Whitestein Technologies to Provide Daimler with Novel Suite for Agile Business Process Management (BPM)

Next-generation BPM suite puts Daimler's vision of Agile Change Management into practice based on innovations in the area of self-managing software systems.

Whitestein Technologies today announced that it has been chosen by leading car maker Daimler AG as the provider of a Business Process Management (BPM) system based on its novel Living Systems® Process Suite. Daimler expects to make significant steps toward its strategic vision of Agile Change Management thanks to the solution’s unique goal-oriented business process modeling and execution. Whitestein is implementing the application, which will be deployed to over 12,000 users in Daimler engineering centers worldwide, together with strategic partner msg systems AG.

Robust and powerful process management solutions are critical to Daimler's ongoing success. However, Daimler concluded that the efficiency of its change management processes was limited by conventional BPM systems, which would require processes to be hard-coded before execution and allowed only very restricted adaption to a process' structure and path once it was running. Daimler's decision for the Living Systems Process Suite was thus preceded by a research project to evaluate the capabilities of innovative technologies such as Software Agents and Autonomic Computing to enable the modeling and automation of agile processes that could adapt to changing conditions at any time.

"To truly enable our vision of Agile Change Management, we needed a BPM suite that would support not only agile process design, but also agile process execution," said Jürgen Scharpf, Project Manager Agile Change Management at Daimler.

For agile process design, Daimler's envisioned solution had to align business and IT specialists in one tool and enable them to make real-time changes for immediate process governance and improvement.

For agile process execution, Daimler hoped to consolidate the many variants of its change management process into one master schema to optimize reuse of process resources. Much like the navigation system in one of its vehicles, an autonomic process engine would then navigate this flexible network of possible process paths to autonomically assemble the optimal process route for any given situation and adapt the process path whenever deliberate or unexpected changes asked for it.

"We needed a solution that would assemble the optimal change request process for any given situation and also adapt the process path whenever deliberate or unexpected changes asked for it," said Jürgen Scharpf. "The Living Systems Process Suite is capable of delivering both these key aspects of our agility vision."

Following an evaluation involving multiple vendors, Daimler chose Whitestein Technologies' Process Suite as the only offering capable of delivering both these key aspects of their agility vision.

The Living Systems Process Suite puts Daimler's vision into practice with goal-oriented business process modeling and execution. "Speed and flexibility are necessary for agile process management, but not sufficient," said Stefan Brantschen, Senior VP Advanced Technologies at Whitestein. "Goal-orientation is the key to the design-time and run-time agility dreamed of at Daimler and many other enterprises."

The Living Systems Process Suite's goal-oriented modeling notation GO-BPMN, based on OMG-standard BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), lets users describe a process in terms of the business goals it is meant to achieve. These intuitive models are ideal for cross-functional team collaboration. Goal-oriented models are also more versatile in execution, as they prescribe the results and action alternatives, but not the final flow of a process. Instead, the Living Systems Process Suite's smart engine identifies the relevant process goals and executes only the actions along the path to optimal goal fulfillment under the prevailing conditions. This results in a highly agile, situation-specific process that can incorporate any changes at any time and thus avoids process inefficiencies and failures.

"Daimler has reinforced its status as a leader in process management with its Agile Change Management initiative," said Stefan Brantschen. "We are proud that our Process Suite will enable them to count on better business user involvement and a unique self-adaptive system for unprecedented process agility."

(Updated on 2009-05-06 to reflect the new name of the Living Systems Process Suite [formerly LS/ABPM]).