BPM for Managed Services

The Terms

Managed Services - An umbrella term for third-party monitoring and maintaining of computers, networks and software. The actual equipment may be in-house or at the third-party's facilities, but the "managed" implies an on-going effort; for example, making sure the equipment is running at a certain quality level.

The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to a set of activities which organizations can perform to either optimize their business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs. Through BPM tools, a company can create a workflow for a business process and automate all or most of that process

The Need

Managed Services offer customers instant expert services along with seasoned and tested systems and workers, while the Service providers bring with them their considerable and varied cross-industry experience and expertise. However, the performance and efficiency levels of any Managed Service platform are intricately dependant on the feedback and adaptation abilities of the Service, as well as its human and software applications. Failure to update the provider regarding ongoing new requirements, changing schedules, or new industry standards; miscommunication between the customer's project design team business users and IT teams and the provider's teams regarding new features or modification of existing ones; lack of real-time monitoring and follow-up capabilities – all of these and more can lead to timetable problems, inflated costs, and considerable delays in time-to-market.

In order to avoid these problems and make the most of Managed Services resources, the needs created by the business practice must be addressed: better communication between the customer and the provider, streamlined systems for processing and incorporating changes and requests, real-time monitoring and management capabilities, and the ability to quickly and rapidly integrate know-how and operations between the provider, the customer, and the provider’s team.

A combined BPM solution responds to the needs raised by the utilization of Managed Service resources: facilitating communications between the customer and the provider, providing ongoing real-time information, managing change requests and dynamic requirements, and integrating different teams into a single streamlined system.

The Solution

PNMsoft offers a BPM solution for upgrading and supporting Managed Services and Outsourcing platforms. Based on PNMsoft's flagship product, SEQUENCE, the company present a collaborative platform specifically tailored to respond to the industry's needs and requirements. The platform focuses on the potential "weak links" in the process, and manages all business processes involving:

• The customer
• The Provider's delivery team
• The Provider's R&D

The implementation is based on PNMsoft’s SEQUENCE server: a set of predefined business processes combined with the powerful SEQUENCE studio to enable customization of existing process and creation of new customer-specific processes.

The SEQEUNCE integration layer is tailored to increase the efficiency of the customer/provider association by bridging communication gaps, tracking progress, and seamlessly integrating changing needs and requests into the work process. Utilizing its built-in flexibility and integrative properties, SEQUENCE users can interface with Microsoft's Outlook to send and receive project-related emails and notices, integrate with the Project Server to insure that Gantt updates automatically trigger notes and alerts, and launch and manage numerous automatic work processes – both pre-defined and customized.

Managing customers request and changes, managing promises to customers and insuring they are delivered according on request and on time, implementing new ideas from the market and more - these are just examples of business processes that can be handled by the SEQUENCE platform, leading to an improved and better service and to an improvement of the business results.

BPM Examples

SEQUENCE's integrative BPM platform enables Managed Services customers and providers to automatically generate and integrate:

• Customer complaints & requests
• Change requests
• Document/Proposal approval cycles
• Project planning/changes/approval
• Budget planning/changes/approval
• Contract management
• Customer surveys

Advantages and ROI

PNMsoft's integrative SEQUENCE platform offers Managed Service customers a number of highly-focused advantages:

• Faster Time to Market – the SEQUENCE Managed Services integration layer insures a tighter relationship between customer and provider, based on automatic & efficient processes that enable the customer to respond faster to changing market, business, and organizational needs
• Automatic Process Handling – project business processes are automatically or manually generated, and then automatically dispersed and monitored, ensuring that all project teams are synchronized and no resources are squandered on outdated requirements
• Dynamic Updates – SEQUENCE enables users to update all project participants and systems regarding any changes to the project arising from new industry standards, changing customer needs, or revised requirements.
• Integration with Office Suite – built-in integration with the Office Suite, including MS Project Server, Outlook, MS WORD, InfoPath, and more, enabling both provider and customer teams to work in the same familiar environment
• Real-time monitoring and Data – SEQUENCE offers a set of built-in monitoring and reporting tools, enabling project leaders on both the provider's and customer's teams to remain synchronized and up-to-date

The SEQUENCE integrative Managed Services platform is designed to increase the efficiency of the customer/provider collaboration. The platform enables the customer to rapidly affect changes to the project outline and eliminates the squandering of resources on outdated information and irrelevant requests. The SEQUENCE platform's many features and capabilities are all geared towards one main advantage for the Managed Service customer: Increased ROI, and considerable saving on both manpower and man-hour resources.

For more about BPM for Managed Services, contact us or request our white paper