BPM For Product Lifecycle Management At Johnson & Johnson

In this last breakout of Innovation World, simultaneous sessions from Johnson & Johnson and Johnson Controls were going on in adjacent rooms. I’m guessing that a few people might have ended up in the wrong session.

I was in the J&J session, where Pieter Boeykens and Sanjay Mandloi presented on web collaboration and process automation for global product development in the highly regulated health and pharmaceutical industry. They have a standardized set of processes for developing and launching products, with four different IT systems supporting the four parts of the PLM. A lot of this focuses on collecting documents from employees and suppliers all over the world, but there was no control over the process for doing this and the form of the information collected – they had five different processes for this in four regions. They rationalized this into a single standardized global process, modeled in webMethods BPM, then spent a significant amount of time on the human interaction at each step in the process: creating wireframes, then going through several version of the UI design in collaboration with the business users to ensure that it was intuitive and easy to use. They integrated BrainTribe for content management, which apparently handles the documents (the architecture diagram indicated that the actual documents are in Documentum) but also integrates structured content from other systems such as SAP.

In conjunction with this, they performed a webMethods upgrade from 8.2.x to 9 for their existing integration applications, migrating over their existing applications with little impact. Interestingly, this aspect generated far more questions from the audience than any of the functionality of the new BPM implementation, which gives you an idea of the business-technical mix in the audience. Smile

That’s it for Software AG’s Innovation World 2013. Next week, I’ll be in Vegas for TIBCO’s TUCON conference, where I’ll be on an analyst panel on Wednesday, then back to Vegas the following week for SAP TechEd (not next week, as I tweeted earlier) with a detour through Houston on the way home to speak at the APQC process conference. If you’re at any of those events, look me up and say hi.

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