Although it's true that every business should make daily work more of a system and less of an art, this tool for building systems is a work in process.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 15, 2006]

Coral Gables, Fla.-based Colosa is offering ProcessMaker, a Business Process Management (BPM) tool for small business.

The company has taken advantage of its Miami location, gateway to Latin America, to obtain some significant foreign customers, notably in Bolivia. As a result, the company's software is already bilingual in Spanish and English.

Colosa, however, is eager to grow in the U.S., where it is looking for smaller customers than the financial and government enterprises that use its products in Bolivia. Colosa is eager to use ISPs as a channel to reach small business customers, and is present at ISPCON in ISP-Market's Launch Pad, a gathering of new businesses offering new products.

The company is very open about what the product is and what it does. The entire ProcessMaker manual is online, allowing you to see for yourself that the interface is clean and intuitive.

The employee starts ProcessMaker at a dashboard that shows him (in this case, Keith Games) how many tasks he still needs to do and how many he has completed.

He clicks on any of the tasks he needs to do, and the flowchart logic directs him through the predefined business process.

BPM has been around for a short amount of time for large enterprises, but it is a very new product for small business. Like its cousin, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the goal of BPM is to take the tangled web of activities at a massive business and make sure that every action adheres to a standard, to track each action, to quantify its effectiveness, and to standardize it.

It's quite a goal.

The process
ProcessMaker looks nothing like Microsoft Project (sample template). Instead, it looks like a real flowchart. Each item in a process can link to more than two subsequent actions, and processes can be recursive.

It starts to get complex, however, when you link ProcessMaker to the business databases you already have. While it requires no tech training to click through or even to rearrange a flowchart, you'll need to have your dba managing this software if you're importing data from tables. The dba will need to keep track of variable names and will need to understand the database schema to make sure that the data is accessed correctly.

Whether you're selling this as a service or using it for your own business, you will need to expend a great deal of resources to get it to work for you.

It looks like BPM will have the same disadvantages as ERP (see Disadvantages of ERP in Wikipedia). The system may be difficult to use and troubleshoot, and the business may find itself changing human processes to reflect what's stored in the system, a common complaint about ERP. One ERP consultant scolds managers for failing to change their processes for an ERP implementation:

The typical management complaint, "I don't want to change our business processes," is very dangerous. I've seen how improper customization of ERP solutions on initial implementation can cost a company many millions of dollars when it comes time to upgrade its ERP software. Functional managers must understand the expense associated with customizing ERP solutions, and VPs must be willing to change the way that they do business to conform to a noncustomized ERP solution.

BPM will work best for businesses that do the same task over and over again and have to conform to regulations while doing so. Real Estate, tax preparation, and auditing are all regulated industries that have complex processes. Some regulators even provide flowcharts for their process, as in this flowchart [.pdf] from the e-rate people.

On the other hand, for any process that can differ on a case by case basis, BPM might restrict business rather than promote it.

In the end, only the proprietor can decide whether and how to use BPM, on a case by case basis. Those small businesses owners who do choose to use BPM will find few options besides ProcessMaker.

Pricing and availability
ProcessMaker is available direct from the company. Pricing is published online.

ISPs wishing to sell ProcessMaker to subscribers can use an affiliate program that provides recurring revenue (15 to 25 percent) or purchase it wholesale at a discount that is over 50 percent, depending on volume.

—End