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Procession, Aerial House Asheridge Road Chesham Bucks HP5 2QB www.procession.com

17th April 2007

White Paper positioning Procession's software as a Business Process Platform sets a standard for others to follow

Procession plc, the developer of original and innovative People & Task Driven and Goal Directed software in its Task Orientated Applications (TOA), has published a new paper which sets out the basis for its claim to lead this new breed of software.

Business Process Management (BPM) has regained both a momentum and credibility after its earlier years of hype. Now industry analysts and many thought leaders are more specific in their statements, and this has enabled Procession to benchmark and define its unique approach to application development.

"These recent developments are long overdue," said David Chassels, Procession's CEO. "We have been pioneering people-driven software too long in isolation.

"Now things are changing - which is good news. Our mission has been twofold: to remove complexity from application development by encapsulating all business requirements in a single platform and to close the gap between the business and IT by allowing business analysts to build new applications with no coding or traditional compiling.

"The key to 'how' was to recognise that it is people and their daily tasks that are both the source of information and the main drivers in any business," he explained.

"In reality, there are fewer than 15 task types, whether human or system, in any business, which can handle any eventuality," Chassels continued. "By expressing these tasks as data, we can build applications in a data-centric environment which, in one development environment, contains all today's BPM requirements, rules, state, calculations engines, time, user interface and, of course, content."

Procession's new paper sets out how BPM evolved into a discipline - as described by leading analysts, Gartner Inc. The paper provides a detailed analysis to allow over-pressed CIOs and IT departments to grasp the core capabilities quickly.

"We are not at the end of this journey," said Chassels. "We've resolved the 'easy' linear processes that cover most business activities - either 'human' or 'system'.

"We are now addressing those areas where people need to step outside these structures to resolve issues or to encourage users to be 'innovative' in interacting with business software. This a big challenge for the industry - not least because regulatory requirements need to be recognised at all times.

"Procession's simple and highly people-focused architecture has already enabled us to allow users to build, at run time, a process that suits the circumstances within agreed parameters, ensuring that content integrity is maintained. This is a first in the industry," Chassels claimed.

"The real challenge is making it available to handle the unpredictable as part of the way business works. Procession is close to achieving this," he revealed.

End

Notes for Editors:

The White Paper
The paper summarises the how Procession's approach started with some original thinking and years of research and development. It notes both how the BPM market has evolved over the past seven years and how leading analysts and thought leaders now see what vendors need to start delivering.

There is increasing recognition of the relevance of human interaction management software (HIMS). The logical next step is at the application level, where both human and system tasks are seamlessly contained in one platform technology.

In developing its Task Orientated Application (TOA) approach, Procession effectively separates business fundamentals from technology-led delivery mechanisms, thus taking application development to a new paradigm that allows business analysts to build applications working directly with the business. The TOA approach effectively closes the gap between 'business' and 'IT'.

The paper concludes by giving a detailed analysis of how Procession TOA fully supports the BPM discipline and is a complete Business Process Platform as defined by leading analysts, Gartner Inc.


About Procession
Procession is a UK-based and owned company that has developed original and innovative software in Task Orientated Applications (TOA). This TOA approach represents a dynamic alternative to pre-built and/or custom hard-coded applications and represents a paradigm shift in Business Software Development. 

In effect, Procession has created a highly customisable ‘generic’ application and has, in one single technology, moved beyond the beyond the concepts of BPM and SOA to a new enabling ‘platform’ technology to build solutions in its Process Application Platform. 

Procession is a complete and comprehensive application platform. In a single technology, it combines data-centricity, BPM, workflow, rules, state, data manipulation, business intelligence and application platform. Procession has it own presentation layer and built-in message queue for external systems. The recent completion of an extension to Dreamweaver, linking to Procession’s tag library in its presentation layer, now deskills and speeds up the build of working web forms as the user interface. 

In the words of market analysts the Butler Group, Procession's unique, user-friendly technology “removes the disconnect between requirement and implementation”. It also enables strategic processes to be built as working applications at 20 to 30 per cent of the cost of traditional methods. 

These systems can be added to or modified easily, giving unrivalled ‘agility’. They can also provide management information in real-time to support dynamic Performance Management with guaranteed compliance, as required. 

Procession’s TOA uses an RDBMS (Oracle), along with Java and J2EE application servers and maintains a runtime repository of process data, process state and reference data. The Procession Process Engine uses declarative process definition. There is no code generation and no custom coding. This unique feature means that business analysts and operational managers who understand the vital operational processes can implement and modify those processes. In practice, Procession has cracked the code for the closed loop linking business and IT - a still sought-after goal by some of the world’s largest software technology companies.

Further information from:

David Chassels, Procession: 01494 781 444 ; 07774 681773 (mobile)
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR: 01727 860405