Lombardi&s New BPM Suite Is All About TeamWorks

Few business process management (BPM) vendors can prove that their suites are cohesive enough to implement complex business processes in three- to four-month cycles. Enter Lombardi Software, which offers a highly integrated BPM strategy wrapped into one suite called TeamWorks.

Lombardi has taken a bold step by deploying TeamWorks 5.5 on Eclipse. The benefit of Eclipse is that it provides a unified framework for all of TeamWorks& tools. BPM works best whenever two or more business systems cannot reconcile data by programming alone. As a result, part of TeamWorks& unified architecture arrives with several process and service tools that share the same repository, allowing team members to implement processes from different perspectives within Eclipse.

TeamWorks& unified model is data-driven and uses property files to configure any activity. Because every step shares data from the same source, developers can easily find ways to optimize processes. The unified data model allows business analysts to track how processes execute and to pinpoint inefficiencies beyond what is readily apparent and viewable. For instance, TeamWorks& Coach Designer allows business analysts and developers to collaborate on forms by providing a graphical drag and drop and a detailed XML view. Through Coach Designer, team members will be immediately aware of each other&s work.

The data-driven model allows TeamWorks to use a Playback method. When collaborating, team members can sit together and view how each step executes and determine any new changes. During these sessions, TeamWorks& Process Inspector allows mixed teams of technical and business users to validate each step of a process based on their expertise. In addition, TeamWorks& new portal arrives with many collaboration features that allow users to view and execute tasks, including help requests and discussion threads.

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BPM represents a new way of working for many companies. Due to the high level of integration skills needed among team members, project managers must address training and the importance of communication during the requirements-gathering phase.

Lombardi provides a set of best practices that help customers build processes and share resources among business analysts, designers, developers and project managers. As part of its best practices, Lombardi suggests that end users participate in the development process. Lombardi developed a strategy in TeamWorks in which teams work in two- to three-week cycles. After each cycle, team members share their work-in-progress design, code or user interface with the rest of the team and with end users. This process guarantees a higher project success rate because it includes end users at each development phase.

The iterative development strategy is extended to each process version, following an eight- to 12-week cycle. This strategy establishes a rhythm that creates stability for all BPM projects.

Out of the box, TeamWorks arrives with a large set of performance reports that provide insight into processes and team performance. The reports also look at past performance and use that to gauge risk analysis on current performance.

Lombardi partners with systems integrators at the national and regional levels to support and teach customers how to use the suite. The company has a certification program for systems integrators that covers the entire TeamWorks implementation life cycle—from technical skills all the way up to full-scale project management.

Lombardi&s sales support is also quite extensive. The company runs Webinars and offers joint sales training as well as rebranding for some integrators that want to embed TeamWorks. These integrators often sell business applications built on top of TeamWorks that unify businesses& processes from multiple legacy applications or bridge entire business systems. TeamWorks is priced at $300,000 for a two-CPU license.