Finding that perfect system can be tricky with all the different brands and designs. You want to find one that is in your price range, but one that still performs to your standards. Here are a few things to look for when looking for an MFP that will fit your needs:

• One great feature to look for in an MFP is how fast it takes to print. Some of the best printers can print in a matter of seconds. Other printers come with auto-feeders to increase the rate and efficiency of printing.
• There are many different functions an MFP can provide depending on your needs. If you only need to print black and white documents, then a black and white system would work best. If you are copying professional photographs, however, then you are going to want a system that prints color with a high resolution. High resolution is measured by dot per minute, or DPI.
• A standard, high-quality system should have a scanner that is fast and accurate and should print documents that look crisp and vivid. A higher DPI will give you prints that are extremely clear and have near professional grade quality.

Copiers Northwest provides MFP’s and services, along with printer and software solutions, to areas all over Washington and parts of Oregon and Idaho. We provide brand name products so you know that you are getting a quality product. With over 25 years of service, our customers’ satisfaction has always been a priority.

Copying and printing documents is easier when everything is in order and working at its top performance. Having a service provided to you and your business takes a great deal of weight off of your shoulders. Here are a few ways a copier service can simplify your life:

• A service provider usually sells brand name products and provides input on what would best suit your needs. This makes it easy for you so you don’t have to search around for the best solution. They will provide you with a list of products that will work the best for you.
• A service provider can also help when the sysstem needs to be repaired. A technician will come to your business to diagnose and fix the problem, and if the copier needs to be replaced, then they can replace it faster than if you purchased it on your own. Service usually also includes consumable supplies so you will always be in stock.
• A service provider may also include any software that you might need. You can copy a document or image to your computer with one type of software and edit that photo with another type of software. This can help organize your photos and documents. They also have software that allows you to email those files after they have copied over to your computer.

Copiers Northwest has been providing copier services to Seattle and surrounding areas for over 25 years. We can help manage everything from providing you with a copier to copier repair. Our company also provides managed print services, which include multifunctional devices and fax machines. More on that later.

Ever wondered how copy machines became copy machines. Well Ehow.com has produced an article showing how copy machines came about. A small portion of the article is below.

“Although printing has been in existence in one form or another for centuries, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the idea of the photoelectric process for placing images on paper was finally developed. The dry ink model of copy machines revolutionized society, creating a new industry and allowing the world to operate more efficiently and with greater flexibility. The copy machine of the 21st century is a multifunction machine with new capabilities being added indefinitely.”

To read the full article click here.

If you are looking for a great copy machine, then look no further then Copiers Northwest.

Copiers Northwest’s purpose is to provide superior quality multi-function copier, printer and software solutions to businesses and organizations based in the Northwest. For each customer we serve, it is the performance of our products and the commitment of our staff that make the difference.

Why We Are In Business

Copiers Northwest is in business to help our customers become more successful by helping them to produce and manage document workflow. As a large independent dealer that represents the top manufacturers, we can truly provide our customers with “New Ideas and New Solutions”.

Copiers Northwest Corporate Showroom

Custom Solutions From Your Local Business Partner

When you partner with Copiers Northwest for all your office technology products and services, you’ve aligned yourself with a premier, nationally recognized dealership. With programs that far surpass copiers and Multifunction Printers (MFP’s), Copiers Northwest helps manage change, streamline workflow and control document-related expenses. At Copiers Northwest, NEW IDEAS and NEW SOLUTIONS is more than a slogan. Its innovative programs, creative solutions and local people that are dedicated to helping your business be more successful and more profitable.

Copiers Northwest is honored to be able to provide customers products and technologies from the world’s most respected manufacturers ensuring more integrated, cost efficient solutions that truly meet the requirements of your business.

Our extensive product line and digital solutions enable businesses and consumers worldwide to capture, store, and distribute information.

]]> http://copiersnorthwest.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/5-types-of-businesses-that-can-benefit-from-large-format-printers-3/ Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:12:58 +0000 Copiers Northwest http://copiersnorthwest.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/5-types-of-businesses-that-can-benefit-from-large-format-printers-3/

Large format printers are ideal for certain businesses. The printing capabilities of these machines means not having to outsource your printing projects, like renderings, graphs, CAD drawings, banners, and signs. Today, we’re going to talk about 5 types of businesses that can benefit from large format printers.

Sign Companies. A company that prints signs, banners, decals, window clings, and vehicle signage needs a large format printer. Some printers have different options and features that make them perfect for the nuances associated with sign printing.

Construction Companies. Before a building can be constructed, the plans have to be printed. With a large format printer, putting the CAD drawings or other plan renderings one paper is easy, and the result is a neat, professional product.

Photographers. If you are a photographer or own a picture company, you will certainly benefit from having a large format printer. These allow you to get the high resolution and high quality prints you need without sending your work to an off-site photo lab.

Graphics Studios. The same features that make large format printers great for photographers make them essential for graphics studios as well. You can print color and black and white prints, and even if you have a large quantity of prints, the quality will be the same from start to finish.

Art Studios. No art studio is complete without a large format printer. Posters are a breeze with these printers, and the finished product will be ready for framing and display in no time.

At Copiers Northwest, we offer the best in copiers and printers. We also provide copier service and repair and managed print services. Call us at (866) 692-0700 to find out more about our great products and services.

1.Recycled Paper

Many business owners think they have to go to great lengths to find recycled paper, but the truth is you can find it at most local office supply or printing stores. Using recycled paper reduces our reliance on trees and other natural resources and lowers your company’s carbon footprint.

2. Print Business Cards on Reincarnation Matte

Every successful business owner needs business cards in order to network and grow their business. The next time you order a new set of business cards, consider using reincarnation matte. This material is 100 percent recycled and uses 50 percent post-consumer waste.

3. Ask for Soy-Based Ink

Another way to reduce the carbon footprint of your business is to ask for soy-based ink. This type of ink releases less than five percent volatile organic compounds (or VOCs) into the environment, which is much less than petroleum-based ink. Plus, soy-based ink makes the paper easier to recycle since soy can be stripped easier than traditional ink types. Soy-based ink also produces a

brighter ink while using fewer materials. In fact, soy-based ink can spread roughly 15 percent farther than regular ink, which reduces the amount of ink used and printer cleanup costs.  

If you’re looking for more green printing solutions, then contact Copiers Northwest-Seattle. We have a variety of copiers and printers, including Canon and Sharp printers. Plus, we offer copier repair, document management, variable data printing, and production printing. Visit our website or call us at (206) 438-4720 to learn more about the services and products we have to offer.

I think I held my breath through his whole tirade and then I held my tongue because he was so righteous in his belief that his company should provide him with two personal printers to be able to work effectively.
What happens when he forgets to order ink for both of these and there’s another holiday? (A third printer??)
Truth is, I don’t know if that company has a managed print services program or even a print strategy. My guess is probably neither. With employees like this guy, they are definitely going to need a big dose of change management if they ever try to implement one.

In the current global economic situation the whole world from USA to Europe and China to Japan are reeling under the economic slowdown resulting in the creation of goliath pressure on small to large enterprises public or private sectors in maintaining their bottom-line profitability. In this scenario, there are only three choices left – first is to succumb to the pressure and eliminate the loss making department/s or declare bankruptcy; second is to innovate and diversify into profitable ventures; and the third is to find ways to improve efficiency by optimizing business processes and plugging the leaks, cleaning the gunk and overhauling or streamlining the entire organization or departments by eliminating the wasteful processes. Therefore, it is a clarion call for every business and the government departments to re-view the way they operate or function.  Even if they are doing well then it is the demand of time to go for a periodical check-up of their business processes, the way we go for our health check-up or tune-up of our automobiles.

Business process optimization or BPO or business process improvement BPI is a technique to monitor business processes and how they meet their business objectives, controlling and optimizing the operations in order to make them fall in line with the business objectives and accordingly allocate necessary resources, prioritizing work and selecting the best service providers for those processes. Whereas business process re-engineering or BPR is a technique of change management to clean-up the fat layers by introducing radical changes in operational strategy which should in turn result in competitive advantages.

In BPO, processes can be divided into three parts such as Core Processes, Support Processes and Management Processes. Core processes identifies primary value for customers in the organization such as manufacturing, sales and purchases. Support processes provides support to the core processes such as human resources, IT, accounting, research and development etc., and management processes control and govern both processes.

The key idea of BPR is to re-design the processes of the enterprise so that the organizational barriers and operational impediments between different processes are eliminated. In the process of BPR a fundamental analysis is made for radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in overall performance.

Main difference between BPO and BPR is that BPO looks into ways to improve the processes in the existing structure whereas BPR strives for dramatic improvements so that the organization breaks away from conventional wisdom in such a way that the change becomes cross functional in scope after crossing all boundaries. In this case the existing IT is not duplicated but a brand new system is created. Therefore if BPO is a preventive technique to fine tune the business from possible constraints or losses then BPR is a technique used by companies on the brink of disaster to cut costs by eliminating loss making departments and return to profitability.

BPO and BPR are parts of business process management (BPM) techniques. The methodology of BPO allows users to Vision as per the mission statement and goals of an organization; define the need for improvement; model by simulating the change processes or make ‘what if analysis’ for possible change; analyze and compare the various situations; improve by selecting the best possible variants; and control by monitoring the implementations.  If all these activities do not bring desired results then the only alternative left is to re-engineer the entire process of an organization from scratch to get a dramatic result. Therefore to get the desired result while executing the projects of BPO and BPR, all principles of project management should be applied in order to ensure that processes for improvement do not conflict with each other.

The main pitfalls of BPO is that inter-departmental rivalry or unionized politics may prevent successful implementation of BPO projects whereas in case of  BPR these difficulties may be by-passed as the project of BPR focuses on the overall operations irrespective of business areas.  Key disadvantage of BPR is that in the process of re-engineering an organization, they may slash their capacity for future growth and they also may fail to keep up with their competitors in offering new products or services while becoming too engrossed in restructuring the whole organization.

I am inspired to write this article not only to present in brief differences between the BPO and BPR but also to overcome the criticism of restructuring which generally results in massive layoffs and downsizing of various departments.  To my mind, it is easy for any BPR consultant to find faults by identifying wastage, looking into the problems of over-staffing and uncovering poor communications between various departments of an organization; but to suggest the increase in efficiency without affecting the large numbers of employees. It would be a daunting task for any consultant or consulting firm to retain as many employees as possible while restructuring the organization to improve efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction.

The pundits of BPR do not believe in increasing the efficiency without cutting costs by way of massive lay-offs. I personally feel that in order to improve efficiency and productivity, we should suggest alternatives to the ill effects of re-engineering on the human resources and BPR should be used only as a last resort. Otherwise the critiques of BPR will treat this as anti-social and ill conceived technique to improve efficiency. Simultaneously it is also imperative that, if blockages in the arteries are not cleared or bypassed then the human heart will not function, the same way if non productive processes are not eliminated then the efficiency will never improve. In order to overcome this oxymoron, we have to adopt a holistic approach in a way that before BPR is conducted, a careful shot should be given for BPO.

In this case, where the BPR will investigate the cause of stifling performance and will recommend drastic changes to be introduced, the consultant for BPO will suggest an organization to increase the performance not only by revamping different processes but also by using or recycling their surplus resources innovatively, while keeping in consideration the human resources on whom the organization has already invested hundreds of thousands of dollar over a period of time. In order to do that a BPR consultant must suggest alternate ways without affecting the re-engineering process or undermining the much needed processes of change.

Public vs. Private Sector

Methodology of investigating the cause or implementation for change is the same in both the sectors except in terms of approach. Tools and techniques of the change management are common in both the sectors such as SWOT analysis, PEST or PESTLE analysis, strategic capacity analysis, critical success factors analysis, force field analysis, relationship mapping, process activity analysis, waste analysis, value stream mapping or flowcharting, benchmarking, cost benefit analysis, resource deployment analysis, cause & effect or fish bone analysis, affinity analysis, balance scorecard, ADKAR model worksheet, product life cycle analysis, Pareto analysis, Kurt Lewin’s unfreezing, changing and refreezing model etc.

In a private sector customer satisfaction is the most important factor whereas in a public sector the users of the services become the central point before designing any change. In public sectors, besides improving the efficiency by eliminating the wastage, one also has to keep in mind the resulting political and social fall outs.  Recently, in order to balance the city’s budget, the City of Toronto came under fire due to the restructuring and cost cutting measures in case of daycare facilities provided by the city, Toronto library system and Montgomery’s Inn Museum etc. Therefore, there is a slight shift in the types of stakeholders between the public and private sectors and stakeholders also vary depending upon the nature of business- service or manufacturing.

I look forward to your valuable comments in order to enlighten readers of this blog.

“New business processes will have to be put in place. To that end, an integration broker and a process manager allow companies to redesign their process and execute them so that they can comply with new regulated business processes on top of the existing business application without affecting them and having to change them to deploy new versions of those business applications.”

“Many times, what happens is that we don’t think about enablement, and we put technology in place and it actually becomes a dam or a force field against what the business is trying to accomplish. Typically, it’s growing top-line revenue, controlling costs, protecting the organization from compliance violations, keeping sensitive information secure, (and) protection of intellectual property. There’s a lot of different things we try to do. And the key thing is making sure that we always keep in mind the concept of enablement. How do we enable the business…to grow faster, but within the protected confines that are put up around the organization?”

Following  the three R’s: *Respect for self ***Respect for others and ***Responsibility for all your actions.

Oliver Schmid

Greater Los Angeles area – oschmid14@gmail.com

Director of IT

From a technology perspective, the video technologies providing the greatest value to the enterprise can be divided into two separate categories: transport / messaging technologies and display technologies. Each category provided specific value in enhancing collaborative capabilities.

The greatest differentiator in video collaboration technologies was the ability to have business-to-business video calling ability. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Best-in-Class companies were able to do this, which was three-times the adoption for all other respondents. However, there are multiple ways to accomplish business-to-business calling. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Best-in-Class companies had technology for video firewall traversal to allow their video solution to go across in a formal fashion. However, some organizations also dealt with the risks of reduced security or reduced feature functionality to enable their video calling, which can result in additional problems from an enterprise risk perspective.

Using video for multiple endpoints also was a Best-in-Class practice. One way that Best-in-Class companies did this was to use a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) to enable at least three or more endpoints to communicate with each other. Although an increasing number of solutions provide either the functionality of continuous presence, which shows all respondents simultaneously, or voice presence, which only shows the active speaker, the MCU provides more robust capabilities for network and bandwidth management and to support collaborative efforts.

Companies also sought some level of dedicated bandwidth for video. Sixty-four percent (64%) of the Best-in-Class used dedicated bandwidth from a network management perspective and 43% invested in a dedicated WAN to connect video locations. Although bandwidth demands are changing for video and the public Internet is becoming increasingly common for video transport, the enterprise needs to be aware of the need to properly manage bandwidth to ensure video quality without compromising the rest of the corporate network. Network support is an important component for companies that have high levels of video usage.

From an overall perspective, the use of a PC web client was important for the mainstream adoption of video collaboration in the enterprise. Seventy-five percent (75%) of Best-in-Class companies identified the use of PC web clients for videoconferencing compared to less than half of all other organizations. Sales and customer care departments were more likely to use this PC video usage while project management and talent acquisition efforts were more likely to use the fixed-room video formats that allowed for increased collaboration and higher-quality video. By bringing video collaboration capabilities directly to the desktop and the employee, Best-in-Class companies were able to increase adoption and find more value-driven use cases to justify their video investment.

In addition, Best-in-Class companies used high definition video, high frame rates, and movable cameras and screens to meet one of the top challenges of video collaboration: realistic eye contact and body language. To truly synchronize these behaviors on all sides of a video collaboration solution, the technology must be sufficient to provide a realistic experience. Otherwise, companies risk the challenge of the “uncanny valley,” when an experience simulates reality, but does so in a way that is disturbing and actually less effective than a less realistic experience. For example, an audio call provides less context than a video call with some delays, but the audio call may be more valuable simply because it is more consistent and less distracting.

Finally, from a support and management perspective, companies should consider the use of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to fully gain the benefits of video. As video has become more robust and the technology cycles have accelerated, large implementations are more likely to require some level of support rather than invest in additional in-house resources. Since video collaboration support is rarely a core competency for IT departments, 38% of Best-in-Class companies have implemented a BPO solution for supporting videoconferencing deployments compared to less than 10% of all other companies.

Barnard Howard ounces A360 Process Optimization: Supplier Integration.

Supplier Integration is a consulting service that BHLLC delivers to work with you and your suppliers to improve the integration of your delivery models.

Our service is a top down, bottom up approach.  The initial steps of the engagement review the inner workings of the supplier integration functions and provides a concise management report that highlights the state of your relationships.  The report is in presentation form and provides a prioritized action list of initiatives that target your objectives and are geared to bring near term, quick hit success, followed by sustained and improving return on your investment.   

Process Optimization:  Supplier Integration provides clarity around you complete supplier management business model considering policies and processes that make these integral relationships successful. 

Your return on the investment you make with Barnard Howard is protected by the “fee for performance” business model that makes Barnard Howard’s success tied directly to yours.

Acceleration 360: A360 is innovative organizational improvement services delivered by consultants that taka a wholistic approach to organizational success.  Acceleration 360 considers the 5 accelerators of an organization:  Capabilities; Technology; Organizational Structure; People; and, Processes.

While organizations generally run smoothly, often one of these accelerators can be tuned to increase throughput and improvement operational results.  By taking a holistic perspective change in on one accelerator will be delivered in a manner that has a net positive impact on the total organizational velocity ensuring that the integration of the accelerators is not compromised.

If you think your organization is not running as smoothly as it should or you just want to ensure your organization is “recovery proof”, able to benefit from the impact of the recent economic reset, for a free confidential discussion contact Barnard Howard and see if leveraging Acceleration 360 is right for you.

Contact
Barnard Howard LLC
clientinquiry@barnardhoward.com
(253) 770-3646

Or feel free to contact our President at:
Wayne Barnard
President
Barnard Howard LLC
wayne.barnard@barnardhoward.com

A system like that which can surface and then roll up just the needed information to and from the specific users brings with it many advantages. But the actual interface for capturing that information has to be optimized as well. In many cases allowing the user to simply write whatever they want in a Word doc or rich-text editor may be perfect. In more cases some sort of template in which they just fill in fields is more appropriate. But in many situations the kind of information that should be on that small part of the whole document is very structured in nature and much better served by filling out a simple web form with form controls like constrained-choice drop-downs and check-boxes presenting the user with predefined choices to predefined questions.

I once learned about a customer’s auditing process and it basically went like this:

• Auditor informs company they will be doing an audit at a certain date
• Auditor comes in and audits those areas
• Auditor issues a findings document indicating they have x number of issues they need to deal with
• Responder from company creates an ‘issues document’ from this and emails it around to all people that might have input on any of the issues
• Issues document gets edited by several users simultaneously and they all email them to the responder
• Each issue needs to be responded to in basically one of three ways
  • “has been remediated” (referencing document number that shows this)
  • “will be remediated” (and date of expected remediation plus any notes)
  • “will remain non-compliant” (along with notes)
• Responder receives emails from users, repeatedly bugging them for responses as needed and creates response document
• Responder sends response document to Auditor

They were constantly losing information and repeating work due to this process.

It became obvious that what they should have been doing is creating and working with individual “issue” objects. I prototyped a solution for them on the Vignette (now Open Text) Collaboration platform that allowed them to create secure online audit workspaces for each audit. They were created by cloning a predefined templated workspace that had things like

• a common discussion thread around the audit
• a shared calendar with audit dates on it
• placeholders for the auditor’s findings document and the official response document (which  had its own approval workflow)
• an issues folder that lets one create specific issues from the auditor’s findings document

The issue object was based on a folder (the platform lets you extend the base object types like folders, documents, and discussions ) so that it could contain important reference materials, be subscribed to, be emailed into, and all the other things one can do with a base folder type in the platform. But I also gave it the custom attributes that it needed like ‘Due date’, ‘Assigned To’ ,’Response’ (with choices like ‘Has been remediated, Will be remediated, etc.),  ‘Notes’, ‘Reference #’, and ‘Expected Remediation Date’.

So someone would go through the auditor’s findings and then create an issue out of every issue on it. Each one would be assigned to the person that was best to answer it. That user would receive an email with a link to that online issue workspace that indicated its due date. The user would receive a preconfigured amount of email reminders until it was completed, as each issue object has a process defined around it.  The response document was then automatically created by a display template that rolled up the information that each user responded to into one nicely-formatted text document.

One of the more advanced and important features of the Open Text platform which we used here is that the workspace templates allow one to pre-map access rights so that the content in the cloned workspace  automatically has the correct permissions set on each of the cloned sub-folders and items.

With this solution in place the customer could respond much more quickly and accurately and with much less time spent by its valuable employees. Every audit has its own secure workspace with a full audit history of every response to every issue. This is also, I think,  a perfect example of optimizing a collaborative business process.

About 93 percent of surveyed respondents considered their SaaS experience successful, says researcher Aziz Virani whose survey concludes that the SaaS model is beginning to fundamentally change how IT is consumed and provisioned in large organizations.

Other findings include:
- SaaS deployments generated a reasonable return on the initial investment for 65 percent of respondents, and more than 62 percent of respondents plan to use more SaaS implementations in the coming year.

- Customer relationship management and business intelligence through SaaS were “crucial differentiators” and “strategic weapons” for 40 and 37 percent of respondents, respectively. These were also the most common deployments of SaaS, though other uses included enterprise resource planning, collaboration software and financial systems.

The popularity of SaaS is a direct result of “constrained capital budgets and IT resources, a strong desire for rapid deployment, and the need to reduce operational overhead,” adding that “by outsourcing both critical and noncritical applications, companies can lower overall risk, reduce costs and realize value from the application faster.”

It seems cloud computing does level the IT playing field for small firms! “Small and midsized businesses have much to gain and very little to lose by switching to cloud computing technology,” according to a blog reference from a Forbes arcticle. A Gartner report also showed that SaaS-based applications would help 20 percent of all businesses eliminate all their IT hardware by 2012.

Around 60 percent of cloud computing customers reduce IT capital costs. “A recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates reports that six in 10 cloud computing customers have been able to reduce their IT capital costs. Users also say that the cloud model has helped improve service quality as well as reduce IT operations costs and management complexity,” according to a report from Data Center Knowledge.

Indeed, at PlanMill just a few minutes of calculation demonstrates that relatively small increases in resource utilization could produce dramatic results!

For example, if a Service Organization with 125 individuals logging an average of 1,350 project-related hours per year could increase resource utilization only 3 percent; the result would be just over 5,000 extra productive hours – the equivalent of hiring a new four-person team full time. PlanMill customers have reported, in many cases, even higher results.

Find out how to increase your revenue by reducing costs. Learn more from Improved ROI with PlanMill SaaS: Increased Return On Investment (ROI) through better resource utilization.

Read more:
Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it: Key benefits of SaaS
How PlanMill users work smarter and increase company profitability

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Over the years I have made a point of keeping in touch.  Mostly with colleagues I have come to know since immigrating to the US in the early 90′s however, I do have friends and family I am close to in Toronto. 

What has become vividly obvious as we work at growing Barnard Howard, is the importance of those connections I have maintained.

Dig your well before the current one is dry!

With social networking and this “totally” electronic age the opportunity to leverage years of acquaintances & deep friendships has never been easier nor more valuable.

Each of you that has touched my life probably have no idea how much I value every time we speak or communicate in any fashion, you impact my life & my career.

Thanks

Wayne

If you own these platforms and wish to leverage them better, or are simply looking around at technology options for improving competetiveness, please feel free to email Mike.Letulle@Full-Leverage.com .

Stay tuned for much more about specific solutions and offerings.

I’ll decline to list all the reasons why. There are enough blog posts out there that rant about how cool iPhones are. But what I think a lot of people underestimate is the storm of change they are bringing to the business world. Apple’s new iPhone Apps rolled out last Friday. I was just checking the available business applications and saw that Oracle has a free iPhone application that extends its business intelligence dashboards, KPIs, and alerts to the iPhone.

Salesforce.com has something similar. Now that is vision! I mean when most software companies are finally starting to grasp that they should probably consider a decent format option for mobile devices accessing content over the web, these guys offer rich interactive client apps on the world’s most popular new mobile platform.  Sure a lot of BI solutions can already send alerts to people via email and even SMS if certain thresholds are hit, but nice graphs and charts on your iPhone? Now that’s slick!

I seriously think iPhone’s use by the business user is going to start to snowball now. They took a lesson from the facebook apps and put it on the iPhone. The interface is ideal for a small-size device to view varying amounts of content, and the easy upgradeability of the firmware makes it easy for Apple to keep it up-to-date and competitive. And now it’s inexpensive and faster! What is their stock trading at now???…

 The idea of properly using technology to not only get around the isssues and enhance the process, but also to make customer relationships more profitable while you are at it has been somewhat of a devoted cause of my manager at Global360, Phil Ayres. He has a Blog dedicated to these concepts. He and I have been hard at work over the last several months building a blueprint (or solution template – call it what you want) on top of our Case360 product which is what I currently specialize in.

Global360 just posted the recent 1 hour webinar we held in which Phil presents the business value and architecture followed by my delivering a 20 minute demonstration of the solution.

Many business processes require a special kind of business intelligence applied to it for it to be really meaningful. We at Global 360 call this BI that is specialized for process “Process Intelligence”, and we have a product called Insight360 that is ideally suited for it. It has two components to it that are both crucial to this whole measurement concept, simulation and analytics. The simulator allows one to model a high level business process made up of both human and system activities. One can setup participants who can work varying roles, be assigned costs, and even be assigned performance factors such as Mary works 30% faster than Bill. One can set up arrival patterns that describe how work enters the process, and these are so configurable that for example one can assign any one of about fifteen kinds of statistical distributions to it.

Bruce Silver, an independent analyst who focuses on BPM, wrote a pretty interesting post about simulators back in March of this year called Is Simulation Fake? .

It’s a fair question. There are so many parameters and variables in a typical business process that it is hard to conceive of being able to represent the entire process in a model that takes it all into consideration properly. The newest release of Insight360 has almost all the features (and I feel all the important ones) that Bruce says are needed to keep a simulator from being fake. There is one concept it is missing that he speaks of that I had never even heard of before. This is the first scenario he talks about regarding predictive performance analysis in which he suggests one ought to be able to measure the process improvement at the model level. In other words, there should be some empirical process efficiency rating for a process or at least a way to measure one against the other that factors in how many activity hand-offs there are, points of failure, built-in time or resource constraints, etc. There ought to be some efficiency measurement you can know without having to run the scenarios with varying resources to see the improvements. Cool idea. We don’t have that yet though.

 Regardless, Insight360 lets you accurately model your real world scenarios with all the parameters and configurations that generally matter for human-centric processes. You can then perform ‘what if’ scenarios such as what happens if I increase the number of people doing my health claims, or what if we started getting 50% more volume than normal.

All the simulation data (how long each process and activity took, how long it was in a waiting state, how much were the workers utilized, etc) gets structured into an OLAP cube that one can slice, dice, and visualize in the tool of one’s choice (We’re finding Excel 2007 is amazing at this and what’s really cool is one can easily post the excel charts in your SharePoint portal). This allows one to know the impact of a business change before it happens.

Some of our customers are starting to use this tool as a means to calculate the ROI of a process improvement project before they do it. They hold a Lean Six Sigma kaizen session to lean the process of its waste which results in an ‘As-Is’ state model and a ‘To-Be’ state model. Running the scenarios with expected work arrival volumes and time frames and resources shows the expected benefits and costs.

We often recommend using Insight360 before you implement any BPM project. You think you need to automate that process? How do you know your time is better spent fixing that process versus a different one? Exactly how much do you expect to gain by automating that portion of that process? How do you know if you haven’t first measured in some reliable way. And this is why we say, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure!”

While there I spent most of that time working on a Six Sigma project tracking application for DuPont that was based on the Lotus Notes platform. This was the first time I had ever heard of Six Sigma and I thought it was a really cool concept. DuPont was very serious about it too. If I remember correctly one couldn’t even enter a project idea unless it stood to save the company at least $100,000. The application was pretty robust and let one track all aspects of all phases of the projects. It even had complex financial calculations which could export out to Excel for graphs and charts.

Now here it is 8 years later and I was recently at a large manufacturing company here in Austin who is looking to replace their home-grown six sigma project tracking application. My contact there walked me through it and it was unbelievable to me how similar it was to what we had built 8 years ago for DuPont. The system they built was not scaling to the usage and had horrible performance problems. The projects are saving the company literally hundreds of millions of dollars per year. But what surprises me the most is that even so, getting the budget to replace the system is not a no-brainer. Someone please explain this to me!

Well currently Global 360 doesn’t have an out-of-the-box Six Sigma project tracking application, but I think the Case360 product is very strongly suited for one to be built on it. However what is even more compelling is that our Insight360 product is perfect for modeling a current business process in its simulator, running the simulation to see the ‘as-is’ process statistics, proposing a change in the process, and then running that simulation to see what the difference would really be in the ‘to-be’ process before one actually implements the change.