HOLOSOFX ships v. 1.0 of Workflo.BPR, breakthrough software for process representation

Business Wire, Feb 27, 1995

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 1995--HOLOSOFX Inc. (formerly known as Virtual Management Inc.) has announced commercial availability of version 1.0 of its flagship business-process representation product, Workflow.BPR.

Workflow.BPR, the first in a family of Business Process Improvement products, is a comprehensive, industry-independent, business-process definition tool that allows realistic visual representation of exactly how a process is handled under specific conditions.

Workflow.BPR, v. 1.0, is a single-user, Windows-based tool that captures the activities, participants, resources and conditions that determine the course of a business process. These components are then used to generate virtual workflows, which realistically represent exactly how a process is handled under all specified conditions and exceptions.

In addition, all of the possible alternative paths within a virtual workflow can be captured and an explicit path can be generated on demand.

``Workflow.BPR is a definite breakthrough,'' said Bernard Johann, Ph.D., senior business consultant at Motorola and Workflow.BPR beta user.

``One of the biggest challenges has been realistically modeling the complexity of work and the multiple variations of a business process... Through an easy-to-use graphical interface, it (Workflow.BPR) has the ability to store, analyze and report specific data about variations of a process. Workflow.BPR will greatly improve the way we approach the design or redesign of business processes, thereby helping drive organizational change.''

As an industry-independent tool, Workflow.BPR meets a wide variety of business-process improvement needs.

``The ability to realistically represent business processes is a prerequisite for business improvement in quality management, business-process re-engineering, activity-based costing and enterprise modeling,'' said Hassan Korshid, president of HOLOSOFX. ``You need to visually see how a process will run under given conditions in order to do effective outsource management, resource management and business benchmarking.''

The strategic value of Workflow.BPR extends to its capability to instantly provide the time- and cost-based metrics needed to evaluate a process and its alternatives. The current version can also export these metrics to Microsoft Excel, with other export capabilities planned for future upgrades.

``I'm impressed by the wealth of information available to managers from the maps that Workflow.BPR generates,'' said Ronni Marshak, vice president, Patricia Seybold Group. ``By generating specific business-process definitions on the fly and providing the related metrics automatically, management can pinpoint problem areas and make more intelligent decisions about not only their business process but about their business as a whole.''

Workflow.BPR is based on HOLOSOFX's BPR.M methodology, which demands that a tool take into account both identifiable and hidden elements of a process that will become factors when the process is enacted, while hiding the complexities that are not relevant to the task at hand. In addition, the BPR.M methodology requires the robustness to handle an environment of dynamic change and complexity.

The result is Workflow.BPR, a robust, graphical tool powerful enough to manage change and complexity yet simple enough to be used by the nontechnical manager.

According to Scott Dixon Smith, vice president, sales and marketing, of HOLOSOFX: ``Other process-definition tools may be effective for graphically depicting relatively simple processes, but they fall down when trying to represent complex ones. Our customers are amazed at how the business-process-generation-on-demand model has eliminated visual clutter and has allowed them to focus on the specific path that needs to be addressed.''

Workflow.BPR is available directly from HOLOSOFX in Manhattan Beach, Calif., or from its new business partners. Business partners include TRW Systems Integration Group (Long Beach, Calif.), RISCmanagement Inc. (New York), Hcm (Torrance, Calif.), Sequent Computer Systems (Portland, Ore.) and IBM Workgroup Solutions (Kettletown, Conn.). Pricing has been set at $2,495 for a single-user copy.

Plans are in progress for a client/server version, due out during the second quarter of 1995. -0-

NOTE: A kickoff announcement will be made at Workflow '95 Boston, on March 10. For information on attending, call 310/798-2425 or 800/247-0262.

CONTACT: HOLOSOFX Inc., Manhattan Beach

Scott Dixon Smith, 310/798-2425