Press Release here (PDF)
March 2 Awards Ceremony: Slide Presentation here
Finalists 2008
 

2008 Winners Announced in
Global Awards for Excellence in BPM & Workflow

March 2, 2009 –  Future Strategies Inc., is pleased to announce the Winners of the 2008 Global Awards for Excellence in Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow. Co-sponsored by WfMC, BPMFocus.org and BPM.com and now in their 15^th year, these prestigious awards recognize user organizations that have demonstrably excelled in implementing innovative business process solutions to meet strategic business objectives. There are five geographical regions. Each region receives one Gold and one Silver Award.

“We congratulate the 2008 winners for the particularly high standard of innovation shown in their BPM and workflow implementations,” said Nathaniel Palmer, Executive Director of the WfMC. “The positive impact on their business objectives has helped them move the goalposts for their respective industries.”

In judging, particular attention was paid to implementations that showed processes extending beyond the corporate boundaries to support customers, suppliers, trading partners and more.

Industry Analyst Derek Miers from BPM Focus commented on the strength of the entries, especially those from South America and Europe. “With a wide range of industries represented, the critical importance of driving performance improvement through more effective management of business processes was plain to see. The case studies presented provide compelling reading and clearly demonstrate the growing recognition of business processes as key business assets.”

The following list identifies the winners from each region.

Europe

Gold Award

·         MIGROSBANK, Switzerland; nominated by Action Technologies Inc.

Silver Award

·          Techspace Aero, BELGIUM; nominated by W4

Middle East-Africa

Gold Award

·         PruHealth South Africa, South Africa; nominated by TIBCO

North America

Gold Award

·         US MEPCOM, USA; nominated by Oracle Corp

Silver Award (tie)

·          Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Estado de Hidalgo, Mexico; nominated by PECTRA Technology

·          U.S. Xpress, USA; nominated by Cordys UK Ltd

Pacific Rim

Gold Award

·         Fullerton India Credit Company Ltd., India; nominated by Newgen Software Technologies Ltd.

Silver Award

·         Australian Health Plans, Australia; nominated by Polonious Pty Ltd

South and Central America

Gold Award

·         Produbanco, Ecuador; nominated by BizAgi Ltd

Silver Award

·         INMETRO, Brazil; nominated by Cryo Technologies

Now in their 15th year, the Awards were presented on Monday, March 2, 2009. BPMFocus.org and BPM.com jointly sponsor the annual Global Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow with support from industry associations Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and Object Management Group (OMG). This year the Awards Ceremony was presented in a virtual format with the Gold and Silver winners announced in a special webinar chaired by Derek Miers, lead judge. The Awards program is managed by Future Strategies Inc.

About the Workflow Management Coalition (www.wfmc.org)

The WfMC, founded in August 1993, is a non-profit, international organization of workflow vendors, users, analysts and university/research groups. The Coalition's mission is to promote and develop the use of workflow through the establishment of standards for software terminology, interoperability and connectivity between workflow products. Comprising over 300 members worldwide, the Coalition is the only standards body for this specific software market. The creation of the WfMC Standards Reference Model has proved its importance in other areas of technology, most notably the ISO Seven Layer reference model for computer communications.

About BPM Focus (www.bpmfocus.org)

BPM Focus is a new member network formed by the recent merger of Enix Consulting and WARIA (Workflow and Reengineering International Association). The new organization extends the traditional services offered by Enix and WARIA through a range of educational services focused around the BPM arena. The BPMF Learning Framework is a program of BPM Development & Deployment courses incorporating best practices for BPM project delivery and supporting techniques from the best thinkers in the industry. Both organizations have traded continuously since 1992 and this merger is a natural extension of a long tradition of collaboration.

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Winners and finalists will receive additional recognition by having their case studies published in the next volume of BPM Excellence in Practice by Future Strategies Inc.  

BPMFocus.org and BPM.com jointly sponsor the annual Global Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow with support from industry associations Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and Object Management Group (OMG). The Awards program is managed by Future Strategies Inc. 

FOR PRESS CONTACT:

Layna Fischer, Awards Director
Future Strategies Inc.
Tel: (1) 954 782 3376 /Fax: (1) 954 719 3746

Nominator  

Nominee and Case Study Submission
(Gold and Silver Winners)

Europe

Action Technologies Inc., USA

Integrator:
Action Solutions AG

Migros Bank, Switzerland

Migros Bank is one of the 10 leading financial institutes in Switzerland and one of the biggest Retail-Banks. Our focus is to be very close to the clients and therefore we have around 50 branches all over Switzerland and many more small contact-points that offer basic services for new clients. All in all about 1,400 employees work for Migros Bank.

Techspace Aero designs, develops and produces modules, equipment and test cells for aircraft and space engines. The regulations in the domain require strict quality control of the products. The quality department, alongside the company’s ambition to become the world leader in its areas of excellence, has decided to rationalize its applications for better department efficiency. At the same time, studies conducted by the IT department on the operation of the ERP used for quality management have demonstrated that a BPM solution could respond more effectively to the evolution requirements fixed by the company, and more specifically conform to the quality requirements within Techspace Aero.

Middle East - Africa

PruHealth South Africa

PruHealth is using a business process management approach on top of a service oriented architecture to create a more agile IT infrastructure – one that enables them to adapt their processes to business opportunities and bring products to market more quickly in the highly competitive health insurance market in the UK.  PruHealth acquired the BPMS software in August 2007 and had already started to deploy processes on a service oriented architecture by April 2008, a significant achievement in a short space of time. PruHealth’s IT team and back office and systems support is located in Johannesburg, South Africa.

North America

The United States Military Entrance Processing Command (US MEPCOM) processes and qualifies individuals applying for military service in any one of five Armed Services (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard) and their subcomponents (i.e. Reserve, National Guard).  They are required to process over 1 million records a year with potentially spikes of 18,000 per day (5.6 million a year), and to maintain over 60 million current records across all the armed services.  Their existing Enterprise Architecture (EA) was too antiquated and brittle to handle the growing requirements of its customer in an increasingly changing environment.

PECTRA Technology, USA

 Integrator:
Acerti, Mexico

Tribunal Superior de Justicia del Estado de Hidalgo, Mexico

Within the framework of e‐governance developed by the Government of Mexico –with the purpose of improving the quality and transparency in management and increasing the efficiency in public services – the High Court of the State of Hidalgo implemented an Integral Program of Processes Systematization. The project included the integration of tasks of 51 first instance courts and their second instance courts, each one of them with numerous individual, complex, and manual processes. In addition, all the value chain participants – both internal and external ‐ were integrated: Organization (Courts, Courtrooms); citizens (Lawyers, parties involved in the trial), and the Government.

U.S. Xpress Enterprises stands today as one of the premier transportation companies in North America. Founded in 1985, U.S. Xpress is the third-largest privately-owned truckload carrier with over 8,500 trucks and 26,000 trailers. U.S. Xpress has reshaped the landscape of transportation by developing revolutionary innovations that continually deliver unmatched levels of customer satisfaction. With the demand for trucking services closely tied to the economy and fulgurations in fuel prices, margins can be low and U.S. Xpress is continually looking to increase the efficiency of its operations to ensure bottom line corporate success. In 2008 U.S. Xpress faced the additional challenge of acquiring several other companies and bringing together the disparate systems of these sister companies.

Pacific Rim

Being a recent entrant in the retail-lending segment, FICCL plans for rapid rollout of branch network to reach a large customer base. The company’s objective was to achieve lean but profit-oriented branches, reduced turn-around-times, lower cost of operations and better customer experience. Newgen offered FICCL a BPM solution based on NEWGEN® OmniFlow^TM, which integrates with the core system, Flexcube. The solution covers the entire spectrum of loan process starting from loan initiation, de-dupe, credit verifications, deviation handling and approvals, loan booking by the back-office, and finally loan disbursal.

Australian Health Plans, a division of IMAN International is a specialist health insurer providing health plans for temporary residents working in Australia. Since 1981, the IMAN group has specialised in this niche market for health plans. In 2004 IMAN had a problem, as their sales grew, their costs grew in proportion. Considering this, John Braithwaite made a strategic decision to embark on a IT improvement strategy based on implementing Open Source technology via their IT software partners Polonious.  The main objective being to reduce operating costs and to stop them rising with sales as much as possible. A side benefit of this approach has been to reduce the external systems to near zero and provide a single point of reference for all information pertaining to claims and policy within the core system.

South and Central America

Produbanco is one of the main financial institutions in Ecuador. In their search for a solution for the administration of credit applications they were looking for a simple system that was agile and able to integrate with their Core Banking systems as well as all areas involved throughout their organization. They decided upon BizAgi’s BPM (Business Process Management) technology to automate the process of managing their consumer credit applications (personal, vehicle and credit cards) and mortgages.

INMETRO, Brazil

Through directives which have already been named in its strategic planning, INMETRO seeks to roll out a new process-oriented public administration model, focusing entirely on customer satisfaction and the efficiency of its processes. As an initial project, the redesign and automation of its Accreditation process, essential to guaranteeing the competitiveness of Brazilian industry, succeeded in substantially reducing the total time required to carry out this process, at the same time introducing a new paradigm for the way governmental agencies provide services in Brazil. This project’s success now serves as the model for many other process automation initiatives within the organization.