CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
May 14, 2007
Product News
Lombardi Announces Teamworks 6 BPM Suite
Lombardi®, leader in business process management (BPM) software for Global 2000 companies, announced the availability of Teamworks® 6, the next generation of Lombardi's award-winning BPM Suite. The overarching theme for the Teamworks 6 suite is to deliver extensive horizontal and vertical process collaboration focused on all roles within an organization, and covering the entire process lifecycle.
In addition to the many new business-oriented enhancements and technical functionality introduced in Teamworks 6 Enterprise, Lombardi has also introduced two new complementary products for the Teamworks family that further extend the reach of business process management and promote collaboration - Teamworks for Organization ManagementT, and Teamworks for SharePoint 2007T.
"Business process management is about making everyone in a company more productive," said Phil Gilbert, EVP and CTO at Lombardi. "Some of those people work in defined workflows and applications, but more and more, if companies can define the flow then they can probably automate the process. To continue to succeed, BPM has to move into implementing, measuring and helping organizations to improve their unstructured activities. New collaborative software enables these activities, and now with Teamworks 6 there is a BPM platform that integrates those collaborative activities into higher-level, structured, measurable business processes."
As part of today's Teamworks 6 announcement, Lombardi is hosting two (2) one-hour webinars to highlight important aspects of the technology:
• "Adding Process Management to Microsoft SharePoint," features Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research and Jim Rudden of Lombardi, and is being held on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. CDT. This one-hour webinar is presented in conjunction with Shared Insights, and details how to combine collaboration platforms with better process management to leverage personal productivity into more strategic organizational productivity gains. For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.sharedinsights.com/events/webseminars/overview.aspx?e_id=9DF1CF16EE3E4782BFC23DE556D8BCB1&pcode=FYOTL88. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field.)
• "Building A Business Process Management Roadmap," features Janelle Hill of Gartner and Phil Gilbert of Lombardi, and is being held on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. CDT. This one-hour webinar provides organizations with a concrete set of recommendations for assessing their BPM capabilities, putting a roadmap in place for growing the company's process management maturity and the key BPM technologies to support it. For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.lombardisoftware.com/building-bpm-roadmap.php.
Core Teamworks Innovations
Innovations to Teamworks 6 Enterprise are focused on helping companies dramatically expand the adoption of BPM throughout the organization by increasing collaboration and ease-of-use across all of the product components. For example, Teamworks 6 process development and modeling improvements include support for real-time discussion between business team and process developers, ad-hoc process tasks, advanced task routing rules, business-data auditing, built-in Wiki capabilities allowing process authors to maintain up-to-date process documentation in real-time, and links to on-line product documentation, knowledge base, discussion groups, and "user contributions" from the online Lombardi Community.
Technical enhancements for architects and developers include AJAX support, numerous enhancements to Web Services integration, JSR-168 portlet support, and security, as well as certification for the latest versions of various application servers, databases, Web browsers and Eclipse.
The Teamworks 6 Enterprise OptimizerT has been enhanced to associate SLA's and KPI's to processes as well as group different processes in one analysis set. This allows companies to conduct true cross-process analysis and optimization to learn the answers to difficult process questions such as - "will our call center still be able to meet the agreed upon customer Service Level Agreement (SLA) if we introduce two new product lines next quarter?" Additionally, the unique Shared Model technology in Teamworks 6 Enterprise incorporates the Object Management Group's recently-ratified Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) standard specification to deliver BPM portability and interoperability.
Teamworks 6 Enterprise also provides seamless integration with Teamworks for Office 2003T, as well as Lombardi BlueprintT, the first on-demand collaborative process planning tool that enables companies to map processes, identify problems and prioritize improvement opportunities. Processes created in Blueprint can be published into Teamworks 6 Enterprise and executed instantaneously. Any changes made to process models in the Teamworks Authoring Environment, such as those recommended by the Teamworks Optimizer, are published back to the Blueprint repository for true round-trip integration. This approach allows for rapid, iterative process model development and collaboration between business analysts and process authors.
New Lombardi Products
Teamworks for Organization Management (TFOM), is an add-on component that extends the organization modeling capabilities of Teamworks 6. It delivers an Organization Modeling perspective into the Authoring Environment that allows companies to easily and flexibly define any number of organization structures matching their unique process needs. This is especially useful when modeling "dotted line" relationships in matrix organization structures or informal approval chains. During process execution, TFOM extends the normal task routing capabilities by factoring in the relationships defined in these organizations. Finally, TFOM adds an Organization Analysis view to the Teamworks Optimizer that allows companies to identify which groups having trouble meeting business-defined SLAs across all processes. This provides companies the first ability to gain insight into workforce management across processes, across applications, throughout the enterprise. Teamworks for Organization Management provides the means by which companies can gain additional insights into the productivity increases that business process management offers.
Teamworks now offers seamless integration to Microsoft SharePoint via Teamworks for SharePoint 2007. Workgroups are increasingly using Microsoft SharePoint to set up team sites, discussion groups and document repositories. However, these collaboration forums rarely have a notion of process - the steps that came before the forum discussion, the information required downstream, or the overall performance of the process supported by the forum. Teamworks for SharePoint 2007 provides built in support for ad-hoc collaboration activities by creating shared workspaces and discussion forums in SharePoint at any point in a Teamworks process, ensuring that the business process context and visibility remains intact. Thus people can continue to collaborate on work activities in a free form manner, and Teamworks for SharePoint tracks all of these activities as part of an overall process.
"Customers place their trust in Lombardi because our software and people deliver the confidence they need to become - and remain - process-driven," said Rod Favaron, Lombardi president and CEO. "Teamworks 6 is another innovative leap forward that is designed to help companies around the world to close the gap between their business strategy and execution results."
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