MSB Endorses Metastorm BPM as a Business-Critical Component

Following a competitive review, UK-based MSB International has turned to Metastorm to automate its internal processes in support of its re-focus on customer service. Among the selection criteria was a need for a fast and cost-effective approach, the ability to track and record progress, and a mindset in which technology should adapt to the business instead of the other way around. Overall, Metastorm BPM helps MSB eliminate extraneous processes to focus instead on its customer service mission.

By freeing staff in MSB’s six locations from their paper-based tasks, they are able to spend more time with customers and perform other higher value functions that are necessary for a customer-centric company. However, data still needs to be captured from multiple departments on customers and their requirements, contractors and the pay rates, and other related information.

Accomplishing this required a series of applications developed with Metastorm’s BPM software. The applications were developed in conjunction with the end users, who mapped out their ideal process, and the IT staff, who did the heavy lifting - the coding and testing of the application and its integration with databases. Data is recorded electronically and is accessible and traceable by multiple users.

As the Metastorm BPM suite has become an integral part of MSB’s IT infrastructure, MSB has been able to leverage the application as a platform to quickly generate the applications necessary on an on-going basis to eliminate time-consuming processes with tangible results, explains Laura Mooney, Metastorm’s senior director, corporate and product marketing. The platform approach of Metastorm BPM gives MSB the agility to easily modify and develop new applications for other people-intensive processes as the business evolves and grows. MSB is realising ongoing benefits with the most important one being the ability to manage its critical business processes across all of its locations and employees.

The first and most critical process the company automated in Metastorm BPM is its ’Contractors Out Form’, known within MSB as COF - a sales agreement for all of its divisions that allows any MSB associate to complete the form directly from their Intranet portal. Using Metastorm, the COF is automatically routed to appropriate individuals for scrutiny and authorisation, but its capabilities go beyond mere routing. As an application it captures appropriate information from databases and includes the necessary form fields from the sales associate, thus enabling users to work within the application, not just move it along.

Due to the increased internal efficiency 100,000 was saved over a one-year period from the COF application alone. This was derived from 200 users saving up to 4,000 hours per year in process implementation time.

A core philosophy within MSB is that the IT systems support and flex around the business process, not the other way round. For instance, placements made under Managed or Preferred Status have different business rules applied to them and thus are required to involve another series of processes such as comparing the COF with the pricing in the database, and getting approval. If the contract has non-standard language, the application automatically sends the COF to the legal department for review, modification and approval. In other cases, the COF process requires updating the accounting department’s system with the pricing, tax and salary information. With the application, this not only eliminates the need for data re-entry, it automatically extracts the information necessary for generating invoices, thus creating a level of efficiency not previously achieved at MSB.

Metastorm BPM tracks the COF throughout its process and alerts users if a COF is in one place for more than one working day, which keeps it moving through the process. A record is made of each department’s throughput and is stored in the Metastorm BPM folder trail. This keeps track of who approved what and when.

Due to the success of its COF process automation, MSB has further leveraged Metastorm BPM across the company and to date has over 31 processes deployed including processes to perform credit checks on new clients, tracking permanent placement clients, client contract management, client survey response management, internal IT helpdesk management, and compliance with UK employment agency legislations as well as numerous Human Resources processes.