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OpenSpan White Paper

User Process Improvement – Automation wp-upia-013111

OpenSpan® User Process Improvement Automation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WELCOME TO USER PROCESS IMPROVEMENT 2 DISCOVER/MEASURE/IMPROVE WITH OPENSPAN 2 OPENSPAN ENTERPRISE COMPONENTS 3 WHAT OPENSPAN AUTOMATION CAN DO 4 HOW OPENSPAN AUTOMATION WORKS 5 HOW OPENSPAN CAN WORK FOR YOU 5 BENEFITS 7 SUMMARY 8 ABOUT OPENSPAN INC. 8 GET MORE INFORMATION 8

p.2 | OpenSpan White Paper


Welcome to User Process Improvement

Typically, software use in organizations follows one of two scenarios: either the multiple applications used throughout your organization resemble a patchwork quilt or you have one or two very complex enterprise applications (ERP, SCM, HRM, from companies like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and others).

If your organization is in the first group, the applications you are using are likely a mix of build-or-buy solutions (mainframe/green screen, Java, Windows, Web applications and even Web services), each of which addresses a particular issue and does not integrate with the others. In scenario two, enterprise applications are typically third-party and offer few if any ways to modify or customize features. Further, many of the functions your users perform on a daily basis are spread across dozens of screens and dialog boxes, creating hundreds of opportunities for errors.

Over the years, you have heard about software integration solutions from numerous vendors. But spending a significant portion of your budget to bring in a team of professional service consultants to build custom solutions could leave you in exactly the same place five years from now -- not your idea of a solution. Replacing or significantly rewriting your applications may not offer success; your existing applications may not be pretty or loved by users but they still access the information necessary to run significant aspects of your business and you can’t abandon them.

Sound familiar? Each OpenSpan customer has dealt with these exact issues. Every one concluded that there had to be a better way. OpenSpan provides that way. OpenSpan provides a better way for users to interact with applications, and for applications to interoperate. It offers new ways to provide visibility of the processes people follow and to report on process adherence across applications. It lets you simply and effectively automate applications, add new functionality to existing applications, integrate functionality among applications, and even build new applications from relevant pieces of other applications. OpenSpan provides all of this and more.

Discover/Measure/Improve with OpenSpan

In the OpenSpan white paper, Improving Business Visibility and Control with User Process Monitoring

*, you saw how the powerful

OpenSpan Events helps you Discover how users actually interact with their computers and software. You saw how OpenSpan Analytics helps you Measure potential productivity gains in time, efficiency, accuracy and ROI, if only you could eliminate user bottlenecks, inefficiencies and data input errors.

In this white paper, you will see how OpenSpan Enterprise enables you to customize, automate, and Improve your applications to increase productivity, improve employee and customers’ satisfaction, and ultimately increase your bottom line.

Business processes typically contain many steps of varying complexity, and many of these steps can now be automated through enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) software.

However, with most business processes—even those orchestrated by BPM—many tasks still must be completed manually, typically by a knowledge worker using a Windows desktop with multiple applications. Usually these applications were developed individually, with little or no expectation that they would work well together. Navigation between them is a tremendous waste of time and creates multiple opportunities for errors even from the most skilled users. In most organizations significant training is necessary to educate new users on the many multi-step, multi-application processes.

* Available at http://www.openspan.com/resources/

http://www.openspan.com/resources/



This is illustrated by the many users who surround their monitors with Post-it® Notes that deal with the infrequently used features of their programs. You probably have seen (or may have on your own monitor) notes such as “Be sure to press F4, then Control-F8 before clicking Save in app W.” or “If client has new address, confirm changes during call and after, copy changed info to customer database on server, to shipping app, and to apps X, Y and Z.“

Consequently, the lack of visibility into and control of these user processes means that companies are not tracking vast numbers of business events per day, which often results in missed opportunities to improve productivity, enhance customer service, reduce operating costs, ensure compliance and generate additional sales.

The next section covers how OpenSpan automation tools enable you to Improve your business processes, easily – and very quickly.

OpenSpan Enterprise Components

OpenSpan Studio

OpenSpan Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) that you can use to create these automations. The IDE is available as either a stand-alone tool or a plug-in to Visual Studio.NET 2008. The OpenSpan Studio is a free product and can be downloaded from the OpenSpan Community Website at http://www.openspan.com/community.

OpenSpan Studio provides a set of sophisticated, yet easy-to-use tools to create new User Process Improvement solutions, known as automations in OpenSpan terminology.

Use OpenSpan to make your users more efficient – quickly and easily optimize and automate applications and features so they work the way you and your staff want, instead of you having to work the way the applications require.

http://www.openspan.com/community



The OpenSpan Studio provides:

INTERROGATION: This gives your developers the ability to look into virtually any application, including mainframe/green screen, Java, Windows (WIN32), Web applications and even Web services, and identify user interface (UI) objects and their attributes they can use to create custom OpenSpan automations.

OBJECT LIBRARY: After interrogation, OpenSpan keeps track of every UI object that may be of interest to your developers, including its location and how to access it. OpenSpan makes no changes to the underlying applications’ code. Everything continues to work as it always has.

VISUAL MODELING ENVIRONMENT: OpenSpan is powerful, yet easy to use by developers or tech-savvy business analysts. They can create automations by dragging and dropping objects to connect them, all without coding.

OpenSpan also provides a highly intuitive set of tools for building new composite user interfaces from components of existing applications.

TESTING: OpenSpan allows extensive testing of new automations and composite applications before deployment. This will ensure that once deployed, they will perform as intended, right from the start.

ADMINISTRATION AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT: With OpenSpan technology, when users login, their systems will automatically check to see that they have the most up-to-date versions of the custom applications and automations on their computers. So making changes to all users’ systems is as easy as updating files hosted on a server. With OpenSpan, your users are up-to-date all of the time.

OpenSpan Enterprise

The OpenSpan Enterprise (Runtime) is the runtime agent that deploys an automation solution on a given user’s desktop. The footprint is minimal (< 2 MB) and requires only an active user’s interaction with the applications via keyboard or mouse. OpenSpan Enterprise is a licensed product that contains all OpenSpan Events functionality.

What OpenSpan Automation Can Do

OpenSpan developers can quickly and easily improve user productivity by customizing and automating procedures

between any UI objects or services regardless of whether the original applications are mainframe/green screen, custom-built, desktop, Java or Windows-based, new Web applications, or even Web services.

without requiring programming-specific language skills

without requiring access to the underlying source code

without requiring re-compilation of the application’s code

that can be updated if changes to the application or its user interface occur.

Perhaps you have identified a number of user steps of a manual process you would like to automate as soon as possible. How long do you think “as soon as possible” will be? Three weeks? Six months? Next year sometime? Perhaps colleagues tell you it cannot be done without a major infrastructure upgrade.

Using OpenSpan, how about having the change created, tested and deployed to all of your users in just a few days? It can happen.



How OpenSpan Automation Works

Programmers used one of a number of different programming languages to create each application running on your desktop. Yet all of your applications have one thing in common. Each includes a set of objects that interact with the underlying Windows® operating system. Application developers originally constructed and assembled a user interface designed for end user ease of use.

Some applications offer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), that both describe the objects within the application and the manner of accessing them. Many applications do not offer APIs at all, or if they do, the APIs may not access features you need. Even those that do offer APIs often do not provide a flexible way to allow for user process optimization. Before OpenSpan, if you tried to integrate data across applications, you were limited to the data integration points the original developers thought were important. Those do not necessarily reflect what is important for your business today.

OpenSpan takes a unique approach to automation. The powerful, yet intuitive, OpenSpan software allows developers to integrate any UI object from any application with any other object in any other application.

Every mouse click, every link, every submit button communicates between an application’s objects and the operating system. OpenSpan leverages these ongoing communications, and resides between the applications’ objects and the underlying Windows operating system(s). In effect, OpenSpan breaks down your applications’ walls and allows you to use the program components in ways well beyond the applications developers’ original intentions. It uses an event-driven approach to inject code into participating applications at runtime. This code performs a given action (automation, process improvement) once a pre-defined event occurs.

Using OpenSpan software, a typical entry-level programmer can create automations that offer immediate benefit to your desktop users. Moreover, you can create robust automations among legacy applications and newer solutions such as Web applications, Web services, Rich Internet Apps, and Mashups to deliver significant long-term benefit to your enterprise.

How OpenSpan Can Work for You

Simple Automation

One of the quickest ways to improve the efficiency of your business is to reduce repetitive tasks performed by employees. With OpenSpan, it is easy to build simple automations that accomplish that. For example:

AUTOMATE DATA ENTRY. Minimize – or even eliminate – users’ data entry errors by leading them through their tasks while providing them with the right screens, information, options, and scripts at the right time.

UPDATE CUSTOMER INFORMATION. Updating customer information can be a time-consuming task for call center agents. Manual data entry, or copying and pasting customer information into multiple applications, takes time that agents could use more effectively to address a customer’s real problem. With OpenSpan, create simple automations that perform the cut and paste update tasks automatically, freeing the agent to focus on resolving customer issues, or moving on to the next customer more quickly. For example, suppose an agent changes a customer’s contact information in one application. With an OpenSpan automation, the company’s billing, shipping, CRM, and other applications can be updated automatically, all at once, without errors.

REDUCE TRAINING. Multi-step processes, whether across multiple applications or a single complex application require significant investments in training. When OpenSpan is used to simplify, optimize and automate complex processes, the time required to train users on these process is dramatically reduced.



Additionally, user process improvement is not a one-time task. Continuous improvement suggests constant discovery of new processes to improve. Every complex process improved and automated with OpenSpan will further reduce the time and expense necessary to educate and train users.

INCREASE UP-SELL OPPORTUNITIES. Identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities is clearly beneficial to the bottom line. However, doing so often requires that agents or sales representatives receive the right information at the right time. It also requires that they know the best way to present that information to the customer. Based on criteria defined by the business, such as customer type or specific product being sold, let OpenSpan present relevant up-sell or cross-sell opportunities to the call center agent - including scripts - at the appropriate time during the call. OpenSpan can also log and distribute call or customer feedback to multiple applications or to managers.

MANAGE AND ENFORCE BUSINESS PROCESSES. Having all users follow defined business processes all of the time can be nearly impossible to achieve. It is especially challenging when doing so means having to learn the subtleties of multiple disparate applications and the associated workflows. This can become still more challenging as new products or new processes are introduced. OpenSpan lets you build in logic to ensure that users fully complete one part of the process, such as entering a valid email address or reading a particular script, before moving on to the next steps. This provides true User Process Management by extending your BPM strategy to include all user activities.

AUTOMATE MULTIPLE LOGINS. Users often waste a lot of time every day logging into different applications, often multiple times during the day. This process can extend customer calls and lengthen average hold times for call center agents. Use OpenSpan to build automations that either log in an agent to one or more applications at the beginning of each shift, or as new logins become necessary, based on the business processes. With OpenSpan, passwords are stored in a highly secure encrypted container.

Composite Applications

Many OpenSpan customers choose to build new composite applications or dashboards that allow one unified view to replace the need for employees to work in multiple applications. This can deliver a tremendous ROI to the business in terms of improved productivity, improved performance, and reduced training costs. Composite applications also provide a way to limit access of certain applications or functionality based on user type. For example:

CONSOLIDATE APPLICATIONS’ INFORMATION. With OpenSpan, why not create a simple composite application to streamline business processes? Remember, OpenSpan lets you integrate information from virtually any application accessible from a desktop - mainframe/green screen, custom-built, desktop, Java or Windows-based, new Web applications, or Web services. Remaining with the call center example, OpenSpan lets you streamline the processes followed by call center agents by allowing them to interact with relevant customer information in a single dashboard view. Transparent to the user, the dashboard can draw information from CRM, shipping, billing, and other applications. Remember, this single dashboard not only can streamline agent productivity, but can also reduce training times dramatically for new agents.

LIMIT APPLICATION ACCESS BASED ON ROLES. Commonly, current users of an application are not the same audience for which it was created. For example, many financial applications were written for accountants and other finance employees, not call center or collections agents. It may be appropriate for agents to have access to some, but not all, functionality or data within an application. With OpenSpan, you can create a composite application that allows individuals read and/or write access to only specific objects within an application. This provides enhanced security and regulatory compliance. It can also dramatically simplify the training necessary and reduce the number of applications with which an agent must interface.



Extend the functionality of your existing applications

PROVIDE CONTROL OVER YOUR APPLICATIONS’ OBJECTS. A very powerful capability of OpenSpan is the ability to add new functionality or business logic to an existing legacy application. This is especially important for enterprises that have significant investments in legacy applications which are considered ‘closed’ (no available API), where an enterprise has little understanding of the underlying logic of the application, or where it lacks the necessary skills with the underlying programming language.

ADD COMPLIANCE TO AN EXISTING APPLICATION. New regulatory issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance create new challenges for enterprises and may require changes to existing applications and business processes. This presents extremely difficult challenges for enterprises that have a significant investment in legacy applications that cannot be easily modified or extended. With OpenSpan, add necessary new logic to existing applications, resolving this issue without affecting any existing business logic. For example, you could add customer interaction logs to existing applications for compliance auditing purposes. Similarly, depending upon the caller’s state of residency, you might deploy automations that provide call center representatives explicit messages they must discuss with a customer or prospect, in order to comply with state-specific regulations.

ADD VALIDATION TO AN EXISTING APPLICATION. Use OpenSpan automations to validate data prior to submitting into an application. For example, you could create an OpenSpan automation for a billing application that prevents a credit or wire transfer exceeding a defined amount for a given customer or customer group. Or, an automation could ensure that the data entered in a given field matches the desired data structure, such as validating state and postal code accuracy, or credit limits.

LEVERAGE WEB SERVICES TO EXTEND APPLICATION FUNCTIONALITY. Web services can deliver powerful new functionality, but integration into an existing application can be complex and extremely time-consuming, especially in applications over which you have no control (cloud, SAAS, 3

rd party).

OpenSpan enables developers to add Web services’ functionality to legacy applications in the same manner as any application object. For example, a retail vendor could build an automation that accesses existing Web services from UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service to determine the least expensive shipping option for a particular customer shipment and presents that data to a call center agent in real-time.

LEVERAGE DATA FROM THIRD-PARTY WEB APPLICATIONS. OpenSpan automations allow you to obtain data from third-party Web applications and post it to an internal legacy application. For example, an OpenSpan automation created for a banking institution could identify competitive savings or certificate of deposit banking rates from publicly available Web applications or Websites. At the appropriate time during a call, the automation could present that information to an agent in the form of a pop-up window. This would allow the call center agent to know in real-time what competitive pressures exist without requiring that agent to look up the information manually.

Benefits

You have seen how OpenSpan delivers value in many different scenarios. One key uniqueness of OpenSpan is how easily it allows integration and automation of objects from any application.

Specific benefits of OpenSpan include:

Helping you monitor exactly what users do in virtually any application, analyzing inefficiencies and compliance risks, and automating manual processes that save time and money

Providing an iterative approach for more rapidly realizing ROI benefits of application automation projects



Simplifying and expediting the application automation process, thus reducing the risk for new automation projects

Reducing operational costs by streamlining existing business processes

Extending existing applications to comply with new business requirements (e.g. regulatory compliance)

Allowing and restricting access to certain application functionality, based on particular roles

Extending legacy applications to participate in next-generation portals, mashups, and rich Internet applications

Improving effectiveness of up-selling and cross-selling campaigns by providing timely and accurate access to customer, competitor, and promotional data

Providing a single unified view to streamline processes

Dramatically reducing average handling times

Improving customer satisfaction by resolving issues more quickly

Reducing training costs significantly for new and existing employees

Simplifying compliance with Federal and State regulations and laws

Summary

With OpenSpan, comprehensive process improvement means that your applications can now better support your business and perform in the way you need, beyond even how the original designers intended. OpenSpan lets you to tear down the walls between applications to build integrations and automations that solve today’s challenges. OpenSpan also prepares you to support the challenges of tomorrow by providing the link between Service-Oriented Architectures and the applications, data, and user activity taking place on the desktop.

About OpenSpan Inc.

For many organizations, OpenSpan software is part of a continuous improvement process to discover, measure and improve the productivity of contact center and back office workers. Using OpenSpan, organizations can DISCOVER how users and applications work together, MEASURE process inefficiencies and compliance gaps, and IMPROVE user processes. OpenSpan solutions often include simplifying application interfaces, automating manual tasks, and creating on-screen, contextual guidance. These user process improvements are often linked directly to increased revenue, enhanced customer and employee satisfaction and lowered operations costs. Visit www.openspan.com for more information or to download the free OpenSpan Studio IDE.

Get More Information

If you would like to learn more about OpenSpan, we invite you to contact us directly via phone at 1.678.527.5416 or e-mail at [email protected]. Our team of automation professionals will be glad to assist you in determining how OpenSpan can be of value to your organization. They can also arrange an online or in-person demonstration of OpenSpan.

Additional resources are also available on the OpenSpan Website at www.openspan.com and

www.openspan.com/community.

http://www.openspan.com/

http://www.openspan.com/community



Copyright © 2010 OpenSpan, Inc. All rights reserved.

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