Business process management (BPM) maven Lombardi announced Teamworks 7, the latest release of its BPM Suite, as well as a new release of its Blueprint hosted process management tool, and Lombardi University, a BPM talent development program.

“The biggest feedback we hear from companies doing BPM – not just with Teamworks, but any BPM solution – is the need to manage their whole program better,” said Phil Gilbert, president of Lombardi. “This moves beyond simple development environment changes – into how assets are managed, changes deployed and visibility to what is running where. That is where we have focused our innovation in Teamworks 7.”

Teamworks 7 is claimed to offer a new paradigm for model management and deployment, simplifying the process iteration that occurs frequently as part of continuous process improvement initiatives.

New in teamworks 7 is what the firm calls Process Centre: in which all process artifacts created during design and development are stored and maintained in a central repository.

 A graphical view of the Process Center provides authors and architects with access to the organization and management of all process artifacts, process applications and reusable functionality that are created as part of a BPM Program.

Teamworks 7 also introduces Toolkits to facilitate and manage reuse of common functionality across multiple versions of multiple process applications. Meanwhile changes to process models are now managed through Snapshots which reference all artifacts of a process at specific points in time, such as business diagrams, rules, services and simulation scenarios. 

Back-in-Time Versioning: Teamworks 7 provides the ability to instantly view any historical version of a process at any time with the click of a mouse, as well as run the entire process application as it existed at that specific point in time, including models, rules, services, data, forms and more.

 Meanwhile centralized tools to deploy and track versions of multiple processes across various runtime server environments are now provided in the Process Server Registry.

The value proposition of BPM is more than just rapid delivery of software applications to support business process requirements; it’s also about enabling continuous process improvement across the organization through technology use, said Neil Ward-Dutton, senior analyst at MWD Advisors. Ironically, few technology vendors deliver the key BPM capabilities that are critical to making this value proposition a reality.