Although Microsoft SharePoint includes some basic workflow functionality out-of-the-box, as well as development tools for developing more advanced workflows, it is often not the best business process management (BPM) solution to manage, monitor and optimise workflows and business processes.

In fact, organisations that selected SharePoint for its collaboration, file sharing and publishing capabilities are now looking for an BPM alternative for automating and monitoring anything beyond the most basic workflow scenarios.

The SharePoint eForm and workflow tools available to non-developers can work for very basic requirements for inward-facing processes or where customisation is not required but once you need to handle the many complications that exist in day-to-day business activities, SharePoint requires development skills.

These skills are beyond most business users and it soon becomes apparent that if an investment in developers, project managers and infrastructure to support SharePoint development is going to be made, SharePoint alone is rarely sufficient to justify this cost. This is why there are many products available that describe themselves as SharePoint add-ons.

Available on-premise or in the Cloud, Process Director was selected from more than 600 products and hundreds of vendors.

The list of winners, now in its 14th year, will be published in the September issue of KMWorld, a leading publisher and conference organiser in the fields of knowledge management, content management and document management.

We are thrilled to see Process Director highlighted as a trend setting product. It reaffirms our choice of partner and offers well-deserved recognition of their unique product offering, exceptional flexibility and dynamic approach to implementing new technologies and functionality

Alan Ingram, Technical Director, ePC

Process Director is the workflow software behind systems for FTSE listed companies including Rentokil Initial and Millennium Hotels.

According to Gartner, there are a couple of significant changes in the 2016 Magic Quadrant iBPMS category when compared to 2015.

First, there is an increasing focus on using an iBPMS to address more complex work styles that may be less structured or unstructured and require interaction with a wide variety of structured and unstructured content types. iBPMSs have evolved a varying degree of case management solutions — enabling organisations to improve outcomes from a wider variety of process styles. Second, in order to adapt to changing business needs more quickly, there is an even greater focus on making the technologies easier to use so that the citizen developer (business users and business analysts rather than software developers) can author solutions with minimal involvement from IT.

Being recognised by Gartner and added to the Magic Quadrant in 2015 was a great achievement for BP Logix and Process Director. Moving further up and to the right of the quadrant for the second year endorses the progress BP Logix have made with the product and how it continues to fulfil more and more current business requirements

Alan Ingram, Technical Director, ePC

While few dispute the need for workflow, it usually requires seeing the workflow planned out before people spot and tackle what are minor discussion points at the planning stage, but would be business show-stoppers during production.

Developing your workflow has challenges; it’s like planning the world’s largest reception and taking into consideration every plate, glass, napkin, hors d’oeuvres, beverage and the thousands of other details that must be coordinated beforehand. Planning the reception mandates viewing the event holistically yet acting with singular precision.

According to the report, the iBPMS market is the natural evolution of the earlier BPMS market, adding more emphasis on support for greater system and human intelligence within business processes. Capabilities such as “what if” process simulation, optimisation and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration, integration with social media, mobile access to processes, more analytics and real-time decision management. An iBPMS orchestrates work to produce business outcomes that go far beyond typical process efficiency and performance measures.

For its 2015 iBPMS Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluated platforms based on their ability to orchestrate increasingly complex work styles.

Gartner noted, BP Logix Process Timeline technology provides the process owner with key insights into the behaviour of each process instance. If, at any point, it determines that any future task—or the process as a whole—is in danger of running late, then Process Director can take action directly, or notify the process owner to intercede manually. Process Timeline is easy to use and flexible. Tasks can be linked dynamically using rules or by identifying predecessors. Ad-hoc and improvisational tasks can be easily added to a process as needed. Additionally, BP Logix Elastic BPM cloud is offered in single-tenant and multi-tenant deployments. The multi-tenant offering provides an attractive entry point for smaller applications, while the single tenant offering supports more robust enterprise requirements.

BP Logix deserve to be recognised by Gartner as they continue to provide great software with real power that is far more dynamic, flexible and cost effective than many of the quadrant long-timers

Alan Ingram, Technical Director, ePC