Companies rewarded for BPM excellence

Johannesburg, 26 Aug 2009

Zurich SA/Ovations walked away with the Grand Prix Award for BPM Excellence, sponsored by K2, at the ITWeb BPM awards event held in Johannesburg last night.

It was one of three companies ITWeb presented with excellence awards for their achievements in business process management (BPM) project implementation and success.

The award was given to Zurich SA/Ovations for the enhancement of Zurich SA's BPM environment and the replacement of its software solution. This resulted in process improvements and greater management visibility and capability in the company environment, bringing centralised processes, increased flexibility, reduced costs and improved efficiencies.

Accepting the award was Ovations MD, Thys Bruwer, who said: “We feel very positive about this award. It is always good to be recognised for what we do and it also adds more credibility to our product and services when approaching prospective customers.”

The BPM Excellence Award, sponsored by IMB, was awarded to MediHelp - MediChron Department, for implementing a BPM solution that supplies wall-to-wall automated workflow processes for each of the main MediHelp departments. This enabled the organisation to cope with the enormous volume of paper-based submissions and applications.

Reinette Fourie, IT director at MediHelp, accepted the award and said it was great to be recognised for the long road of hard work. “We are thankful to our users and business partners, Datacentrix and K2, for their help from start to finish.”

Vodacom was awarded the Metastorm-sponsored BPM Excellence Award for the implementation of a BPM platform and system that enables automated workflow processes for strategic areas of the business. It rationalises selected business processes in targeted operational and service-oriented departments in the organisation, realising a 30% improvement in processing responses.

Integration manager at Vodacom, Arthur Benting, noted the company was “pleasantly surprised to receive this award”. “We still have hard work ahead of us, looking to build further on this good foundation, which Datacentrix helped us with.”

Ranka Jovanovic, editorial director at ITWeb, says these awards came as a result of the huge interest in BPM in the industry, and a need to recognise, highlight and reward the good news. “As the media, we usually only highlight the bad things, so it was time to reward and recognise the good things that companies are doing.”

The judging of the awards was conducted by a panel of independent experts who concentrated on innovative BPM projects or processes that demonstrated a successful solution to a problem.