (including workforce planning and analytics), acquire (i.e., source, select, and onboard), develop (i.e., manage performance, manage career, and plan succession), and align their workforce for improved business performance (via goals management, internal mobility, and reporting).

As another example, the Authoria Talent Management suite is also an integrated, on-demand solution that addresses the strategic talent management lifecycle, from hiring through compensation, performance, benefits communication, and succession planning. Also, by delivering role-based dashboards with analytics and workflow tools, the vendor aims to help managers improve business performance through better people performance. Authoria’s “plan-attract-review-reward-develop wheel” of applications involves the following modules:

* Authoria Recruiting drives the hiring of top talent;
* Authoria Performance aligns employee actions to company goals and captures performance against competencies. Managers are given coaching in-context to ensure standardized, best practice performance appraisals. Besides coaching, the competency support enriches the entire talent management lifecycle;
* Authoria Compensation comprises Authoria Incentive, which automates incentive compensation, and Authoria Salary, which improves accuracy, auditability and cycle times of compensation management; and
* Authoria Development & Succession leverages performance data to identify and develop top talent.

Let me for example flesh out the succession planning and employee-development module capabilities that allow line-of-business (LoB) managers and human resource (HR) professionals to assess bench strength, and fill critical roles with high-potential, top-performing employees. This latest functionality, which Authoria showcasing at the recent HR Technology Conference & Exposition, empowers LoB managers and HR professionals with:

* Talent Pools – Whereby employees with high-leadership potential can be identified for critical roles, since managers and HR professionals have access to performance, education, work history, and other relevant information on potential successors;
* Succession Slates – Can be developed and maintained to readily identify high-potential employees to fill key roles;
* Succession Organization Chart – The availability and readiness of successors to key positions can be viewed directly from actionable org charts; and
* Bench Strength, Bench Health, Diversity, and Utilization Analytics – So that managers and HR professionals can view the slate of potential successors, and evaluate the readiness and flight risk of those people.

As the underlying technologies, Authoria’s role-based dashboards allow managers and employees to access reports and track workflow. The dashboards serve as a common starting point for a consistent and integrated approach to all aspects of talent management. Finally, Authoria Communications, the company’s original product, provides personalized benefits and policy communications to employees, with the idea of reducing costs and improving value.

Similar definitions and portfolios of talent management applications would come from Halogen Software, Kenexa, Lawson Software, SucessFactors, Oracle PeopleSoft HCM, Ramco Systems, Softscape, Workscape, Kronos, and so on. In the recently unveiled “Integrated Talent Management Practices Study” by IBM Global Services and the Human Capital Institute (HCI), the survey was based on the following six talent management dimensions:

1. Develop Strategy — Establishing the optimal long-term strategy for attracting, developing, connecting and deploying the workforce;
2. Attract and Retain — Sourcing, recruiting and holding onto the appropriate skills and capabilities according to business needs;
3. Motivate and Develop — Ensuring that people’s capabilities are understood and developed to match business requirements, while also meeting people’s needs for motivation, development and job satisfaction;
4. Deploy and Manage — Providing effective resource deployment, scheduling and work management that matches skills and experience with organizational needs;
5. Connect and Enable — Identifying individuals with relevant skills, collaborating and sharing knowledge, and working effectively in virtual setting; and
6. Transform and Sustain — Achieving clear, measurable and sustainable change within the organization, while maintaining the day-to-day continuity of operations.

Finally, there are the HCM and talent management definitions from Wikipedia.

Part 3 of this blog post will analyze how integrated talent management suite can help HR departments that are currently in distress, and finally explain my buying into the talent management concept via some major league sports examples. In the meantime, please feel free send me your comments, opinions, etc. I would certainly be interested in your personal work experiences as an employee or employers, as well as with leveraging this emerging software category per se.

The Wizardry of Business Process Management – Part 3

Part 1 of this blog series provided a lengthy discussion about business process management’s (BPM’s) necessary parts and parcels, and the software category’s value proposition. At the end of the article, I mentioned my recent attendance of a witty presentation that attempted to explain the essence of BPM via some humor and metaphor of the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Namely, on March 23, 2009, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems’ founder and CEO, gave his luncheon keynote presentation at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego. His theme was “Don’t just Survive… Capitalize.” Trefler begun by reminding the audience that in today’s turbulent economy we are all “not in Kansas anymore” and may just need some “ruby slippers” to find our way back home to profitability. If you have 14 minutes to spare, you can re-capture the spirit of the event here.

In the main part of his presentation in Part 2, Trefler maintained that to follow the “Yellow Brick Road,” which will lead any business to Oz (and back to profitability), requires three capabilities in particular, starting with the ability to directly capture business objectives into the BPM system by the business users.It cannot be overemphasized how important it is for business users to be able to capture corporate objectives directly into the software technology so that these new objectives can immediately impact their customers, partners, and employees. The ability to easily record, erase, revise, and organize business rule changes creates the foundation for organizational agility. Letting organizations design for both planned and (even more importantly) unplanned business changes is of paramount importance.

It’s About (the “Six Rs” of) Automation, After All

Companies have to optimize their processes through technology that automatically integrates new objectives into their systems to adjust for every specific situation. They need a “brain” that ensures that processes and decisions are optimized per these new objectives in both mainstream and exceptional situations.

The idea is to get the initial process quickly and iterate later. Business users can do it one customer issue at the time, starting with any business process that needs improvement: e.g., open a new account, charge dispute, detect fraud, increase credit line, handle a missed payment, and so on.

As said in Part 2, Pegasystems (also known as Pega) users can use the familiar Microsoft Visio diagramming tool to visually create (model) the processes that will deliver better customer service. There are many pre-built solution frameworks with industry best practices to get them jump-started if necessary.

But the second brick in the Yellow Brick Road is the ability of the technology to automate all necessary computer programming. Namely, business people can draw nice pictures and diagrams to capture objectives, but if between that model of what you want and ultimately running your business you need to do lots of tedious Java or C++ programming, you cannot be agile and nimble enough. To that technical end, the model that business users create should actually automate the programming that makes the business process run.

The final brick in the Yellow Brick Road of BPM is the automation of business processes that then “drives the work to be done” by, well, automating the actual work. In other words, the work is not merely tracked or routed for human intervention, but is also completed with the power of smart automation and minimal manual effort.

Nirvana would be to ultimately automate the work for people, who then only add value as required. Although the human touch is always needed, the point of business process automation (BPA) is to eliminate any distractions.

Again stepping out of Trefler’s presentation’s narrow scope, let me try to explain here how Pega’s SmartBPM suite really turns work automation into a tool for business changes on the fly. Let’s explore the “Six Rs” of driving work to be done via Pega’s BPM technology.

As the first “R,” the BPM product makes it easy for users to receive the work that needs processing. SmartBPM has a broad ability to receive input out-of-the-box from virtually any conceivable channel.

To that end, flexible, self-expanding extensible markup language (XML)-based data structures make it easy to capture whatever data, attachments, images, or other content may be appropriate, so that users can always have the right information at hand. Web services, e-mail notifications, and so on are all treated through a common software architecture, to ensure that processes designed for one particular channel can be leveraged in a multi-channel environment.

The second “R” stands for route. To that end, rules ensure optimal work management for either people or systems by organizing related work into Cases and Folders, thus prioritizing and managing them. The duplicate checking ability prevents redundancy, while skills-based routing (SBR) optimizes work assignments.

For the third “R” of automation, report, the system offers over 100 standard reports, plus an open database to integrate with other customer information and enterprise reporting systems. Canned reporting capabilities can even be extended to include real-time business activity monitoring (BAM). For instance, built-in Service Level Agreement (SLA) management and statistical sampling provide management impacts in real time.

Customers use these capabilities to coordinate and control key business functions. For example, National Australian Bank (NAB) uses SmartBPM to control the receipt, prioritization, and execution of billions of dollars of high value payments, ensuring that every wire transfer request is handled according to the best practice.

The Exceeding “Three Rs” of BPA

But these are just the basic three “Rs” of BPA, something like the reading, writing, and arithmetic abilities in elementary school. They are the basis of what was originally called workflow automation that represents the procedural side of the world.

These days, competitive organizations need much more than the basics. To that end, PegaRULES Process Commander, a thin-client collaborative environment for both business users and IT departments, brings the further benefits and the power of automation with the additional three “Rs” that make the procedures even smarter.

Thus, the fourth “R” stands for research: the ability to dynamically get the data needed to automate work when and as needed, and use the best sources. Retrieving data if and only if it is needed saves resources and money. In addition, the system saves users’ time by only asking relevant questions and making it easy to dynamically insert alternative data sources.

Then comes the “R” for respond: the ability to reduce effort and provide service by ensuring that interactions with people are “smart.” For example, users are able to alter the forms and fields of the hypertext markup language (HTML) screens based on the rules and the situation. In addition, companies are able to notify partners, customers, and other relevant parties effectively and appropriately, and even have them directly participate in the completion of the work over the Web.

Last but not least, the sixth “R” stands for resolve: the ability to drive work through to completion with the power of an inference engine. In other words, it is the ability to fully automate work where possible and guide users if and when user involvement is needed.

The “Six Rs” of Automation in Action

Pega’s customers use these BPA capabilities to weave policies and other declarative rules into their procedures. As an illustration, let’s see how the “Six Rs” would work at an insurance call center:

1. Receive – A New York customer wants to add boat coverage to his homeowners and auto insurance plan. He or she goes to the online portal, gets partially through, but has questions about what happens if he or she moors in Maine in the summer, but brings the boat back for storage in New York in winter. He or she picks up the phone, switching from the Web to the phone channel.
2. Research – In the background, the system pre-determines that the local insurance agent is not skilled enough to write the policy for a boat moored in Maine, calculate the right policy for a commission sharing (and potential discounts), and up-sell.
3. Route – Thus, the customer profile triggers an SBR to a preferred customers queue in the call center. The right customer service representative (CSR) quickly asks a few relevant questions (e.g., near-shore or offshore sailing?) and recommends an additional multi-line coverage umbrella.
4. Resolve – The customer receives a quote to his liking and the change in policy is resolved by underwriting and a system-driven straight-through processing (STP) to be bound.
5. Respond – The customer gets an automatically generated confirmation e-mail with a print snail mail follow-up and confirmation of the change of policy and debit acknowledgement.
6. Report – The activity is monitored for ongoing process improvements and optimization via productivity and quality alerts.

The benefits of such intent-driven user experience are that it eliminates the CSR’s guesswork, since the system analyzes information on the customer history, coverage, value, prior interactions, etc., as well as the insurance provider’s business goals to determine the best course of action. Furthermore, CSRs benefit from improved effectiveness and efficiency, since the SmartBPM suite guides the agent through the interaction process and delivers the appropriate scripts, process steps, and customer information exactly when needed. In addition, Pega dynamically alters the agent experience to accommodate multiple roles (e.g., sales vs. service) and locations.

The Wizardry of Closing Execution Gaps

Going back to Alan Trefler’s luncheon presentation, in summary, he concluded that it takes the following: corporate courage (not to flinch in these times, but to instead try to see what can be done), a BPM brain (to capture the business intent), and a heart (a service oriented architecture [SOA]-based infrastructure). This creative cinematic BPM metaphor did not come out of thin air, since the presentation took place exactly on the 70th anniversary of the great “Wizard of Oz” movie.

Another salient point in Trefler’s creative speech was that the market for BPM software is driven by competitive businesses that seek to close the execution gaps that may exist between their business objectives and their actual business processes. Pega’s target customers are large, industry-leading service organizations faced with managing transaction-intensive, complex and changing processes that seek the agility needed for growth, productivity, and regulatory compliance.

Financial services organizations require software to improve the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of customer interactions and transactions processing. Pega’s customer process management and exceptions management products allow its financial service customers to be more responsive to changing business requirements. Representative Pega’s financial services customers include Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, HSBC Group Holdings, JPMorgan Chase & Co., National Australian Bank (NAB), and TD Bank Financial Group.

Pega’s financial industry knowledge and experience has resulted in solutions to help these customers close execution gaps and improve the following processes:

* In Bank Card Operations: Multi-channel service; Self-service account opening; Product roll-out; Fraud processing; Customer on-boarding, etc.
* In Retail Banking: Event-driven marketing; Account opening; New product introduction; Service case management; Specialized fulfillment, etc.
* In Wholesale Banking (e.g., wire transfers and treasury management): Proactive service monitoring; Account servicing; New product introduction; Compliance trade monitoring; Exception management, etc.

For their part, healthcare organizations seek products that integrate their front-office and back-office initiatives and help drive customer service, efficiency, and productivity. Representative Pega’s healthcare customers include: Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Group Health Cooperative, HealthNow New York, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals (Kaiser Permanente), and Wellpoint.

Pega’s healthcare industry involvement has resulted in solutions to help these customers close execution gaps and improve the following processes: Automated Underwriting; Sales Renewals; Appeals & Grievances; Consumer Directed Healthcare (CDHC) offerings; Facilitation; Authorization Management; Small- and Large-Plan Enrollment and Servicing; Disease/Care Management, and so on.

Insurance companies, whether competing globally or nationally for customers and channels, need software to automate the key activities of policy/contract rating, quoting, customization, underwriting, and servicing as well as products that improve customer service and the overall customer experience. Representative Pega insurance industry customers include: American National Insurance Company, former American International Group (AIG) that recently changed name into American International Underwriters (AIU), John Hancock, Farmers Insurance Group, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, and The Prudential Insurance Company of America. Pega’s insurance industry knowledge and experience has resulted in solutions to help these customers close gaps and improve the following processes: automated underwriting; event-driven marketing; product cloning; claims management; legacy transformation, etc.

A CRM Provider Too?

While its customers are typically large companies in the financial services, healthcare and insurance markets, with SmartBPM Suite, Pega is also able to offer solutions to a broader range of companies and industries, such as telecommunications, government, life sciences, manufacturing, and travel services. Marquee customers here include Amgen, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), General Electric Company (GE), Ford Motor Company, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, and The ServiceMaster Company.

All of the abovementioned companies are largely concerned about their customer service levels. Pega’s customer interaction know-how has also resulted in solutions to close gaps and improve the following processes: Customer retention and cross-selling; Specialized fulfillment; New hire training; Post-order clean-up; Objection handling; Reducing on-call time, Product warranty and servicing management, and so on.

In fact, Pega is also regarded as a customer relationship management (CRM) provider. ZDNet’s 2007 blog post mentioned Pega within a Forrester’s CRM Wave research document. Pega does acknowledge the competition from CRM application vendors including Chordiant Software, Microsoft Dynamics CRM by Microsoft, Siebel by Oracle; Pivotal CRM by CDC Software, and Consona CRM to name but a few.

There is also competition coming from companies that provide application specific software for the financial services, healthcare, insurance, and other specific markets such as Norkom Technologies, SmartStream Technologies, SunGard, The TriZetto Group, Oracle’s solutions for financial services, Misys, etc. An interesting nugget of information is that Pega used to be a Salesforce.com on-demand CRM customer. The vendor recently made a decision to replace Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition with its own CRM system, in an “drink your own champagne” manner.

Part 4 of this blog series will provide more of Pegasystems’ value proposition and BPM secret sauce. In the meantime, your comments, thoughts, suggestions or individual experiences with BPM solutions are more than welcome. If you are SmartBPM user, I would appreciate you sharing your experiences with the product and the company.

IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Evaluation Center

What is IT Infrastructure Outsourcing?

IT infrastructure outsourcing is the practice of one company contracting another to perform services and tasks related to the organization's IT infrastructure and operations. The organization may choose to outsource one or more specific projects, or may simply decide to supplement the capacity of its existing IT department. IT infrastructure outsourcers can be responsible for some or all of an organization's hardware and software components, including data communications, telecommunications, firewalls, mainframe computers, desktop and laptop PCs, handheld devices, printers, operating systems, and e-mail management. A number of activities can typically be included in IT infrastructure outsourcing: physical facilities setup and maintenance; site and system security; data storage, backup and recovery management; hardware or software procurement; help desk support; and desktop “break-fix” and repair. The provider's aim with all offerings is to take proactive measures and perform corrective actions to maximize the uptime and availability of an organization's IT infrastructure.

Outsourcing IT Infrastructure Business Benefits and Drivers

By outsourcing IT infrastructure, organizations stand to gain various business benefits: reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including lower technical administration costs, lower help desk costs, lower implementation costs, and less loss of profit due to IT infrastructure downtime greater transparency of task processes: thanks to service level agreements (SLAs), each party can be completely clear as to what it is responsible for doing, resulting in greater satisfaction for both the organization and its clients 24-7 management of desktop functionality upgrade and expansion of existing local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs) the ability to design, plan, implement, and install new networks, including required security features more accurate budget planning, as many hosted IT services are subscription-based and can be paid for monthly more secure, reliable, and scalable web sites through an outsourcer’s Web hosting capabilities

IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Risks

You should be vigilant in ensuring that outsourcing providers are capable of meeting regulatory compliance requirements such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), or Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (TUPE) in the UK. You must ensure that outsourcing providers maintain adequate data security policies and practices, or else risk loss of sensitive data. Without the industry-specific expertise of IT outsourcers, an organization runs the risk of performing its own activities or services inconsistently, leading to customer dissatisfaction and loss of profits.

Why Use the Outsourcing IT Infrastructure Evaluation Center?

Get access to information that will help you receive more accurate request for proposal (RFP) responses from IT infrastructure service outsourcing providers. Make sure you shortlist IT infrastructure outsourcers that can provide you with scalable solutions that adapt not only to your organization’s changing needs, but also to changes in the technology landscape. Identify which IT infrastructure outsourcers can help you reduce the risks associated with your current infrastructure, and assist in creating a working strategy for mitigating future risk. Compare outsourcing companies that provide disaster recovery and security services and functionalities. Reduce the risk of choosing an IT infrastructure service provider that cannot provide the network or communications services your organization requires.