BPM Keeps Pace With Business Changes

Walk into one of the Athletes? Performance fitness centersscattered around the country, and you?ll find that each computer-controlledpiece of exercise equipment has been updated with the specific settings andinstructions for each regular client. Enabling its highly skilled trainers totailor personal workout plans for a large number of customers allowed the chainto quickly scale its expert-driven business model and rapidly expand thebusiness.

In the past, the company?known for training some of theworld?s top athletes, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, Olympic teams, NFLplayers, and the German soccer team?relied on its expert  staff to apply its steady flow of researchfindings in fields such as nutrition, metabolism and neuro-science. But managementwas ready to take its sophisticated approach to fitness directly to theconsumer with a network of consumer training facilities called CorePerformance.

To achieve that goal, Athletes? Performance had to automatethe process used to adopt rules so that it could deliver its services at aconsumer-friendly price. One thing stood in the way: The company needed asimpler way to distributethe rule set that guided its customized training regimens.

Backed by an open-source IT environment, Athletes? Performancelooked at Drools, but eventually chose the rule-management system sold by ILOG(later acquired by IBM) because of its speed and flexibility. By fall 2008,Athletes? Performance had put an implementation of the renamed IBM WebSphereILOG JRules into production with about 23,000 rules, according to CTO JonZerden.

Using ILOG as it would a business process management (BPM)system, the company was able to change everything about how it incorporatedbusiness rules?from shedding its reliance on Excel spreadsheets and theknowledge in its trainers? heads to slashing the amount of time it takes tocomplete research studies and change its rule set.

Most importantly, Athletes? Performance could instantlydeploy rules to all its facilities, with its computerized workout equipmentautomatically adjusting settings for each client and providing specificinstructions to trainers. That, in turn, allowed the firm to scale its businessto service consumers much more cost-effectively than it could its elite athleteclients. While up to 14 of the company?s specialists work with any givenprofessional athlete, each trainer at the Core Performance facilities can workwith up to 16 consumer clients at a time.

?We?ve used the technology to automate the rules and bringspeed and consistency to the methodology,? says Zerden. ?BPM has allowed us toadjust the rules in a much more granular and expeditious way as the marketevolves?and to do it at a much more palatable price point.?

 

BPM Market Is Growing

Such stories are the reason BPM technology is on the rise.In a July 2011 report, Wintergreen Research predicted that the BPM market,which it pegged at $2.3 billion in 2010, will grow to $5.5 billion by 2017.Clay Richardson, senior analyst at Forrester Research, predicts that the marketfor BPM software?which is typically Web-based, with integration into back-endsystems?will exceed $3 billion this year, with large companies investing asmuch as $15 million in a BPM solution.

?Companies using BPM technology can analyze business processesand identify opportunities to become more efficient, more cost-effective andmore profitable,? says Richardson.

Unfortunately, many companies don?t realize that they needBPM. Richardson points out, for instance, that a company may not know that twoseparate groups are managing identical processes in very different ways. Thatsituation, if addressed, can yield cost reductions of as much as 20 percent.

Consider Liquid Controls, which wasn?t looking to head downthe BPM path in 2004 when it set out to address a simple problem. The maker ofliquid-flow meters and measurement equipment, based in Lake Bluff, Ill., neededto get a handle on the hundreds of documents detailing how it builds itsproducts?all of which were stored as an unwieldy collection of paper files.That made it tough to keep track of the constant changes to those instructions.

After deploying a Web-based workflow tool with documentmanagement capabilities from iMarkup (since renamed BP Logix), the company wasable to speed up product assembly and simplify the internal auditing process.