Nelamangala, a suburb of Bangalore, is the hub for gherkin (pasteurized cucumbers) cultivation. Intergarden, a Belgium-based processed food company, imports 5000 million tons of gherkins from its subsidiary in Bangalore, where the unit undertakes contract farming, engaging more than 7000 farmers and distributes seeds, fertilizer and pesticides to them for producing a particular variety of gherkins.
Keeping track of every farmer’s plot, soil testing, and monitoring the crop cultivation is an onerous task. The trick is to use technology and this is what Intergarden is doing. It has installed enterprise software to manage its processes—all the way from planning to export the gherkin harvest.

Typical enterprise software solutions—SAP, Oracle, Baan, Peoplesoft—are not designed for managing non-standard processes in a general business environment.
Implementing these branded packages for managing contract farming processes wouldn’t have been the apt strategy—not to forget, these branded packages are pretty expensive.

Executives at Intergarden were careful in their decision to implement the enterprise wide software. They implemented a business process management (BPM) solution that just met their needs instead of the expensive branded package applications.

Like Intergarden, many businesses are cynical about the capability of branded packages to deliver the benefits that they promise. Many CIOs who have made high investments in enterprise software today privately admit that they made a ‘wrong call’.

BPM In Limelight
In today’s competitive business environment, there is an increasing demand on the enterprise to respond quickly to the changing climate. The challenges of today’s business world are now forcing many organizations to focus more explicitly on their processes. Increasing customer service to finer granularity, bringing new products to market, cutting out cost inefficiencies, and conforming with new regulations all push business processes and their effective management to the top of the priority list. Hence, not only are businesses placing greater demands on IT but they are also expecting IT to respond much faster. But that’s not happening.

Today’s enterprise software is not “flexible” to implement any new or improved business process practically, and this lack of flexibility in corporate software systems is becoming a roadblock to a corporation’s ability to compete. Increasingly organizations are realizing that their business processes are a fundamental source of competitive advantage. Companies are now keenly looking for different ways to improve managing their business processes, and yet avoiding investing in the large, expensive, and risky new application projects that have so often led to disappointment in the past.

Packaged enterprise softwares have failed to meet the needs of the enterprise because they were built to meet the perceived needs of an entire community of users. These software packages have restricted users to a define process flow and process rules. This rigid adherence to business rules or process flow is forcing companies to explore newer ways to approach process management.

Today, the Business Process Management (BPM) solutions available in the market accommodate process improvements that occur on a day-to-day basis. Users can evolve processes on their own without compromising the core integrity of the processes management.

A little known company in Bangalore—Bluechip Infoway—has developed a platform on which process-independent software applications can be built. The functioning of such an application works is governed by externalized rules. Intergarden currently deploys Bluechip’s platform, and the client seems extremely happy with it.

The founders of Blue Chip Infoway took a cue from what had happened in the database space. In the previous generation of data management applications, data was embedded. Hence it did not facilitate sharing of data across different applications or transactions. As the volume of data grew, relationships across different data sets became apparent. Companies then rushed to deploy a standards-based DBMS that could share data across several applications—they deployed a holistic data management platform.

“By separating the business processes from the software code, the creation, modification and integration of new processes becomes simple and quick without the need for writing any program code or objects. This makes the software development process 10 times faster than the traditional ones, which use the programming languages,” says Sabarish Santhanam, CTO of Bluechip Infoway.

The Blue Chip Architecture
Blue Chip boasts that its flagship product—the Profit 5RM—works on process structures just as an RDBMS works on table structures. Process structures are defined by using the Profit5RM Developer. These process structures are stored in a database and a Process Request layer reads the process structures and renders the application to the end user using a GUI layer.

Whenever the user wants to deploy a new process or make changes to an existing process, all he or she needs to do is change the process structure. This can be done even without the help of the vendor. Profit5RM offers a powerful graphical environment in which business users are able to model and design processes, create forms, and develop process actions.

The advantage of using process-independent software architecture is that it can be easily adopted in any business environment. Using Profit5RM, applications can be built for any kind of enterprise like manufacturing industries, product distribution companies, banks, insurance companies, hotels, hospitals, shops, restaurants or service industries.

“The Western way of doing business is to be focused on one vertical. For a developing nation, you cannot have that approach. By having a horizontal business approach, you have access to a wider market, “ says Jayavanth Vajram, COO of Bluechip Infoway.

Staying Ahead
In the last 12 months, the company has to its credit more than 35 installations of Profit5RM in different business segments. And unlike traditional enterprise software, process independent software can be implemented in lesser time, and delivers a faster use level to the enterprise.

And this is what is driving the adoption of BPM tools in the market. A Delphi Group research points out, “It’s no surprise then that BPM is quickly emerging as the moniker for the next Killer App in enterprise software. Few areas of software will receive more attention in the coming months and years than BPM.”

Gartner predicts that by 2005, at least 90 percent of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous system (0.9 probability). Enterprises that continue to hard-code all flow control, or insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate BPM’s benefits, will lose out to competitors that adopt BPM. Business Process Management Systems seem to be the next logical step in making business processes explicit, executable and adaptable.