CTO Forum: Fuego illuminates crucial BPM ingredients 

Citing ingredients necessary for BPM (business process management), an official at Addison, Texas-based BPM vendor Fuego offered attendees at the InfoWorld CTO Forum conference on Tuesday a glimpse of organizations that have shortened the gap between business processes and execution.

Fuego CEO Mark Theilken stressed that a BPM implementation must be technology- and application-independent as well as not rely on a single individual for its operation. Theilken added that systems must be designed to represent activities in a single process model.

“It’s not just Web services you have to integrate, it’s also desktop services from [Microsoft] Excel and Windows [plus] integrate mainframe services, and you have to turn Web applications into Web services to integrate that as well,” said Theilken.

The Fuego CEO noted that customers must approach BPM by compensating for applications that were not designed to fit into a wide range of environments and do not take into account a pivotal process layer absent from a traditional 3-tier client architecture.

For example, United Surgical Partners, which operates nearly 60 surgical centers it acquired through growth, faced extreme difficulty managing 50 disparate and multiple brands of accounting packages. The health care organization encountered trouble consolidating all the information required for its monthly SEC filings. 

Through Fuego’s BPM offering, United Surgical Partners was able to significantly improve its accuracy and timing for filings as well as move the composite information into its Oracle Financial system.

Accoring to Theilken, NII Holdings, formerly Nextel International, also was in desperate need of a working BPM game plan and offering.  Through its acquisition of seven companies in six different countries, NII Holdings ran into trouble spots concerning order management and service provisioning. 

The company had resorted to “swivel-chairing” between disparate systems to get information synchronized and provisioned between customers. Also, wireless services were not available for as long as five days for customers at times. To solve the billing and service delivery errors, Fuego helped NII Holdings create a solution in Reston, Va., which allowed each location to customize workflow and deploy plug-and-play back-ends to support needed changes.