08 October 2009

Leaner Software streamlines productivity

Submitted by: CubicICE
{pp}In the current economic climate businesses are trying to find ways in which to optimise productivity and reduce costs in an effort to survive. While business process management (BPM) could be the answer, it often requires more resources, such as hardware and staff, which translates into more money. BPM solutions are also large and complex.

According to Tommy Erlank, General Manager – Serena, Blue Turtle Technologies, the concept of Lean BPM presents the ideal solution. “The market is definitely seeing the benefits of the leaner approach. This is backed up by independent technology research analysts, such as Forrester Research, stating that traditional BPM is bloated and the leaner approach is the way forward.

“Lean BPM offers collaborative applications that are easy to develop, cost-effective to deploy, and deliver a rapid return on investment. It creates applications that increase productivity in a simplified way at a lower cost.” Serena, represented locally by Blue Turtle Technologies, has developed a pragmatic alternative to the traditional BPM solutions – Lean BPM with Serena Business Mashups. “Typically BPM solutions fall into either the human-centric or system-centric sphere.

Serena’s Lean BPM offering falls into the space between, offering high functionality for common business processes, the everyday items that are often overlooked by traditional BPM teams,” says Erlank. Serena allows customers to develop collaborative applications that automate their business processes - without the need for coding. This includes tasks, such as defining a process flow, creating a business rule, designing a user interface or connecting process flow with specific source systems. “Serena has made it simple to visually design process-based applications, called Business Mashups, that automate common business activities without writing code,” says Erlank. “This new approach makes it possible for even semi-technical business people and IT staff to quickly address business needs, while freeing scarce application development resources to focus on more complex systems and services.”

Serena has been offering the market lean solutions for over a decade and its Lean BPM offering has been designed with usability in mind. Encompassing Web 2.0 functionality, customers can create easy to use, web based interfaces simply by dragging and dropping fields onto forms. These process-centric applications streamline business productivity by delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. Erlank notes that clients both in South Africa and overseas are finding value through the use of the Business Mashup software.

“Serena provides a collaboration portal, allowing corporations to share their process definitions via an online registry. These definitions may in turn be downloaded and re-configured by other organisations, resulting in vastly reduced implementation timescales for new projects.” Serena Business Mashups is built on a single integrated platform, requiring less hardware, software and administration. It can be implemented on-site or as a hosted software-as-a-service solution depending upon the needs of the customer. “Lean BPM may be used to manage any number of disparate business processes, ranging from human resources to safety, contract approval and inventory requisition. The application features in many industry sectors from finance and mining to pharmaceuticals and entertainment.” Blue Turtle offers sales, support, training and implementation of Serena’s Lean BPM solutions.

About Blue Turtle Technologies
Blue Turtle Technologies provides and supports best-in-class software solutions that optimise, enhance and leverage existing IT investment and assist in the cost-effective delivery of new technology. The company offers an extensive product range, sourced through its strategic partnerships with leading local and international software providers, augmented by best-practice implementation services.

About Serena
Serena® Software, Inc. provides services to make Enterprises and the business people within them more productive. More than 15,000 organizations around the world, including 96 of the Fortune 100, rely on Serena solutions delivered either on premise or on demand, to provide visibility and efficiency to the application development process. The company provides software services such as Serena Mariner (Project & Portfolio Management), Serena Business Mashups, Serena Dimensions (Change & Requirements Management) and will be providing Agile Lifecycle Management tools in the near future. Serena® is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and has offices throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific.

For more information on Serena solutions and services, visit www.Serena.com. Sources: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47830,00.html Forrester Research, “Lean BPM” Serena webcast, Jan. 21, 2009.

Contact information:
Blue Turtle Technologies
Enquiries: Martyn Healy
Tel: 011 206 5600
Fax: 011 206 5606
www.blueturtle.co.za