05/01/2008

Fujitsu Computer Systems today an Automated Business Process Discovery service designed to answer one of the biggest challenges faced by companies embarking on a process improvement and governance initiative today -- illuminating the exposure to compliance failure, fraud, and other legal and efficiency issues lying hidden in their operational workflows.

ebizQ received the following:

This innovative offering eliminates months of time and labor-intensive exploration and lets organizations immediately discover what often remains completely invisible. No other company is currently capable of offering this service, further strengthening the Fujitsu business process management suite, which enables organizations to design, simulate, automate, analyze, and optimize their business processes. Fujitsu will provide a free trial of the Automated Business Process Discovery service to select customers in North America.

Mapping out existing business processes has historically required a detailed, time-consuming, but highly inaccurate self assessment using high-priced consultants to try to expose workflow issues by interviewing key internal stakeholders and examining only a random sample of transactions. The Fujitsu Automated Business Process Discovery service reduces this expensive and often futile step while including every transaction in its assessment for far greater insight. Customers need only provide Fujitsu with the existing database logs for the business process they want to visualize. The Fujitsu software tool runs through the data and helps customers visualize their business processes while identifying potential areas for improvement.

"All business process improvement starts with fact finding," said Farhat Ali, president and chief executive officer, Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation. "We are very excited about the new Automated Business Process Discovery Service as it provides our customers with the agility to quickly begin remodeling their processes based on a thorough understanding of existing problems. By visualizing business processes, enterprises can focus on refining the way they do business, establish best practices, and, over time, reduce the number of expensive 'outlier' steps."

"Historically, the time, cost, and inaccuracy involved in mapping out existing processes has been a significant impediment to undertaking business process improvement initiatives, and certainly to obtaining all the potential benefits from it," said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president at Gartner. "An automated process discovery service has the potential to change all that, allowing organizations to kick-start their initiatives."

The service can also help businesses identify best practices and compare operations across branch offices and merged or acquired entities. Findings from the service have helped several pilot customers in Japan improve their resource allocations for various business processes, identify areas of potential risk in their business operations, and take concrete steps toward process improvement.