The goal of Communication Enabled Business Process (CEBP) is to optimize business processes by reducing the delays and latency that exists within a process or workflow. For example, a loan approval process may be experiencing latency because the person assigned to providing an approval is away from the office. If the loan process is integrated into the organization's communications system, then the loan officer could review and approve from her PDA or email box. This is an example of leveraging Unified Communications (UC) technology to improve business process. The result is a more efficient, more automated closed-loop process; translating into significant ROI.
If the person does not provide the necessary approval within a designated period of time then the business process could invoke a UC service such as ‘notify and respond’, voice portal/IVR, conferencing application, etc. These embedded UC services would ‘notify’ the person that they need to do something. If the person does not ‘respond’ to the notification then it can be escalated to a manager in the same manner.
In fact, there are a number of UC services that could be embedded within a business process to reduce human latency. These could include: conference [on demand], alert, escalate, contact resident expert—all of which create measurable business value.
The great thing about CEBP is that it can be applied horizontally across different lines of business and different industries. Virtually every business process is hampered by human latency due to delays in communication and collaboration. Some other use cases that CEBP can be applied to include: roadside assistance, stock portfolio alerts, personal information loss, claims processing, and inventory management.
CEPB and Interaction Center
Interaction Center is an open and flexible communications platform with virtually unlimited flexibility. It includes an incredibly rich set of multi-media communications capabilities and a customization tool that really has no limits, making it a very rich platform to support CEPB.
Interaction Designer® is a graphical application generator, which can be used to customize the processing of any communications event. In short, the Interaction Designer interface allows developers to create system handlers by visually constructing the logic that determines how a given event is to be handled, such as an incoming telephone call. The Interaction Designer then automatically generates a program that is compiled and executed in its own thread within the Interaction Processor. Below is a sample screen shot of Interaction Designer.
