Agility and Standards Drive Business Process Excellence at ProcessWorld 2006 Conference; Highest Attended ProcessWorld Draws 300 Attendees who Witnessed Thought-Provoking Sessions on Compliance, EA, SOA and Process Governance.

BERWYN, Pa. -- ProcessWorld 2006, presented by IDS Scheer, the leading provider of solutions for business process excellence, was lauded by attendees as a resounding success, exceeding all expectations. Three hundred participants from 14 countries braved the inclement weather in the Northeast and traveled to the renowned Doral Resort & Spa in Miami to hear thought leaders expound on the importance of agility and witness real-life accounts of process excellence in action. This year's ProcessWorld agenda included three tracks featuring interactive roundtables and sessions covering process excellence in manufacturing, services and public sector organizations.

"This was the highest attended ProcessWorld conference in the U.S. and we were pleased to see an increase of 30 percent in overall attendance with more than 60 percent of this year's attendees being end users," said Dr. Mathias Kirchmer, CEO of IDS Scheer for the Americas. "This surge of end users demonstrates an organizational mindset shift from viewing business process management as a one off project into its evolution as a dominating paradigm for management of an entire organization."

Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, founder of IDS Scheer, opened up the conference with a highly entertaining and interactive session featuring jazz pieces interspersed with his profound views on business agility. According to Prof. Scheer, in business process management, the rules of standardization revolve around communication, especially having the IT and core business teams speak the same language. He also noted that operational processes such as procurement or sales need supporting managerial processes for the orchestration of BPM as well as directing governance processes to ensure legal compliance. Prof. Scheer also discussed the agility of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and equated them to the small parts of a jazz melody called licks that can be assembled into a new melody.

Dr. Kirchmer's session focused on the importance of business process reference models as knowledge assets for agility. Expanding on Prof. Scheer's comparison of jazz licks and BPM, he discussed how reference models are licks for business processes or components for enterprise-specific processes.

Offering a real-life perspective on the application of reference models, Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Chief Technology Architect for Merrill Lynch, opened his session by discussing the evolution of interoperability and the need for reference models to talk to each other. He also took the audience through his round trip journey of EAM, BPM and SOA and outlined the need to first capture the process with EAM, optimize the process with BPM and use SOA platforms to simplify, automate and instrument the business processes. In terms of lessons learned, Brown noted that SOA combined with a good BPM strategy increases ROA via systematic re-use.

Dr. Wolfram Jost, member of the executive board at IDS Scheer AG responsible for ARIS Products, emphatically stated that BPM is not a technology but an overall approach or philosophy. He also gave an overview of the new ARIS Platform, version 7 and gave a preview of the new ARIS for SOA offering that will be available middle of 2006.

The following are other key highlights from ProcessWorld 2006:

--  Jim Sinur, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, discussed how
        agility will be a core requirement for all components going
        forward and expanded on Dr. Jost's comment that agility is a
        mindset and process and not just a technology. He also
        described BPM and rules as the "Power of Two" and recommended
        that companies should select agility methods, techniques and
        tools that fit their organizations, and cautioned that rules
        had better be in place.

    --  Eric Austvold, Research Director, AMR Research, led the
        manufacturing track and kicked it off with an insightful
        discussion on attaining perfect processes within
        manufacturing. He referenced an AMR study on Demand Driven
        Supply Networks (DDSN) and emphasized the need to shift from a
        strategy of efficiency to agility using a DDSN system
        combining technologies and processes that sense and resets to
        real-time demand signals across a supply network of customers,
        suppliers and employees. He also reaffirmed those leading
        organizations who implement a DDSN strategy focus on process
        excellence rather than the technology.

    --  Guillermo Kopp, vice president of TowerGroup's cross-industry
        practice, spoke about BPM within a service-oriented
        architecture to enable financial services firms to assemble
        and orchestrate discrete process services rapidly into larger
        end-to-end processes.

    --  Tom Gulledge, president of Eii, the leading provider of
        architecture-driven enterprise integration solutions, led the
        public sector track with a session on the possibilities for
        transitioning the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to the next
        generation of Enterprise Integration technologies and
        methodologies.

    --  Customer-centric sessions included case studies from Bank of
        America on its large-scale enterprise deployment of BPM, Estee
        Lauder's implementation of ARIS to transform the company into
        a process-centric operation, and Zurich Insurance on building
        a business architecture with ARIS. Other sessions included:

        --  The ERP Special Projects Office: Delivering Solutions
            Across the Army

        --  Mid-Market Manufacturing Success at American Meter

        --  Business Process Innovation - New Metrics, New Behaviors
            at NOVA Chemicals

        --  We Have a Process Model - Now What from City of Calgary

        --  General Dynamics Land Systems - My BPM Journey...

        --  Effective BPM in Mergers and Acquisitions at Seriologicals

        --  How BPM Has Ensured that an Electricity Company is
            Unphased By Changing Regulations from EPCOR and Fujitsu

        --  Federated Architectures, Alignment Methodology & Process
            Integration at US TRANSCOM Department of Defense

        --  The Secret to ERP in Home Building - Business Process
            Management from ConDev Homes

In addition, ProcessWorld 2006 featured many of these customers and industry analysts returning for interactive panel discussions on real-world deployments of process excellence within various verticals.

About IDS Scheer in the Americas

With the ARIS Platform, IDS Scheer is the leading provider of solutions for business process excellence. The company's ARIS-based solutions offer a complete portfolio for "Business Process Excellence," including the software, services and methods to address all phases of the business process lifecycle: strategy, design, implementation, controlling, documentation, and continuous improvement. From small/medium enterprises to Global 1000 organizations, IDS Scheer provides solutions to help customers optimize their investments in Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Architecture (EA), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), and Compliance Management. As a Global SAP Service Partner and strategic SAP development partner, IDS Scheer has unmatched domain expertise in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and SAP NetWeaver. As part of an organization of more than 2,500 employees worldwide in more than 70 countries with more than 6,000 customers, IDS Scheer's 2005 revenues reached $386.4 million USD/318 million Euros. IDS Scheer was established in 1984 by August-Wilhelm Scheer, widely recognized as a founding father of Business Process Management.

For more information on IDS Scheer in the Americas, visit http://www.ids-scheer.com/us.

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