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Analysis of business processes and management of those processes today are done with different sets of software. With an upcoming version of its business process analysis platform, ProActivity Inc. is looking to the day when those distinctions are not made.
ProActivity 4.0, due this fall, will provide four major areas of enhancement that officials said will allow more scalability and ultimately facilitate linking the BPA and BPM (business process management) software camps.
A primary upgrade in 4.0 is an all-Java architecture based on an Enterprise JavaBeans model. This will open up ProActivitys platform and make it easier to partner with BPM vendors, said Chief Technology Officer Lawrence Verner, in Newton, Mass.
Version 4.0 will also feature a reporting engine that allows analysts to create ad hoc reports with a drag-and-drop menu. In ProActivitys current release, Version 3.1, analysts can create reports from templates. ProActivity will gain features to make the user interface consistent and provide enterprise scalability.
Verner said the new platform will provide enhancements that make it easier to scale BPA inside and outside the enterprise.
ProActivity 3.1, released last month, is designed as a Business Process Knowledge platform for the enterprise that provides a digital blueprint of the end-to-end processes of an enterprise and all its extended partners.
The platform sits inside an Oracle Corp. or Sybase Inc. relational database to provide reusable process information coupled with analytics capabilities. Support for IBMs DB2 database will soon be added.
Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp., is using ProActivitys BPA platform to understand and speed up the implementation of a J.D. Edwards & Co. ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. The ProActivity platform will enable Hamilton to capture and define business processes, system interfaces, business objects and human roles within each plant, according to company officials. Hamilton will use the information to map and design each implementation to fit into the existing infrastructure and standardize its ERP business processes across the organization.
According to Dennis Charest, CIO at Hamilton, of Windsor Locks, Conn., most of his teams input and process discovery had traditionally been done using flip charts and Microsoft Corp.s Visio maps—an extremely time-consuming and impractical solution.
Using ProActivitys platform, Charest will be able to build a knowledge base of Hamiltons business processes and gain a more complete understanding of the data flows, interactions and dependencies that will go into its J.D. Edwards implementation.