12/27/2006

HandySoft Global Corp., a provider of business process management (BPM) solutions, announced the release of OfficeEngineTM, an application that enables knowledge workers to create, assign, sub-delegate, track and execute mission critical work in real time.

ebizQ received the following details:

Originally developed for a federal law enforcement agency, HandySoft has expanded OfficeEngine’s capabilities to meet the needs of both public and private sector organizations.

“Although traditional BPM solutions have driven significant value to organizations by defining, automating and institutionalizing structured business processes, the fact remains that structured processes account for less than 20% of all work performed today,” said Derek Miers, president of BPM Focus, a leading BPM consultancy. “The other 80% of work is completely dynamic.”

In today’s world, email is the primary tool for facilitating dynamic work. Executives use email to assign work, middle-level managers use it to delegate sub-tasks and knowledge workers use it to collaborate with peers and subject matter experts when completing tasks. Unfortunately, email lacks the enterprise visibility necessary to monitor work in real time, to identify issues as they unfold and take corrective action before larger problems arise.

OfficeEngine solves this problem by modeling and displaying work in real time as it happens. What was once a series of disjointed peer-to-peer emails is now a single, centralized dashboard, clearly illustrating the journey of all work items from creation, to assignment, to sub-delegation, to completion—including all individuals involved, all collaboration, all attachments and all related status information.

“As CEO, I need to know where mission critical work stands at any given moment,” said John Kiser, chief executive officer of Gray Hat Research Corporation. “With OfficeEngine, that information is now at my fingertips, any time I need it. Armed with more complete and timely information, I’m able to make better decisions, faster.”

Beyond providing visibility and control to executives and managers, OfficeEngine also drives knowledge worker productivity. OfficeEngine captures and interprets the business context of each task assigned. It then searches internal and external information sources—desktop files, content management systems, knowledge management systems, learning management systems, resource scheduling systems, employee performance management systems and the Web—and proactively displays documents, presentations and content that is most likely to assist the knowledge worker in completing his/her task. The result is a much more productive employee and a more efficient organization.

Watson search technology from Intellext is a key component of this powerful business context capability.

“OfficeEngine is the ideal platform for Watson,” said Al Wasserberger, chief executive officer of Intellext. “By combining Watson’s innovative search capabilities with OfficeEngine’s dynamic process framework, we are delivering on the much-discussed but never realized vision of context-specific, just-in-time information to users as they perform their jobs. While other software vendors are putting search boxes in their applications or providing interfaces for low value tasks like vacation scheduling, HandySoft is actually giving users the information they need to complete their tasks better and faster.”

OfficeEngine also reduces the significant investment in time and money required to model existing processes. Rather than analyzing and modeling processes beforehand, OfficeEngine documents and models processes in real time, as employees perform their jobs. The result is real-world processes that are archived for future use. Users may choose to leverage these historical process models as a head start when initiating similar work in the future and organizations can use them as a baseline to analyze and define best practices going forward.

OfficeEngine can be deployed very quickly, with minimal IT investment and end-user training. The solution operates as a stand alone application, from within a variety of standard portals or embedded directly in Microsoft Outlook. This fact, combined with its intuitive user interface, enables most organizations to deploy OfficeEngine in the time it takes to roll out a commercial email application