CoreProcess releases process management solution

CoreFlow enables firms to integrate people, information, business processes across technologies, organisations CoreProcess South Africa, a member of CoreProcess International Plc, today announced the launch of the next version in its revolutionary industry-leading integration and application process management product designed to provide extensibility across heterogeneous IT landscapes.

CoreFlow enables organisations to integrate people, information and business processes across technologies and organisations. Additionally, CoreProcess takes the technology high ground by designing CoreFlow to be fully interoperable with Microsoft .NET, IBM WebSphere (J2EE), BEA Weblogic (J2EE), providing customers with flexibility to manage heterogeneous infrastructures, minimising complexity, and reducing total cost of ownership.

"With the constraints on IT spending, the goal is to lower costs and increase productivity," said Dale Good CEO CoreProcess International "To do this, business managers need a flexible and comprehensive technology product based around Web services and other standards that can drive innovation and support the integration of heterogeneous applications. CoreFlow 2.5 will allow customers to achieve their goals by creating and improving business processes across their IT ecosystem without changing the underlying technology foundation."

The new and improved CoreFlow administrator enables CoreProcess`s customers and/or business divisions or its partners to create new applications targeting cross-functional business processes through tools, process design, rules and methodologies. This includes a repository for reusable com or Java components for customers to create the flexibility that they have always strived for in the IT systems today.

In addition to these new and improved capabilities, CoreFlow 2.5 is comprised of the following: multi-channel access -- Web, mobile, SMS, X25 and GPRS access to business systems in connected and disconnected scenarios; enterprise portal -- internal and external unified user interfaces through a Web browser in role-based fashion; collaboration -- real-time and asynchronous and synchronous communication between people, applications and data, in either a moderated or free-form fashion; business intelligence -- the infrastructure for extracting, aggregating and analysing structured business information across the enterprise; knowledge management -- unifies multiple sources of unstructured information, such as document management, file services, XML feeds, and so on for providing and managing knowledge; an integration broker -- for internal and external process integration, based on XML messaging; business process management -- design, development, execution, monitoring, and management of business processes across the extended enterprise; J2EE-- provisioning of native, highly secured Web services implemented and developed in JAVA and extensibility through Microsoft .NET, IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic; database and operating system independence -- open and operable on all relevant platforms; and life-cycle management -- development, composing and modelling, testing, deployment, and management of the entire software landscape.

"It is widely accepted that a key cost driver for business today is the challenge of integration," said Ken Venn, CEO CoreProcess SA. "In today`s heterogeneous environment, a customer choosing a best of breed approach for its integration technologies (for example, bringing together portal and business intelligence from different vendors) is faced with the daunting challenge of integrating disparate technologies. The customer must first make the technologies work with each other before any new business value can be realised. And, this integration challenge is faced not just at the outset, but must be managed over the lifecycle of the solutions. An integrated process product, such a CoreFLow 2.5, significantly reduces cost of ownership by avoiding custom integration."

Another cost factor is the need to integrate with the wide variety of technologies and formats of various independent software vendors. CoreFlow is not only designed to be fully interoperable with .NET and J2EE on all levels (people, information, and processes) in one platform, but also provides out-of-the-box integration with third-party applications through its open architecture. Additionally, CoreFlow 2.5 permits customers to better leverage their existing personnel skill sets across the company, in all IT silos-driving down recruitment, retention, and training costs.

When shipping business solutions that are powered by CoreFlow 2.5, CoreProcess pre-configures those solutions with business content such as user roles, taxonomies, reports, queries, and business process templates. Therefore, customers are able to significantly accelerate their time to value.

"CoreFlow 2.5 turns IT assets into a strategic value driver for customers," said Nick Gazzard, Strategic Marketing director, CoreProcess International. "Pure technology alone cannot support today`s complex business processes-customers need a complete integration and application environment that addresses their need to create new value from existing technology investments and skill sets. With CoreFlow 2.5, CoreProcess has delivered the blueprint for turning Web services from a concept into business reality, while, at the same time, driving down the costs of operations."

Going forward, all CoreProcess solutions will be powered by CoreFlow 2.5 as CoreProcess delivers on its vision of industry driving solutions. New applications and solutions will be developed against the industry driving blueprint such as (ECR for Retail and the FSE for Financial, and CoreFlow will provide the technology to enable that blueprint.

CoreProcess has already begun to deliver on the promise of improved productivity with shipments of CoreFlow 2.5 with solutions that are cross-applications, a new breed of packaged composite applications that snap-on to existing IT environments. One of the first cross-application solutions, CoreQuery was implemented at BodyIQ in November 2002, with many additional solutions scheduled for delivery in 2003.

The solutions developed by CoreProcess South Africa and partner companies, target specific cross-functional and business process needs - such as advanced product portfolio management CoreNPI, Collaborative planning, forecast and replenishment CorePlan, and promotion management CorePromotions - by delivering new functionality that is driven by information and services that come from a variety of systems located both inside and outside the enterprise.

Customers can already take advantage of some of the solutions which CoreProcess offers. These include CoreCommerce, CoreQuery, CoreNPI, CoreDemand. To find out more about these solutions and about CoreFlow 2.5, contact CoreProcess South Africa.