Handling Complex Organizations? A Piece of (Situational Layer) Cake!

For the reasons explained in the previous paragraph, Pega frequently sells initial BPM software licenses to target accounts that are focused on a specific purpose or area of operations, rather than selling large enterprise-wide licenses. A primary objective of this strategy is to have its customers quickly realize business value from Pega’s software.

Once a customer has realized this initial value, the vendor then works with that customer to identify opportunities for follow-on sales. The sales process for follow-on sales is often shorter as a result of Pega’s established relationship with the customer. Typically, organizations can automate their first process in 90 days, and the next process can be delivered in even less time.

This is how sophisticated service companies can create an ideal service infrastructure (servicing backbone) in small manageable chunks. With every process they create or improve, they should build for (necessary future) changes. Namely, while every process is specialized for a particular circumstance, the ability to reuse the components from previously built processes enhances the company’s foundation for agility.

Making situational rule selection work requires the right structure for organizations to adapt and innovate. Pega allows organizations to add “specialized” layers of instructions to their repository of rules (RuleBase, in Pega’s lingo) by recording just what will be different in specific situations. This is modeled to match the way people think, and makes the system easier to understand and instruct.

For example, a business may have a company-wide standard (or baseline) way of processing orders. But when an order is for a key customer and the product is out of stock, the company may want to do something special. Or, if it is a first-time customer in a certain region, the organization may have special customer satisfaction checks it wants to run.

Pega’s flagship SmartBPM Suite handles these situations by layering-on specializations, i.e., adding personalization differences without having to go back and manually weave revisions (pesky and dangerous software versioning) into the corporate standard. Users can specify how their processes, decision rules, and data sources will work just as they would do if they were explaining their business policies to a new employee. The SmartBPM engine determines which set of processes, rules, and data sources apply best in every situation.

To illustrate, the figure below shows an example of a hypothetical global company with specialized needs in the US, Canada, and Europe. Thpractices has been built on top of the rules database. There would be a number of individual RuleBase entries that define standard corporate processes, decisions, and data sources.

The next layer might then contain specializations representing differences between North America and Europe. This “layer cake” can evolve to handle additional business differences, whereby new versions can then be layered on top to contain only the rules that describe differences (while the unchanged characteristics are inherited from lower layers). For example, they could add French specializations for the appropriate portions of Canada and some other idiosyncratic factors to roll out a pilot project in Los Angeles.

Incidentally, Pega’s SmartBPM Suite lets users easily pilot (i.e., test or simulate) new situations to understand options and validate expectations. Piloting can be conducted in terms of customer segments, regions, product lines, time zones, channels… you name the factor or dimension. The ability to quickly and safely pilot proposed changes allows an operation to validate new concepts such as cost-saving measures or tailored product offerings before investing in the entire solution suite.

e SmartBPM suite with the PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC) rules repository is the supporting BPM solution, whereby a baseline BPM application with enterprise-wide best