ISIS Papyrus finishes successful joint research project with the University of Vienna

The joint research project of ISIS Papyrus and the University of Vienna, CACAO (Consistency Checking, Recommendations, and Visual Modeling for ad hoc Changes by Knowledge Workers in Adaptive Case Management) has been recently successfully completed. The focus of this multi-year project, as reported earlier in the ISIS Times, was on Adaptive Case Management (ACM) research topics related to consistency and compliance of business execution performed by business users in highly adaptive business application environments.

Christoph Ruhsam, head of the ISIS Papyrus Academy, summarizes the core research results as follows:

• Automatic identification of structural inconsistencies in ACM business models
  ACM cases can contain certain predefined process fragments, which shall guarantee a consistent execution at runtime.
  A model checking algorithm was developed which allows to identify and resolve such inconsistencies already at design time during the release management phase before being rolled out into production.
  

  ACM model consistency checking

• Implementation of a pattern-based language for the definition and automatic execution of compliance rules for ACM models
  The implementation provides a Natural Language Compliance Rule Editor for the business administrator using terms from the domain-specific business vocabulary (ontology-based compliance rules).
  

  Business vocabulary editor (Ontology)

  Using this approach, the system can provide reactive as well as proactive guidance taking into account both the compliance rules and the knowledge workers’ past decisions to enhance the users’ working experience. This opens the stage for new ACM-based business applications that have the capability to effectively serve the needs of business users in providing high-quality customer-focused service.

  

  Natural language compliance rule editor

  Compliance is continuously checked during the whole case execution and the business user informed by the compliance checking log being part of the case management user interface.

  

  ACM business user interface with compliance log

• Runtime recommendation algorithms for business users to guide and guarantee business compliance during a highly flexible ACM case execution
  The compliance rule solution mentioned above has been integrated with the Papyrus User Trained Agent (UTA) machine learning technology that has been utilized to make recommendations on best next actions in a given business context in compliance with defined business rules.

The CACAO project results were presented by Professor Uwe Zdun’s team (Project lead and Head of the Software Architecture Research Group at the University of Vienna) and ISIS Papyrus at a number of specialized conferences, published in 12 scientific papers, as well as a contribution to the new book “Intelligent Adaptability with BPM” in the Workflow Management Coalition’s BPM Excellence in Practice Series. Scientific software engineering was applied with mathematical algorithms to real-life situations and their relevance and effectiveness have been evaluated with joint industry research partners like “die Mobiliar” (results are available in the Springer book “Business Process Management Cases“). All publications are available for download from the ISIS Papyrus Website under Academic Research.

Modern businesses cannot be satisfied with a traditional procedural process design as they are highly semi- or unstructured like any customer communication. The prototype implementation using the Papyrus Business Communication and Process Platform has proven that such unstructured customer communication business applications can be defined with a pure declarative approach, giving business users the needed flexibility to focus on customer experience, while adhering to company regulations and external compliance criteria. By using such an approach, companies can significantly improve and optimize the customer experience, while meeting compliance requirements. For more information please see Building Business Solutions using Adaptive Case Management.

Consequently, ISIS Papyrus has recently announced Papyrus Converse  – the new low-code platform for business users with a focus on Customer Experience (outcome) and Efficiency (processes) that will substantially speed up the delivery of new business services by making use of industry- and company-specific Business Terminology (Ontology) and Business Rules (Compliance) to help companies innovate and provide services in a conversational style with no prescribed process flows. Watch out for more and stay tuned to this site.

ISIS Papyrus announces availability of the free AFP Viewer in Papyrus V7.1 SP9

ISIS Papyrus is pleased to announce the update of its Papyrus AFP Viewer Freeware, 7.1 SP9 (build number 7.19.0.1730), which is available now for download from the ISIS Papyrus website.

It offers a completely reworked user interface which follows the ISIS Papyrus user interface flat design concept. Moreover, ISIS Papyrus is committed to continue the AFP Viewer plugin support for IE and Firefox that support NPAPI. As an alternative, with V7.1 SP9 we offer the installation of the Papyrus AFP Viewer Freeware as a Windows application. The AFP Viewer application supports AFP documents with external AFP resources in order to reduce the actual document size to a minimum.

CEO Annemarie Pucher says: We are very happy to support the AFP community with the free AFP Viewer, which is unsurpassed in its WYSIWYG AFP viewing and printing capabilities.

Roberto Anzola, VP Solutions of ISIS Papyrus Group and Board Director of the AFP Consortium (AFPC), says: ISIS Papyrus is continuing its dedication to steer the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture into a fully fledged and open document standard. Its independence from specific applications and devices makes it the first choice for any business document and information presentation including also embedded PDF and video resources.

Read more about the new release on the AFP Viewer Blog.

First iPhone Scan Application for Online Payments

ISIS Papyrus proudly announces the world’s first iPhone scan application for online payslip payments. This innovative app created for a major Austrian banking institution fills the void between the convenience of mobile banking and the traditional processing of physical payslips.

Now it’s no longer necessary to do all the tedious data entry for payslip payments manually with all the potential errors. Instead banking customers may simply use the iPhone’s camera to take a photo of the payslip and let the state-of-the-art capture and OCR technology from ISIS Papyrus do the rest.

The first users we asked about their impression were upbeat about the capabilities of the app. “This saves an awful lot of time when doing the ‘paperwork'”, says a middle-aged owner of a small car-repair shop and perhaps not your typical tech-savvy smartphone wizard, “you know I always used to mistype things when entering all that stuff manually and doing the same thing over and over again just drives you nuts every once in a while. I’m really glad to have this app.” He is assisted by a young woman who admits she’s having particular trouble with entering the new IBAN and BIC codes. “When you’re used to the old way of entering these codes it takes some time to get used to a completely new system that doesn’t make much sense in the beginning. I prefer to just snatch the photo and then check it for errors than to do it all manually. It’s really handy!”

Watch this video to see more detailed features of this latest innovation from ISIS Papyrus:




Invitation to ISIS Open House 2010

ISIS Papyrus invites once again to its well-respected Open House and User Conferences. These events are held in Vienna (AT), Dallas (US), Kingsclere (UK), and Ivrea (IT). As usual there will be several ways to participate: speeches, workshops, hands-on demos, case studies and group discussions. Dates and more information can be found on the ISIS Website.

Chief Architect Max J. Pucher will hold the keynote address on adaptive processes and empowerment of business users. This will certainly be a highlight as it gives an in-depth explanation of some of the key concepts of the Papyrus Platform. It will also outline how businesses can use Case Management in an environment with predominantly unstructured and dynamic processes to improve their performance and efficiency.

Together with the other amazing Papyrus features like Papyrus EYE widgets, wizards, Content Compare or the WebArchive for iPhone visitors will enjoy exciting presentations and unique opportunities to meet like-minded document professionals and to discuss pragmatic solutions to real-life challenges in a special ambience.

WebArchive Goes Mobile With iPhone

The powerful WebArchive solution from ISIS Papyrus for short and long-term archiving and easy retrieval has now joined top perfomance for high-quality, on-the-go customer communications and response with the mobility and convenience of the iPhone.

This recent development is part of the new strategy of ISIS Papyrus to support mobile applications and will be followed up by support for Windows Mobile 7 and Symbian.

We have investigated the benefits of the Papyrus iPhone app and asked people who already employ it in their everyday business. A senior product manager at a major telecommunications provider put it like this:

“We want to offer this app both to our customer service reps as well as to a very well-defined target group of customers as a value proposition. Our staff will now have a huge amount of documents available to service their clients instantly without the need of opening and connecting their notebook first or even the need of having their notebooks with them. On the customer’s request and with proper authorization they can edit or annotate those documents and the changes will be reflected throughout the entire organization. Customers are given access to their documents without any intermediary and at any given time. But this is only part of the story. However well designed a customer offering may be, it will fail when poorly executed. We use the advantages of the Papyrus Platform in its entirety to provide a unified experience for the customer. First we enable and promote the collaboration of cross-functional teams from sales and marketing to logistics and supplies in our own organization and with partners and we highly value any communication with our customers as a precious resource. Because it is not so much data mining and other statistic guesswork that tells you what your customers want, they will rather tell you personally if you are ready to listen to them. And we certainly are!”

On asking if they were just jumping the bandwagon to capitalize on the popularity of the iPhone he adds the following:

“This all is not just a new random offering but part of an integrated strategy of providing a service platform for highly targeted individuals. Papyrus allows everyone in the organization to understand, subscribe to and fulfill the importance of the customer experience and our commitment to make it valuable and pleasant. This is not a one-off effort but a an ongoing process which we couldn’t manage without an integrated communications platform.”

At this point he is assisted by the VP of Costumer Services who had joined our conversation earlier and points out:

“By integrating the whole communication with the customer at each touchpoint we can focus on the entire customer experience. Each interaction of the customer with different departments of our company is equally important and Papyrus gives us the complete transparency to track these interactions by providing all of our staff with access to all customer-related communications together with real-time data in a single view.”

To find out how the WebArchive iPhone app can help you in fulfilling your organization’s strategic goals read a detailed description and a list of features here or get it at the Apple Appstore.

User-Trained Agent in V7

Real-Time Chart for UTA

The User-Trained Agent (UTA) enables the business user to gradually design a workflow by training. This kind of training is not suited for the sequential entry of data and threshold values. In conventional workflow systems developers have to provide this functionality via forms, script logic and business rule systems plus the programming of complex interfaces.

The Papyrus WebRepository lets the user create metadata definitions for interactive Activity Recording (AR) and the entry of business rules in natural language without the need for scripts and without programming efforts. The integrated authorization features restrict the creation and editing of business rules to users with appropriate rights and make sure that execution of the rules is strictly within the boundaries of user roles. The UTA can be trained to perform activities but their scope is limited by defined business rules.

NLR – Natural Language Rules

Business users need to quickly and easily add and modify business rules for the processes that they own to either comply with changes in market conditions, business principles or regulation. The Papyrus Query Language (PQL) of the Papyrus Platform is extremely powerful but was not designed to be used by business users. The NLR Editor provides the business user with single-edit-line rule entry that enables clear text, syntax free entry of business rules that are structured according to predefinable rule patterns. The NLR Editor uses the context of the business case as functional scope and will suggest access to metadata attributes based on that context. The user can neither access data that he is not authorized for nor can he make a mistake in using attribute names. The rules are entered in a national language of choice supported by the translation collection and stored in a language independent format. Rules can be entered in one language and edited in another as long as the rule keywords are available in the Papyrus WebRepository translation collection. The executable format of the NLR is a PQL rule object and is therefore fully compatible with normal PQL scripts.

Papyrus Activity Recorder V7

The Activity Recorder (AR) lets users automatically add routine activities like the addition of new customers or the changes of customer data to the context of a business case. This makes complex scripting of forms and the underlying logic dispensable. Once activities have been recorded users may modify and fine-tune them. Changes in the metadata object of the repository are considered automatically and therefore running the AR requires no changes to the activity as such. The GUI language of the activity is activated at the same time as the translation functionality of the Papyrus WebRepository. Activities are provided as generic functions in a library or assigned to an abject type as tooltip method. As all activities are executed along the same principle users need no extra training for certain forms.

Papyrus EYE Dashboards

Using the graphical capability of Papyrus EYE in v7, it is now very simple to create dashboard panels that can display any data query from the system or from applications. A simple PQL query can read system statistics, real-time transactions or resource consumption, live business data, process managemant statistics, campaign or customer relationship management information and present them in a choice of charts.

Papyrus EYE Dashboard

The dynamically appearing real-time charts are a lot more flexible and easier to use than in MS-Excel. With this capability the Papyrus Platform establishes itself as a full-function process management suite and is in terms of graphics presentation as powerful as any business intelligence product.

->MJP