Welcome

Welcome to the new look newsletter, focusing on the leading edge Business Process Modelling tools from Proforma Corporation, state of the art Business Process Management from Savvion and associated tools and services from our partners.

We hope that you will find this information useful and we encourage you to forward this newsletter to any interested colleagues. Please contact us for further information and purchasing details. The following items are covered this issue:

• ProVision News - Version 4.3 Released
• Savvion V5.0 Released with Market Leading Features
• Roadshow planned for February 2004
• New ProVision Interfaces in Progress
• ProVision Documentation
• The Delegate IT Vision for BPM
• Support & Maintenance
• Contacting Us

Savvion V5.0 Released with Market Leading Features

With BusinessManager 5.0, Savvion are pulling further ahead with breakaway BPM capabilities that provide true business process lifecycle management. They have incorporated, the complete end-to-end delivery of business processes from workflow modelling to deployment to management to process improvement. Unique in the industry, Savvion’s enhanced BPM system puts role specific tools directly into the hands of those closest to the process at the appropriate phase; a robust modelling and simulation system for business analysts, a collaborative process design, business rule and event management and integration system for IT developers, and business performance scorecard, business intelligence analytics and process improvement tools for business managers.

This tight integration of all phases of the process lifecycle, coupled with Savvion and partner developed industry process templates, enable Savvion customers to quickly move from process discovery to production in less than 90 days while typically returning 200% – 300% ROI. Eight of the new customers in Q3 who chose Savvion BusinessManager over competing products (including Bank of America, Seagate and Sears), did so because of Savvion’s comprehensive product offering and unique solutions approach. It's no wonder 15% of the Fortune 100 are Savvion customers.

Process modelling and Simulation - Integrated modelling and simulation tools enable business managers to quickly discover and model a process, simulate process execution, and fine-tune and optimize process flow. A process repository stores and manages process models for reuse as corporate best practices (see "The Delegate IT BPM Vision for BPM" below).

Management Scorecards & Reports - 5.0 includes an easy-to-use scorecard designer that lets business managers design scorecards in minutes to monitor business activity. 40 out-of-the-box reports give managers complete visibility into detailed process metrics including drill down into underlying data to view any metric in greater detail.

Pre-Built, Industry Process Templates - Over 30 pre-built process templates that automate a number of the most common business processes in industries including Manufacturing, Financial Services, CPG, Automotive, Retail, IT, Telecom and Electronics.

See the new streaming video Webinars on our site.

ProVision & Savvion Joint Roadshow in Feb 2004

Delegate IT will be running a series of Roadshows around Australia and New Zealand in early February, 2004 together with our partners. We expect to have key representatives from Proforma Corporation and Savvion to show how these products can address the key issues to most organisations, as well as provide details for the product roadmaps over coming years. We will also provide detailed workshops demonstrating how to move from requirements to modelling and then to automated implementation and management.

We will advise when bookings for these highly limited Roadshows are available and ask that you plan ahead to be involved.

New ProVision Interfaces in Progress

Delegate IT is developing interfaces from Rational/IBM RequisitePro as well as Borland CaliberRM to link to ProVision. These interfaces will allow full traceability from captured and categorised requirements to business objects (goals, processes, activities, business rules, etc) in ProVision.

This will assist in the process of determining the impact of changes on business processes and the modelled Enterprise as a result of changes in requirements. In addition, traceability will be provided from requirements through modelling, through implementation and testing, whether implementation is via software development or BPM using Savvion.

Please contact us if you would like further information about the availability of these interfaces or see us at our Roadshows.

ProVision Documentation

When installing ProVision V4.3, you will automatically install a range of documents. One of the key documents provided is a new version of "Visual modelling with ProVision v4.3" which is 125 pages of information showing how to use the various modellers in ProVision, including the new Deployment and Package Modellers.

The Delegate IT Vision for BPM

Delegate IT has invested heavily in the "best of breed" products from Proforma Corporation and Savvion in order to provide a comprehensive solution for our clients to address the enterprise needs of the entire organisation.

While Savvion BusinessManager now offer workflow modelling and simulation, this feature in no way negates the benefit of Enterprise Modelling using ProVision. The 23 Modellers in ProVision allow an organisation to use the Zachman Framework to understand every aspect of doing busines, as well as communicate and optimise the business prior to automating the processes with Savvion. When the workflow is transferred to Savvion BusinessManager, simulation can be used to asses the impact of business rules and real life loading of those processes before they go live.

Our range of products, tools, partners and services are designed to work together to ensure that all aspects of the solution are provided ot our valued clients.

Support and Maintenance

ProVision users who have local maintenance agreements can contact our support staff directly via support@vutech.com.au, on our website or calling 61 (0)3 9434 4115 from 9am to 5.30pm EST.

Contacting Us

To contact Delegate IT for further information about Proforma Business Process Modelling tools, Savvion Business Process Management, MX Contact CRM, training, consulting and software implementation, please use the following details:

We expect to be announcing our contact details for Sydney in the next newsletter.

"The EDGE" Subscriptions and Removal

You can subscribe or unsubscribe to Delegate IT's Newsletter by sending an email to our list administrator with the word "Subscribe" or "Unsubscribe" as the subject.

ProVision News

ProVision 4.3 has been released and is available for download (evaluation and upgrade) from the website.

Note that this version requires all registered users to re-license, so please go to Help->About ProVision->License and request "License by email". Proforma will provide the new license within a day or so.

New Modellers

ProVision 4.3 provides additional UML support including object stereotypes. It introduces two new UML modellers (Package and Deployment) and offers additional support for stereotypes. The Package modeller enables users to express Package dependencies and components. Its purpose is to visualize the interactions of Packages and gracefully present the components of each package. The Deployment modeller is used to provide a more physical view of system components. The Deployment modeller expresses Nodes (equipment), Components and Interfaces. The Nodes (such as a WebServer) can host Components (e.g. a CreditCheck function). Nodes may communicate with each other. Components within Nodes may have dependencies on other Components. In addition, Components may expose Interfaces that other Components use.

New Features

Two new features, multiview modelling and property lists, improve the information content of a single model. With multiview modelling any modelling object can present the image of an entire model. This is particularly useful with nested workflow models. Instead of having to drill down to see a nested model, the user can now see a thumbnail image of the nested model.

Improved Scalable Graphics

ProVision will automatically load any pre-defined set of graphic files and icons when creating a new repository. This makes it simple to visually enhance all your models and objects. In addition, you can also manually load the ProVision image gallery with individual JPG, GIF, EMF and BMP files.

Customisable Activities

The Activity object can now express a customizable property list. This list shows all or a portion of the properties associated with the activity right on the model itself. Property lists are also available on the Package and Interface objects.

Navigation Reports & Grids

Enterprise architects will find enhanced ability to view complex associations with the new Navigation Report and Grid capabilities. The Navigation Grids can now express connections between objects that are not directly connected. It does this by following links to connect the dots from a start object to a desired end object. The user may now, for example, see implementation Locations associated with Activities by following the links from Activity to System to Location.

It is also possible to report on these complex navigations. The Navigation Reporter helps the user trace through successive associations conveniently reported in a nested format.

Object Level Check-out

Teamwork users now have the ability to directly protect (lock) objects. With this enhancement, customers cannot only protect all objects in a model, they can protect individual objects regardless of their participation in multiple models. Additionally, customers may now designate any object as ‘final’, meaning no further changes will be allowed, regardless of model participation.

XML Import & Export

The ProVision ModelMaker functions have been incorporated into our new “Translator”. The ProVision Translator will include support for the XML format. This is in addition to the current support for various Word, Excel and comma separated value formats. Users may now export ProVision data into user-friendly XML files or import data into ProVision from XML files.

XMI Support

The new XMI interface enables ProVision to communicate its UML data using the XMI standard. Any product that has fidelity to XMI can directly import data from ProVision. Similarly, ProVision can import data from other XMI compliant products. In addition to this UML interoperability, the XMI interface also provides yet another way to communicate with ProVision using an XML format.

New Rose & TogetherSoft Interfaces

Two new XMI-based interfaces are also provided. Users now have an XMI-based, bidirectional interface with Rational Rose and TogetherSoft Control Center. These new interfaces communicate with the respective products and cater to the specific, proprietary rules they impose on the XMI standard.