Even so, Tobaccowalla says he has not found that BPM completely eliminates the need for a software development effort on his projects. While a business analyst can do more of the up-front work of defining a business process, there is still "a little bit of classic IT effort" to integrate the systems that must work with the BPM software.

Wyeth has also relied on consultants with expertise at configuring the Metastorm software to produce the actual process models, which is still a little too much like programming for the average business user. However, Tobaccowalla says Wyeth is planning to purchase Metastorm's ProVision tool, which is designed to be a more business-user-friendly tool for visual process design and reengineering, with the ability to generate models that can be imported into the BPM environment.

"Maybe with that, some of the hand-offs will become easier, and some of the simpler automations we'll be able to do with the click of a button," he says.

Success Speeds Adoption

The R&D group's success with BPM has attracted attention from other parts of Wyeth. In fact, Tobaccowalla is in the process of establishing a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) as a way for his staff to advise their business peers how to use the technology effectively. That's significant because "we don't establish COEs very easily," he says. In other words, the company doesn't devote those resources to every new technology fad that comes along, only to things it believes are strategically important.

IDC analyst Maureen Fleming wrote a research report on Metastorm that included a case study on Wyeth. She says some companies who adopt BPM start with a grand vision for gaining better control over all their business processes. Others, like Wyeth, start with a specific application that happens to be a good match for BPM. What can happen then, if all goes well, is that the approach goes 'viral' and starts marketing itself.

"When you have a good experience with a deployment, and it's on time and on budget, the uptake is very good. The heads of other departments start looking at it and saying, 'we want one of those'," Fleming says. "And I think that's what happened here, where the outcome was viral demand inside Wyeth."

Tobaccowalla says that Wyeth originally hesitated over the decision of whether or not to license the Metastorm suite. An internal technology review committee questioned the need for the suite, given that the company already had several other products such as Documentum and SAP at its disposal with workflow capabilities. Ultimately, the project team was able to make the case that BPM went beyond traditional workflow to manage processes that have to span multiple systems and that the tools had enough potential applications to be worth adding to the company's existing technology portfolio.

Wyeth's BPM initiative beginning in R&D is surprising to Pramod Sachdeva, managing director of Princeton Blue, a systems integration firm that targets the pharmaceutical industry. "This is starting on the R&D side? I think that's tremendous," he says, explaining that R&D technology groups are often too focused on specialized informatics technologies to pay attention to BPM. And that's too bad. "There's so much value to be created on the R&D side in pharmaceutical companies" where BPM could make a difference, he says.

Potential customers tend to be skeptical of claims made for BPM that "sound too good to be true," Sachdeva says. "It's only in the last two to three years that I've felt these products have reached the level where they can truly bring value to the business - and not just be another tool for IT," Sachdeva says.

Still, the tools can only do so much. Implementing BPM can be a way of identifying and addressing the gaps in a process that cuts across divisions. But those in charge of the different divisions still have to agree on how the new, automated process should work, Tobaccowalla says.

Lacking that, the result is likely to be "a layer of bureaucracy that nobody is interested in," he says. "So the real magic is getting the business process right."