Last week I payed the 10. Process Solutions Day a visit. I only went on the second day which was in the focus of the User Forum. With two parallel session I had the choice between a wide selection of public, service and industrial use cases. My focus was on the presentations held by 'industrial' customers such as HOPPECKE, HENKEL, BAYER HealthCare and Gunvor.

All presentations made a good impression and they certainly gave a good overview on how 'real' Business Process Management as a management discipline has become of strategic relevance. Independent from the size and specific business models of each industry.

I admit I was especially impressed by Andreas Poss (Henkel KGaA). He show cased how Henkel apply a modified Lean Six Sigma approach with reduced BPMN modelling conventions to design, optimize and automate the administrative processes in their global shared service set up. For automation the BPMN models were enriched according to defined rules in order to ensure readability and acceptance by business. Henkel uses IBM's BPM engine and in total it seems to work and pay off for them.

The User Forum left enough time to visit the tool provider exhibition. Certainly the who-is-who of tool providers (at least in Germany) was present and it was nice to experience the newest developments and trends on BPM Tools.

Screening the participants list however it became clear that the ratio of end-customers / consultants was low. So not really a place for meeting customers.

All in all I would say that for people interested in BPM technologies and vendors the event is of high value. But also for getting a selected view on Use Cases the 'value for price' is worth it. So, see you next year then.

Regards

Russell