Waterton Residential Automates Business Processes with BP Logix Workflow Director and Process Director

12/09/2009

BPM Products Enable Company to Manage Processes Ranging from Policies and Procedures to Due Diligence and Onboarding Concurrently and Effectively

BP Logix, a developer of BPM software for business users, today announced that Waterton Residential, a leader in the multi-family industry, selected BP Logix Workflow Director and BP Logix Process Director to form the infrastructure to implement its BPM Initiatives.

ebizQ received the following:

Recognizing the need to automate its policies and procedures, due diligence walk-throughs and new hire requisition process, Waterton chose Workflow Director. For its 400+ activity-driven Property Takeover process, its Property Disposition process and its New Employee Onboarding process, Waterton selected Process Director. The products are providing Waterton with the tools it needs to automate both workflow and project-based processes.

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Waterton Residential, one of the leading multifamily companies in the nation, is focused on the acquisition and management of apartment communities in multiple markets. Since its inception in 1998, the Waterton Residential team has remained committed to outstanding customer service by providing a community our residents are proud to call home. With over 16,000 apartment homes in 36 communities in 12 states the Waterton Residential brand signifies exceptional living experiences, a sense of community and home. Waterton Associates, L.L.C, has committed more than $3.3 billion in investments in 110 separate real estate transactions. All Waterton investments are made through equity joint ventures with major financial institutions, Wall Street Investment banks, and pension funds.

John Vilim, Chief Technology Officer with Waterton, is responsible for all Information Technology decisions for the company -- from applications and systems support to voice and data communication. Joining the company three years ago, and with a background that included experience with workflow products and Six Sigma Initiatives, Vilim recognized a need to better define the company's business processes.

• His first project was to develop a Policy and Procedures system
• His second project involved Due Diligence Walk-Throughs (on site inspections of properties the company was considering to acquire)
• The company's new hire requisition process needed to be streamlined and updated

While the Policy and Procedure process needed automation, the more cumbersome process was the Due Diligence, as it relied on paper-based forms. For a 300 unit property, Waterton dealt with 300 distinct paper forms making that process unwieldy and prone to errors.

More daunting, however, was Waterton's Property Takeover Process. Its characteristics included:

• A compressed timeframe (60 days from start to finish)
• The need to interface with and across multiple organizations (HR, Finance, IT, Acquisitions, Property Operations)
• A way for the process to kickoff notifications that activities had been completed or information was now available to other departments and users
• The ability to address the 400+ tasks, their dependencies, conditions and timelines

Vilim needed a BPM tool that would provide the technology and business value that Waterton required. The IT considerations, however, were secondary to its business considerations. "We had to solve a business problem, use reasonably standard technology, be cost-effective and find tools that fit into our technology roadmap," Vilim remarked. Waterton wanted a browser-based platform, an effective dashboard and the flexibility to enhance capabilities with web services, access any SQL data it needed and to automate and manage the many forms that drive the business.

"We recognized early on that Workflow Director would help us automate most of our business processes. Then we tried laying out our Property Takeover process in Microsoft Project, hoping we could develop workflows to automate that process. While we could define dependencies we still could not notify the people involved in the tasks. When we heard about Process Director it just clicked: if you have a project you need to automate and it doesn't fit into a workflow, that's a project for Process Director," Vilim added.

According to David Kelly, principal with Upside Research, a solid BPM solution includes the following:

• A process engine
• A business rules engine
• Integration with existing systems
• Reporting and monitoring tools, and for activity-based processes
• Predictive Analysis (being alerted to a prospective problem before it becomes a problem.)

"We are pleased that Waterton Residential has selected both of our products to automate its business process, and that the company recognized that its non-linear, activity-based processes required a different type of BPM solution," stated Edward Skiko, CEO of BP Logix. "Waterton can use Workflow Director for its more traditional BPM processes and use Process Director to model its non-linear activities recognizing their conditions, constraints and timelines. Process Director can also then use its predictive analysis to determine if a future activity is likely to be completed on time or be delayed," Skiko concluded.

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