08/17/2006

Lombardi®, a specialist in Business Process Management (BPM) software for Global 2000 companies, today announced the latest release of Lombardi for Office™ 2003, the company’s desktop-based product that tightly integrates the Lombardi TeamWorks® BPM software platform with the Microsoft Office System. The Lombardi for Office 2003 BPM product makes it easy for any employee to participate in any business process directly from their desktop using Microsoft Office software - including Word, Excel, Outlook, Office Communicator and InfoPath – with virtually no training required.

ebizQ received the following details:

This new release dramatically expands end user capabilities to include skills-based and context-sensitive collaboration, making it easier than ever for process participants to engage the right people at the right time anywhere in the organization to drive business process improvement.

“Customer acceptance of Lombardi for Office 2003 has been tremendous,” said Rod Favaron, President and Chief Executive Officer at Lombardi. “As a process-driven company, everyone here is dedicated to delivering the best tools and services designed to help customers extend the reach and value of business process management to every user in their organization. Adding real-time presence and collaboration further extends the value that our customers receive as they deploy BPM software across their enterprise.”

Lombardi for Office 2003’s strength is leveraging the familiar and powerful capabilities of the Microsoft Office System to simplify adoption and participation in enterprise-level BPM deployments. According to Forrester Research, “today's information worker tools are disjointed, fragmented, and stove-piped. They require people to continually step outside their business process.” (“Context is King in the New World of Work”, Forrester Research, Inc., March 8, 2006). Lombardi for Office 2003 addresses this issue by enabling business users to easily locate and communicate with others directly within the context of the business process in which they are involved. For example, during an insurance claim process, a junior adjudicator may contact a senior claims expert via an Instant Message chat to inquire about additional information related to an irregularity before approving the claim. The entire chat can be recorded and maintained as part of the claim’s audit trail.

“Leveraging the knowledge of the whole organization is key to success with BPM,” said Phil Gilbert, Executive Vice President and CTO at Lombardi. “With our first release of Lombardi for Office, we made it simpler than ever for everyone in the company to take part in process management. We are now adding a whole new dimension to process management – right-time collaboration with the right people in the company using the Office System. By building the understanding of the capabilities of different people in the organization directly into the process, we are streamlining process management like never before.”