Fuego Software Aims To Streamline Business Process Management

"BPM as a discipline got lost after the rage of re-engineering in the 1990s," said Gordon Sellers, vice president of marketing at Fuego, one of the BPM companies hoping to grow its channel presence.

While business process re-engineering was about throwing out all the processes,good and bad,that a company had amassed running its day-to-day operations, "BPM is about managing your business with processes," Sellers said. "It may be the current process you have, or it might be something new."

Four-year-old Fuego, whose products help a company assess and enhance its practices, "does not want to become a systems integrator or a consulting company," Sellers said. "Most of our implementations are done with SI partners [such as] smaller boutique companies with expertise in an industry."

In addition to those partners, Fuego, based here, also works with BearingPoint and Deloitte and Touche, which has used Fuego's BPM solution internationally.

Fuego's software comes in flavors optimized for the telecommunications, insurance, health-care, banking and other vertical industries. At Polygon Consulting, a Portland, Ore.-based solution provider, clients in the insurance and financial services businesses make up the lion's share of the firm's portfolio, said Jack Fuson, vice president of business development.

"We help people capture their processes and identify their disconnects," Fuson said, such as inefficiencies in the steps an insurance company takes to process a claim. For example, an insurance underwriter might "toggle back and forth among 10 different screens because the underwriting process means he has to access different databases and applications," he said. By streamlining this process, Fuego's technology can help the underwriter process more claims, which in turn could generate more revenue for the insurance company, Fuson said.

Fuego's technology lets a client start with one small process and "allow it to drive whatever code is needed," Fuson said.

Business should dictate how the technology works, not the other way around, Fuson said. "I never met a client that said, 'We're going to invest a million dollars in this technology just because it's cool.' "