SaaS-based Blueprint Process Mapping, Documenting and Modeling Tool Makes BPM Easier Than Ever for Business People

AUSTIN, Texas (Business Wire EON) April 8, 2008 -- Lombardi, a leader in business process management (BPM) software, today announced that the Lombardi Blueprint™ Spring ’08 release is live. This release is immediately available to the more than 2,400 companies across 88 countries that are currently using Blueprint, as well as the new customers accessing it over the web. Blueprint is an ‘on-demand’ process documentation tool that is used to collaboratively map an organization’s business processes, identify problems, and prioritize improvement opportunities. Delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), the innovative Enterprise 2.0 application allows customers to immediately start discovering and documenting their processes without training and without having to download or install any software.

Blueprint is very interesting for organizations looking for collaborative process discovery

First introduced in February 2007, and made publicly available in April 2007, Lombardi Blueprint is the best business-facing SaaS-based BPM product on the market today. This maturity is reflected in this major upgrade. Customers simply point their browser at the Blueprint URL (https://blueprint.lombardi.com/), login, and immediately begin using the product.

“When we launched Blueprint a year ago, our goal was to make it easier for real business people to discuss, align and document their processes,” said Phil Gilbert, president of Lombardi. “We succeeded. Blueprint’s simple user interface helps people collect and organize powerful process information faster than any other product. In this release, we focused on simplifying how people draw detailed process diagrams. And again, I think we have succeeded. With this release, Blueprint is the best business-facing process diagramming tool anywhere, at any price.”

Lombardi Blueprint provides multiple views for representing processes. The process mapping view is targeted towards business users who need to describe activities and responsibilities and want to identify potential problems. Blueprint also supports detailed workflow modeling using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) for more sophisticated business analysts and process modelers throughout the organization. The documentation view provides wiki-like capabilities for documenting processes. Additionally, Blueprint serves as a central repository for all process information, automatically managing revision history, as well as rollback and audit trail information for every process.

This latest release introduces a set of new diagramming innovations that dramatically decrease the time and complexity of building detailed process diagrams. Inline diagramming completely replaces the inefficient drag and drop and palette approach that has dominated the process modeling market for several decades. Compared to legacy modeling tools like Visio, Blueprint allows users to create sophisticated diagrams in a fraction of the time. In addition, linked common processes, collapsible sub-processes, and diagram zoom in/out allows a single diagram to represent what would be split across many diagrams in traditional modeling tools.

Additionally, Lombardi’s Spring ’08 release of Blueprint has a powerful, new Microsoft Visio importer. Any Visio process drawing can now be easily imported into a Blueprint Professional Edition account.

“In today's complex business landscape, it’s important to get consensus from everybody on what business processes we should focus on and why," said Shawn Clark, Penn State University. "We’ve found that Blueprint is really valuable in this area – it provides a superb tool for mapping and managing process-based and it does it in a very business-friendly way so that anyone in the company can feel comfortable participating.”

Full Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) support also means that diagrams can be exported to a Business Process Management Suite to be executed, such as Lombardi Teamworks^®, the award-winning BPM suite for designing, controlling, and optimizing business processes. Finally, Blueprint includes an integrated process repository, which serves as a central location for housing common, reusable processes and evergreen documentation, a feature unique from any other business process analysis (BPA) tool.

Since process models are built on Lombardi’s unique Shared Model technology, they can be transferred back and forth between Blueprint and Lombardi Teamworks. This round trip process deployment provides the direct linkage from high-level strategy and goals all the way through to execution of specific activities. Based on the Object Management Group’s (www.omg.org) Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) standards specification, exportable Blueprint models are fully portable and can be utilized with any BPDM-enabled tool or deployment environment.

Lombardi Blueprint utilizes some of the most advanced technology for Internet security available today. By accessing Blueprint through either Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 6.0 or higher, a 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology protects customer information using both server authentication and data encryption, ensuring that their data is safe, secure, and available only to the registered users on their account.

Additionally, Lombardi Blueprint is hosted in a secure, SAS 70 Type II compliant server environment that uses advanced technology to prevent interference or access from outside intruders. Only authorized support personnel have physical access to Blueprint servers.

Key enhancements in the latest release include:

• Inline Editing for improved usability: Diagramming ease of use and productivity improvements have been incorporated into this release. New Blueprint users are able to get started faster, and experienced users can get their job done more efficiently than ever before.
• Expandable and collapsible sub-processes: Sub-processes within Blueprint can be collapsed to simplify the diagram view, or expanded to show more detail. Users control the level of detail shown in the diagram view to that which is best suited for the particular audience involved.
• Reusable common linked processes: Blueprint supports the extraction of sub-processes from existing models into new reusable processes. In this manner, processes can be linked to enable reuse of common processes throughout an enterprise.
• Panning and zooming functionality: Blueprint now provides a zoom capability, enabling larger diagrams to be viewed and edited more easily. Users can zoom in or out as necessary to focus on a particular section of a process or to fit the entire process inside their screen at once.
• More powerful diagramming: BPMN link event support helps make diagrams cleaner and easier to understand. Long flow lines can now be replaced by a pair of links. This not only improves the printed view of the diagram, but also improves user interaction, since double clicking on a link inside Blueprint instantly pans a user’s view to its target at the opposite end of the flow.
• Importing Microsoft Visio process drawings: Blueprint now includes a powerful, Microsoft Visio importer capability. Professional Edition account users may now import any Visio process drawing easily into Blueprint.

"Blueprint is very interesting for organizations looking for collaborative process discovery," said Andy Kellett, Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group. "In addition to its primary role as a free-standing discovery and prioritization tool, it also offers round-trip integration with Teamworks to ensure what is modeled is what is actually being executed."

“This latest release of Blueprint builds upon Lombardi’s vision of dramatically simplifying process modeling and documentation for companies of all sizes,” said Rod Favaron, CEO at Lombardi. “We think that customers agree with us, because since we introduced it a year ago, Blueprint has gained tremendous acceptance across the globe as a proven way to model processes and get consensus across the organization.”

There are two different types of Blueprint Accounts available: a Free Edition and a Professional Edition. For more information or to sign up online, visit: http://www.lombardi.com/bpm-blueprint-product.php.

About Lombardi

Lombardi is a leader in business process management (BPM). We offer award-winning BPM technology and services to help our customers, partners and government agencies around the world succeed with their process improvement initiatives.

Lombardi is behind some of the largest, most successful BPM implementations in the world. Our customers include Allianz Group, Aflac, Banco Espirito Santo, Barclays Global Investors, Dell, El Paso Energy, FETAC, Financial Services Authority, Ford Motor Company, Hasbro, ING Direct, Intel, Maritz Travel, National Bank of Canada, National Institute of Health, Safety-Kleen, T-Mobile, UCLH, Wells Fargo Financial, Xbridge and numerous governmental agencies. For more information, visit www.lombardi.com.

Lombardi, Teamworks are registered trademarks and Teamworks Process Optimizer, Teamworks Portal, Teamworks for Office, Teamworks for SharePoint, Teamworks for Organization Management and Lombardi Blueprint are trademarks of Lombardi Software, Inc. All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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