The PABX has progressed from little more than a manual switchboard to a tool, which enables businesses to operate more efficiently and productively. Today's communication platforms combine unified communications (UC) and communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) to give companies a solid base of features with which to improve their operations.
Siemens Enterprise Communications is one of the world's leading vendors of open communication solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Our products, solutions and services make business processes effective, faster and more secure - with any device, network or IT infrastructure. These solutions include complete converged voice and data communications networks, consultancy, professional services, outsourced managed services and industry specific vertical solutions.
Unified communications enables the integration of voice, data, image, collaboration and presence, and has created a platform for CEBP, the next step in the evolutionary process. With CEBP, unified communications portals are tightly integrated into business processes and enable the process user to be more productive and effective.
In the bid to deliver business benefits, suppliers focus on two main areas: presence and collaboration. In the presence arena, the user can see who is available for sharing information before any attempts to make contact. This significantly speeds up processes and ensures time is not wasted in efforts to reach colleagues and customers.
Recent developments in collaboration enable people in diverse geographical locations to work together using voice and share documents and images. This means documents can be edited, and updated during a working session with everyone participating at the same time.
CEBPs represent the last missing piece in the evolution of communications. That's the opinion of Fred Maurus, Divisional Manager: Technology Management and Marketing, Siemens Enterprise Communications, who says: “At Siemens, we believe that open, standards-based communications will maximise business value by enabling CEBPs and integrating communications into business processes. The process user will be able to handle the processes and the communication requirements at the same time from the same user interface.”
With presence awareness, the process owner can see which knowledgeable resources are available and contact them instantaneously, initiate add-hoc conferences with predetermined workgroups and access background infrastructure while still working in the process.
The advent of UC, which enables the integration of voice, data, image, personal and team applications such as presence, collaboration, conferencing, etc, has created a platform for the next step in this evolutionary process - and that next step is CEBP.
Maurus believes that CEBP is set to change business processes. “Companies want to grow their revenue, manage their cost, achieve customer excellence, be more productive and collaborate efficiently. These objectives are process driven and communication can now be integral and easy to use to better achieve these goals,” he says. “As the competition heats up, only the fittest will survive, and CEBP can give companies the edge to stay ahead of the pack.”
Gartner sees this development as a cool communication application, which will result in measurable and quantifiable improvements in productivity, latency, quality and other tangible issues. Traditionally, communications have been managed in silos, entirely separate from any business applications that these individuals are using. However, the smooth interaction between the various communication elements - mobile, telephone, data, etc - is not always guaranteed and considerable time can be wasted in efforts to reach colleagues and customers.
Unified communications has made substantial inroads towards addressing these problems by bringing all the elements of communications together. CEBP enables workflows to be even further improved by direct integration between the business application and the related communication functions.
Instead of organisations becoming locked into silo application integration, CEBP uses a rich set of high-level web services. Based on services-oriented architecture (SOA), the approach provides modular Web services, which can rapidly be incorporated and re-used across any business processes throughout the enterprise.
CEBP can be initiated manually by a person or automatically by an application. Vertical industry examples of CEBP in action include:
* Banking: when home mortgage rates hit a low, a CEBP could alert customers to take action
* Automotive manufacturing: service engineers could be automatically alerted when a quality issue is identified, in order for the organisation to take immediate action and minimise business impact
* Healthcare: a paramedic at the scene of an accident inputs a request for organ donors into the computer. The system automatically checks for available donors, makes contact and arranges for delivery. This application reduces the reaction time and has already saved many lives
“Companies which business focus is on improving customer service, reducing risk, automating information flow, or speeding up response to various situations, will want to take a look at CEBP. Siemens Enterprise Communications is at the forefront of CEBP development utilising OpenScape unified communications based on SOA,“ Maurus says.
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