Another important goal of implementing BPM is to identify parts of a business process that aren't automated. Often, these are choke points where an employee is responsible for taking the information from one system, performing a manual task or analysis requiring human judgment, and then kicking off a process in another system. In these cases, the BPM tool itself can provide e-mail notifications and reminders, in combination with Web-based forms, to prompt workers to perform those tasks and keep things moving.

This layer of workflow automation also provides visibility into processes that otherwise would occur away from the watchful eyes of corporate information systems. Since Wyeth is in the highly regulated drug development business, having better documented processes and auditing of how they are carried out could help the company in its dealings with regulators.

BPM is also helping Wyeth improve the efficiency of routine administrative processes. For example, one of its BPM initiatives is related to research projects that Wyeth conducts with the help of physicians. Rather than dealing with regulated medical data, it is focused on improving the interactions between Wyeth Medical professionals and the clinicians they work with around the world. The BPM solution provides significantly improved levels of management, collaboration and timeliness of managing these clinical research studies. Previously, Wyeth R&D personnel used a variety of systems and tools to track the activities of clinical investigators, including the number of patients seen and whether their reports on those patients met the requirements of the research protocol. Clinical grant payments were also handled in multiple ways by the research teams at Wyeth, leading to a payment request in SAP. Using the BPM tool, Wyeth can now introduce business rules to initiate the workflow for seeking approval for payments.

"The value is in the process consistency. Rather than relying on individual knowledge to make sure things get done, we can rely on an automated, documented process," says Jazz Tobaccowalla, Wyeth's vice president of information services, the technology group that supports the R&D division. "This is particularly important as we're going more global with our workforce and trying to leverage every hour available in the clock. It gives us a consistent way of doing things and a way to capture knowledge - everything that we can lose when people leave or people forget."

Bust Silos and Tie Processes Together

For Wyeth, the decision to focus on BPM emerged from an analysis of where the research systems group was putting its energy. "The group I inherited had a big emphasis on software development, with the idea that we should build software from scratch where possible," says Tobaccowalla.

Tobaccowalla shifted the emphasis to buying and adapting commercially available software. Yet the classic 'build versus buy' trade-off was only part of the story. He also came to the conclusion that there was too much emphasis on the transaction systems and too little on those that enabled the processes that were valuable to the company. "Development was focused on siloed, transaction systems. We had integration technology that moved data from one system to another, but we did not necessarily tie the processes across these systems together. What we really needed was for the process to flow with the data," Tobaccowalla says.

In the R&D division particularly, "there's certainly a greater emphasis on efficiency," Tobaccowalla says, "so consistency and process and clarity of who is doing what is important." For example, the BPM system can include process-monitoring rules that detect when a required approval is taking too long - perhaps because the responsible person is out sick - and notify another manager.

One of the first benefits Wyeth saw from R&D's BPM initiative was that software development time was cut in half. Tobaccowalla says that on the average project, the actual software development that would have required six months of traditional programming work can be accomplished in about three months with a BPM tool. (This does not include the up-front time spent defining how the process should work, which is sometimes the bigger part of a project.) So while he had only planned to tackle three BPM projects in 2007, he wound up with eight underway by the end of the year.