"We are systematically targeting the fastest growing segments of the red-hot SOA software market," stated Alfred Chuang, Chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, Inc. "The addition of Fuego to our AquaLogic portfolio means that we are now the only company to offer a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments."

The business process management software market is one of the fastest growing segments within infrastructure software and is estimated to top $1 billion dollars by 2008.

Fuego was founded in 1999 and has over 100 employees. The company's customers include Southwest Airlines, United Healthcare, JPMorganChase and British Petroleum. FuegoBPM is a comprehensive, advanced software platform for business process management. Fuego helps businesses increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs and increase profitability, by improving workflow with flexible SOA/BPM systems. The FuegoBPM suite has been used in over 170 production BPM implementations with 100% success rate and referenceability. The FuegoBPM suite was ranked number one — over Oracle and other notable companies — in Business Process Management Suites by Network Computing Magazine.

For More Information Contact May Petry, BEA SYSTEMS, INC. +1-408-570-8704, may.petry@bea.com

"Intalio was started as an open source company and initiated several major open source projects such as OpenEJB, which served as a foundation for Apache Geronimo," said Ismael Ghalimi, founder and CEO of Intalio. "With this acquisition, we are bringing open source to the world of Business Process Management and have what it takes to change the economics of the BPM industry."

Intalio has incorporated the FiveSight technology within Intalio|BPMS 4.0, which is currently available through an Early Adopter Program and will be released to the public in Q1 2006. Intalio is planning to continue the development of the FiveSight BPEL 2.0 engine under the open source Common Public License, and release its BPMN process designer and BPEL4People workflow suite under similar open source licenses later in 2006.

"The FiveSight PXE BPEL 2.0 engine has been embedded by major open source projects such as the ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and leading development tools like Sun's Java Studio Enterprise," said Paul Brown, founder of FiveSight Technologies. "This makes Intalio|BPMS the most popular BPEL product today."

BPEL provides a language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. BPEL 2.0 is developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) with the authorship of companies such as IBM (NYSE: IBM), BEA Systems (Nasdaq:BEAS) and Intalio.

Intalio also announced that Maciej Szefler, architect of FiveSight's BPEL 2.0 engine, has joined Intalio as chief architect. He will work closely with Assaf Arkin, Intalio's chief technology officer and co-author of the BPEL specification, on developing Intalio's next generation of open source BPMS software. Together, they bring years of combined experience developing enterprise-class open source solutions.

About Intalio, Inc. Founded in July 1999, Intalio is a privately-held, venture-backed company located in Redwood City, California. For more information on Intalio, please call 650-596-1800 or visit www.intalio.com.

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA (4 June 2004) – The Supply-Chain Council, Inc. (SCC) has approved the creation of a Customer-Chain Council (CCC) Special Interest Group at its recent board meeting.

The formation of the CCC SIG is the result of Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) development of the Customer-Chain Operations Reference-model (CCOR) and its imminent conveyance to the organization. HP developed the CCOR to increase efficiency, productivity and overall satisfaction in customer management processes throughout its organization.

CCC’s mission is to reduce costs and improve customer service. This new SCC Special Interest Group will develop, maintain, communicate, and support the CCOR as the standard process reference model for communicating Customer-chain management process standards and practices.

The CCOR model is available to all SCC members.

“In today’s collaborative, customer-driven business environment, the importance of customer service can not be overstated,” said Bill Hakanson, SCC’s Executive Director. “The CCC will work to improve the processes associated with customer chain management globally through the use of CCOR.”

CCOR is a reference model for customer-facing processes that integrates process re-engineering, process measurement and benchmarking, competitive capability analysis, methodologies for application by business and IT for business transformation. It is derived from, and integrates into, other reference models such as Supply-Chain Council’s “SCOR” model. CCOR is product and industry-neutral, and is cross-industry and cross-functional to reach a broad population of users.

The CCC is working to establish a Steering Committee and form working committees to advance and improve the CCOR model. Education activities will include Conferences, Workshops, and a website.

Membership is open to all companies and organizations that are concerned about customer service. For more information on the CCC, please visit www.customer-chain.org, or contact Executive Director Bill Hakanson at +1 412 781 2873x104, e-mail at b.hakanson@customer-chain.org.

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, USA (4 June 2004)—The Supply-Chain Council, Inc. (SCC) has approved the creation of a Design-Chain Council (DCC) Special Interest Group at its recent board meeting. The DCC SIG has been formed to advance the world’s body of knowledge surrounding product design and product lifecycle issues through the development of the Design-Chain Operations Reference-model (DCOR).

The DCC SIG promotes the use and development of DCOR, a process reference model developed by Hewlett-Packard, used to analyze a company’s design chain processes to determine where weaknesses exist. HP has used the model in several programs and has noted increased efficiency throughout the product lifecycle.

“Making product design processes more efficient is an important part of an overall corporate strategy to be competitive in today’s fast-paced global economy,” said Bill Hakanson, Executive Director, SCC.

DCOR is structurally based on the SCC’s Supply-Chain Operations Reference-model (SCOR). DCOR identifies principle process elements found throughout the design chain and links them to performance attributes and metrics. The reference model elements start with the earliest planning and research processes and extend through specific design, design integration and design amendment processes.

The DCOR model is available to all SCC members. SCC membership is open to any/all organizations interested in product design. The DCC plans on hosting seminars, workshops and conferences to highlight DCOR implementations and successful design chain practices. In addition, a Steering Committee will be established in the near future.

For more information on the Design-Chain Council or DCOR, please contact the Council at +1 412 781 2792, e-mail at info@design-chain.org, or visit their website at www.design-chain.org.

The Institute for Process Management at Babson Executive Education, in Wellesley, Mass., has gained the research expertise of James A. Champy, a leading authority on business renewal. Champy will join a distinguished team of researchers in Babson’s Institute for Process Management, the only U.S. academic organization dedicated to helping companies improve their operations through process management.

Champy is chairman of the consulting practice and head of strategy for Perot Systems Corporation, a technology services and business solutions company. He is recognized throughout the world as a founder of the reengineering movement and for his ground- breaking work on management issues and organizational change.

He has authored and co-authored five books on business management, including the New York Times best seller on organizational development and corporate renewal, Reengineering the Corporation. His newest book, X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Corporation in the Digital Age, is the first book that describes what companies must do to change how they operate and to leverage the real power of information technology. “The addition of Champy to our team ensures Babson’s mission to be the definitive source of research and education on cutting-edge business processes,” Says Thomas H. Davenport, Director of Research for Babson’s School of Executive Education.

The Babson School of Executive Education established the Institute in 2003 to help companies streamline their business processes and improve their operations.

Current research by the Institute focuses on issues critical to industry growth including: • Process Governance: how to sustain superior results through continuous attention to processes. • Process Sourcing: What processes to outsource or send offshore. • Managing and Improving Knowledge-Intensive Processes: how to manage the unique challenges when elite knowledge work is involved.

Babson Institute Director, Thomas H. Davenport, an author and researcher recognized for his work on process excellence for high-performance enterprises, heads a world-class team of researchers and distinguished corporate members such as Amerada Hess, Aviva, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Horizon BC/BS of New Jersey, Infosys, Microsoft, Partners HealthCare, Perot Systems, and SAP, all rich in process experience.

For more information on the Institute, please see http://www3.babson.edu/SEE/faculty/Institute-for-Process-Management.cfm, or contact Martha Sheehan, Program Director, at msheehan@babson.edu.

Champy received his bachelors and masters degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his law degree from Boston College Law School. He is a life member of the MIT Corporation, MIT's Board of Trustees, and a member of the Board of Overseers for the Boston College Law School. Champy also serves on the Board of Analog Devices, Inc.

Consistently ranked among the world’s top executive education providers, Babson Executive Education fosters the entrepreneurial spirit: the drive to identify opportunities and bring them to commercial realization. Babson’s programs show large corporations how to be agile, efficient, and effective under adverse conditions and during periods of growth.

The program is termed Microsoft 'Acclerator'. According to the story, Microsoft will partner with consultants who will market their Six Sigma solution to manufacturing, IT services, healthcare and financial services companies. The Accelerator offering will leverage existing software such as Microsoft Project, Office and Vision.

Tarun Mallick, Microsoft India's project managers explained that "Our objective is to provide offerings that improve productivity in all apects of a company and enable customers to take greater advantage of the functionality in their software to address specific business problems."

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft fares as a Six Sigma consultancy in India.

“Companies looking to maximize results from their business improvement investments are going to gravitate towards the integration of Six Sigma, Lean and SCOR under a single program,” says Rod Recker, Executive Director, Advanced Integrated Technologies Group, Inc., and a member of the interim steering committee for the SIG. “SCOR deployment will drive strategic, competitive, and operational alignment of the business opportunities … Six Sigma and Lean rapidly leverage these opportunities into bottom-line savings. The ability to tie projects, expectations and results from the process-level all the way back to the enterprise-level using SCOR process definition, metrics and financial validation is an extremely powerful compliment to a Six Sigma and Lean deployment.”

Activities of the new SIG group will center on leveraging the SCOR methodology and project implementation in the identification and structuring of projects for Six Sigma application. The goal is to work with industry practitioners to develop next generation supply-chain best practices and performance measures for the purpose of enabling members to achieve and sustain long-term improvements in the supply chains of their respective companies. The Six Sigma SIG will work with all SCC SIGs to best incorporate Six Sigma into their specific industries.

"The tight coupling of Six Sigma, Lean and SCOR has the potential to be the global leading practice in business transformation," says Jeremy Bupp, a member of the new SIG interim steering committee and Vice President of Business Development for Minneapolis-based Pragmatek Consulting Group. "Integration of these methods can guide leadership teams to structure change management, eliminate process and product defects and waste, and optimize material, work and information flow."

Steering Committee members include Lauren Harris, HP; Scott Sealing, United Space Alliance; Dave Cooper, Owens Corning; Denise Koster, Access Business Group; Frank Bailey, Entegris; Mike Cordovano, Tunnell Consulting; Mike Memmell; R. Reed & Associates; Doug Bley, Pragmatek; Eric Ross, Deloitte & Touche; Rod Recker, Advanced Integrated Technologies; and Bob Parker, AMR Research.

The Six Sigma SIG formation was initiated as a proposal by Robert Daniell, Managing Director, SCAN Services Network. The SCOR/Lean SIG encourages participation by all constituents and organizations interested in furthering the development of supply chain management across industries by involving executive management and senior practitioners from industry; collaborating with suppliers of information technology products and services; engaging with consultants and research organizations associated with Six Sigma/Lean practices and applications; and partnering with organizations sharing common interests.

The next meeting of this SIG will be held during the SCC Annual Meeting on 20-21 August 2003 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Additionally, Six Sigma IQ, a division of IQPC (International Quality & Productivity Center) www.iqpc.com, will present its second seminar on Six Sigma in the Supply Chain, Using Lean and Six Sigma to Achieve Supply Chain Excellence & Compete as an Extended Enterprise, on September 18-19, 2003, in Chicago, Illinois USA. The Council is partnering with IQPC on this program, and Scott Stephens, Chief Technology Officer for the SCC, will be a speaker for the event. This partnership is a result of the SIG work. For more information, contact Sonia Pun, Senior Marketing Manager, IQPC, at 44 (0) 20 7368 9415, or e-mail Sonia.Pun@IQPC.co.uk.

The Global Award for Supply Chain Excellence was awarded to the United States Air Force Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC) Supply Chain Transformation Team. This award recognizes the organization that was judged by the Supply-Chain Council Selection Committee to have made the greatest contribution to demonstrating or advancing the supply chain management body of knowledge during the last year. The winner was selected from the three winners of the other Supply-Chain Excellence Awards, which included the U.S. Department of Defense category of the Supply Chain Operational Excellence Award (the Global Award winner), the Supply Chain Management Technology Excellence Award, and the Supply Chain Academic Excellence Award. The OC-ALC Supply Chain Transformation Team was selected as the Global winner because they first received the award for Supply Chain Operational Excellence from the DoD competition. Their winning submission, “Purchasing and Supply Chain Management Initiatives: Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Pathfinder and F100 Engine Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) Pilot,” describes two initiatives to improve material support across the OC-ALC, which included a variety of analytical tools including SCOR Level IV detailed analysis. The two teams produced dramatic results last year and built the foundation for a successful transformation of their current supply chain and enhanced depot performance. The combined efforts of these OC-ALC teams are recognized as the template for the successful transformation of logistics support for the multitude of organizations that provide the U.S. war fighter with the best bomber, tanker, AWACs and engine support.

The Supply Chain Management Technology Excellence Award was presented to SCA Technologies LLC. The winning submission was based on work that the company did on a large integrated supply chain to generate significant savings for its customer. SCA was asked to deliver a SCAplanner model of the end-to-end supply chain for a product family with annual costs of several hundred million dollars. SCA evaluated the cost and operation impact of different strategic alternatives being considered for the complex business using the model. The scope of the model included Plan, Source, Make and Deliver activities in the supply chain, which was multi-tiered extending across 3rd tier commodity product suppliers, contract processing at the 2nd tier level, 2-stage final product manufacturing and distribution. The supply chain included multiple final products, multiple 2nd tier suppliers, manufacturing plants, manufacturing lines, and distribution centers. The outcomes resulted in significant reduction of total supply chain system costs.

The Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness (ODUSD [L&MR]), Supply Chain Integration (SCI) submitted the winner for the Award for Supply Chain Academic Excellence - “A Green Supply Chain Adaptation of the SCOR-model.” To implement green supply chain concepts, SCI partnered with the Logistics Management Institute (LMI) and the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment to modify the SCOR model to include environmental elements. GreenSCOR adapts the SCOR-model to include elements of “green” supply chain management to improve performance and lower costs, while reducing environmental impacts. The ultimate goal in creating GreenSCOR is to use it as a tool within DoD to leverage green supply chain concepts to improve end-to-end customer support. By mitigating environmental barriers in supply chains, DoD can enable more reliable and flexible operations, while still reducing the costs of supporting its warfighters.

All submissions for the awards will be posted on the http://www.supply-chain.org web site in the members’ section. For more information on the Supply-Chain Council and making submissions for next year's awards, contact the Council at +1 412-781-4101, or info@.supply-chain.org.

The SCOR model is a process reference tool maintained by SCC that allows companies to examine and measure their supply chain processes, determine where weak links exist, and identify how to make improvements. Consisting of three levels of process detail, SCOR also allows companies to examine their supply chain processes and their relationships between partners, suppliers and customers. According to SCC estimates, the number of companies that have adopted the model as a way to improve the performance throughout their entire supply chain has grown to over 500 companies since the formation of the SCC in 1996.

The SCC keeps track of SCOR-model users by auditing SCOR Workshop attendees, its membership, through case histories presented at SCC events worldwide, and entries in its Supply Chain Excellence Award Programs. Since SCOR can be implemented in varying degrees, the SCC estimates that the reported number of SCOR users is actually higher than its verified count. This is due in part to how each company chooses to use the model. A simple SCOR implementation may be an organization’s use of the model’s glossary of terms to identify processes and provide common terminology; while complex implementation may include the top-down restructuring of an organization’s entire supply chain from the supplier’s supplier to the customer’s customer.

SCOR is being implemented by private and public sector companies and organizations of various sizes and industry types as reflected on www.supply-chain.org/images/Email/scor_implmnt.htm. Notable large-scale SCOR implementations include the United States Armed Forces. All four branches of the military: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are using the Model to make their supply chain processes more efficient to improve the flow of materiel to the United States warfighter.

In South East Asia, the Singapore Government has launched an eBusiness Certification Program (eSCM) which references SCOR as the recommended supply chain standard of choice. EAN Australia is endorsing SCOR in its Supply Chain Knowledge Center currently under development.

Examples of SCOR implementation can be found in the Members’ Section of the SCC website www.supply-chain.org in the form of case histories, award entries, and presentations delivered to attendees at various Council events around the world. For more information visit www.supply-chain.org.

For more information visit www.supply-chain.org.

“Companies looking to maximize results from their business improvement investments are going to gravitate towards the integration of Six Sigma, Lean and SCOR under a single program,” says Rod Recker, Executive Director, Advanced Integrated Technologies Group, Inc., and a member of the interim steering committee for the SIG. “SCOR deployment will drive strategic, competitive, and operational alignment of the business opportunities … Six Sigma and Lean rapidly leverage these opportunities into bottom-line savings. The ability to tie projects, expectations and results from the process-level all the way back to the enterprise-level using SCOR process definition, metrics and financial validation is an extremely powerful compliment to a Six Sigma and lean deployment.”

Activities of the new SIG group will center on leveraging the SCOR methodology and project implementation in the identification and structuring of projects for Six Sigma application. The goal is to work with industry practitioners to develop next generation supply-chain best practices and performance measures for the purpose of enabling members to achieve and sustain long-term improvements in the supply chains of their respective companies. The Six Sigma SIG will work with all SCC SIG’s to best incorporate Six Sigma into their specific industries.

Due to the cross-industry nature of the group, SCC members with knowledge of Six Sigma and/or SCOR in any industry are invited to serve on the SIG Steering Committee. During the Atlanta meeting, the SIG established a core team of “Subject Matter Experts” (SMEs) to provide interim leadership and to form a “draft” action plan for the group until an official Steering Committee is elected and in place. For more information visit the SCC website at www.supply-chain.org.

The latest BPEL draft, Version 1.1 was submitted to OASIS by IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Siebel Systems, and SAP. In addition, Accenture, Akazi, CGEY, Collaxa, CommerceQuest, EDS, Vignette, FiveSight, Handysoft, HP, i2, JDEdwards, NEC, Novell, OpenStorm, SeeBeyond, SOurceCode, TeamPlate, Tibco, Unisys, Ultimus, WebV2 and others joined the submitters in calling for the formation of an OASIS technical committee to standardize BPEL. The committee is called the WSBPEL TC and is chaired by Diane Jordan (drj@us.ibm.com)and John Evdemon (jevdemon@microsoft.com) The first meeting is to be a phone conference call on May 16th.

The latest BPEL specification can be found at: http://xml.coverpages.org/WS-BPELv11-20030331.pdf

W3C is already considering choreography and business process specifications submitted by the BPMI consortium and by vendors like Oracle. We might end up with two slightly different business process specifications, although BPEL clearly has the backing of the most powerful software vendors and will probably prevail in any contest.

OMG will develop the exams in a joint effort with UTI. The program will be available beginning in late fall 2003, with UTI administering the program in Japan and other parts of Asia and OMG administering it in the rest of the world. OMG will assemble a team of UML experts and experienced examination professionals to develop the exam materials. Three examinations will test UML knowledge and skills at progressively advanced levels.

In his remarks at the UML 2003 Forum, Dr. Richard Soley, OMG Chairman and CEO stated, "The UML Certification Program fills a vital need for measurement of skills that will be increasingly crucial as more and more smart companies focus on MDA and modeling, thereby boosting the demand for qualified UML professionals. OMG is delighted to work with UTI to deliver a service that will benefit the IT industry throughout the world."

"UTI is at the leading edge of the modeling technology wave, and our work on the UML Certification Program with OMG marks a major new advance in this exciting field. We expect large numbers of participants to enroll in the program as modeling technologies continue to emerge as a key factor for success in designing sound enterprise systems," said Mitsuru Chikamori, President of UML Technology Institute Co., Ltd.

The UML Technology Institute Co., LTD. was founded to promote the use of open, standards-based modeling technologies through the development of international certification programs that provide formal recognition of modeling expertise. With headquarters in Tokyo, UML Technology Institute was established in November 2002 by PA Co., Ltd. and Object Technology Institute, the OMG Representative in Japan.

For more information, contact the OMG at www.omg.org, info@omg.org, or at +1-781-444 0404.

Bill Hakanson is the Executive Director of the SCC.

According to Aberdeen Group's definition, "Business Process Management products offer a business-process oriented framework to manage the integration and information infrastructure of an organization in order to systematically bridge internal and external people with applications and back-end systems." The group notes that BPM standards are still developing and maturing. They also comment on the fact that most of the companies in this market (they identify 21 public and 15 private BPM suppliers) are small companies and they expect this to change dramatically over the next three years.

The report is 37 pages, sells for $495 and is available from 1 800-577-7891