I tried to read the website but it was too much marketing language for my monkey-like mind to understand.
Can someone explain what this software program really does? I have no idea what “business processes” are (as opposed to just business).
I don’t get it.
Business processes are things that need to be done by a business.
In complex businesses you can’t rely on individuals to remember all the steps that need to be taken - due to dependencies and staff turnover - so they need to be codified.
E.g. When a customer calls to make an order, you need to do steps A, B, C and let person X and Y know. Then person X will do step D and Y will do step E and so on until the order is fulfilled (right down to the guy boxing it up in the stockroom).
These are business processes.
If you combine their codification with an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, you can capture the necessary data at each step to forward it into the accounting systems and so on so profit and loss can be instantly calculated and tax can be deducted instantly, etc.
I’ve never worked with Metastorm but I have worked with a couple of other systems (for example SAP) and that’s basically what it is. They’re insanely complicated.
A bit more - modelling the business processes is often done with something that looks like a flowchart tool (e.g. Visio). The more clever ERP systems allow a visual representation of the process to be automatcially translated into ERP process logic, and each flow node to define the data that needs to be captured where.
Each user of the system also has permissions to define what they can and can’t have access to.
Clever ones allow you to create custom reports based on all the data that’s captured.
One of the other things they can do is report on organizational efficiency, as well as nagging people to do stuff they might have forgotten.
I have done Metastorm development. In a nutshell, it allows you to model complex business activities (using a “state machine” type model), and define forms (to fill out…), roles (e.g. floor employee, manager, accountant, lord high approver, attorney), and stages (e.g. point of sale, manager override/exception requested, legal review needed, delivery needed, etc.), and actions/transitions (e.g. file order, request manager override, ship product, request Legal review, approve policy exception, reject policy exception, recommend employee for termination)
At each stage, you can specify forms that have to be filled out by the applicable role (e.g. if an Employee requests a Manager Approval for a customer who wants to haggle, then the Employee can fill out a “Manager Approval Request” form as part of the request step and the Manager can then Approve or Reject, and may be asked to fill out a Justification form.