Process Your Life

As money is a scarce resource these days,  almost every company focusses on effectiveness and effectivity of all of its actions.  This is not a bad thing. During the boom years, companies spent money on expensive services and tools. The ROI was very often one slide of a ppt presentation shown at the project kick-off meeting. Almost no one did a real analysis, which actions really brought business added value. This is especially true for engineering focussed companies, where business added value is even harder to calculate than in other industries.

Now, times have changed.

This is the main reason, why companies are more and more interested in not buying their tools, but using them as  ”software as a service” (SaaS). You just pay for what you need and when you need it. It’s as simple as that.

Now, what are the key advantages of using process management tools as a service?

Low costs

Instead of buying lots of licenses at one time, you simply order the number of licenses you currently need. If you require more, just order more. If you require less, just change your subscription. And this is only the licenses. Seen from the IT point of view, companies don’t need to care about server installation, rack space, storage space, archive or backup facilities. A development team that needs a solution now and not in three months could use the service without even involving their IT department.

Low risk

Almost every SaaS application has a free trial period. Without any installation, you can start evaluating from the first day. If you don’t like it, just stop. No money wasted. Another important topic is service availability and data security. Companies need to be sure, that they can use the service for their business and that their data is safe and secure.  Every serious SaaS provider guarantees a specific availability and will have backup and restore facilities and periodic security audits.

Quick start

In normal process management projects, the first step is to set up the system, configure it, tweak the process metamodel, model the processes, define the users, create the logins and after all that, have the processes executed in engineering projects and have real business added value out of that. By using SaaS, all the setup effort is much less, the serious process management systems that come as a service are already set up with processes that can be used from day one and just need some process tailoring. Even better, if the system directly supports a guided process tailoring.

Fast ROI

Because of the above factors, ROI can much easier be calculated upfront and measured during the project. This allows to control, if the process management project is really effective and provides added value to the business. Companies may simply cancel the service, if ROI is not in sight.

The Stages process management system is now available as a service. With “Stages as a Service“, customers can start defining, managing and enacting their processes at reasonable costs and with almost no risk. Starting at 15€ or $19 per user and month, the full Stages features (e.g. process modeling, standard compliance assurance, process execution, process-controlled document management) can be used without requiring any local installation.

“Stages as a Service” is best suited for engineering focussed companies or development teams in search of better development and engineering processes. For a jump start, every Stages as a Service instance comes preconfigured with a best practice and proven-in-use development process.

See http://www.stagesAsAService.com/ for more info.

Erich

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On July 9th, the the first customer-internal Stages User Forum took place at Continental. It was organized by Cristina Romcea (thanks a lot!).  In the first track, three different business units presented their current solutions for managing their engineering processes. Both, their process modeling and process enactment was impressive.  All three units headed for Automotive SPICE level 3 and continuously prove that by a large number of assessments.

In the second track, the corporate process architecture was presented. The discussions showed, that it is not easy to bridge the gap between an abstract product lifecycle process and engineering processes that can directly be used in development projects. The key idea is to model processes in different abstraction layers and map the interfacing components onto each other. With its unique compliance mapping features, Stages should be ready for doing that.

Tool integration is key in all process management projects. Therefore, solutions for integrating process and project management (Stages interfaces seamlessly with MS Project Enterprise Server), process and document management (Stages interface to MS Sharepoint) and metrics collection across the toolchain (Stages Reporting Engine) were presented in the third track.

At the end all participants agreed, that the User Forum was a very good platform for presenting and sharing ideas around all topics of process management. The User Forum will definitely be repeated next year.

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