Open Text Launches New BPM App Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software provider Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq: OTEX - news) has unveiled a new business process management (BPM) system that aims to help users improve business-critical processes, reduce costs, and tightly integrate processes with important documents and other content. The new BPM product is designed to let customers automate and optimize high-volume processes comprising millions of transactions, thousands of users and multiple applications, according to Open Text. The Open Text application strives to eliminate inefficiencies in processes -- for example, to optimize cash flow in accounts receivable, improve response times for faster customer service, or reduce costs in procurement. Open Text BPM's integration with the firm's new Production Document Management software enables the system to work seamlessly with high-volume imaging and document management capabilities, said the company. Customers benefit because users working within a process have all the documents they need at their fingertips, saving time and speeding processes, Open Text explained. The Open Text BPM system also integrates with a wide range of business applications, so that more required contributors can be incorporated into a process easily, resulting in improved efficiency, the vendor noted. Across the Enterprise Standards-based, open architecture allows Open Text BPM to work easily with enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM) and office applications, such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news) Outlook, said the company. It also works with other Livelink ECM Solutions, providing access to content in the Livelink ECM Platform's content repository, and allowing tasks and information from processes in the BPM system to appear in Livelink ECM client interfaces, Open Text pointed out. "We developed our BPM solution with the idea that critical processes must be seamlessly linked to content and users across the enterprise," said David Glazer, Chief Technology Officer at Open Text. "Documents and the collaboration between people are what initiate processes. Bringing BPM together with document management and collaboration solutions, as well as a single content repository, provides a powerful solution that is unique in the market," he claimed. Analysis of Processes as They Occur Glazer offered an example of how the tight integration of these capabilities can vastly improve a customer's invoice verification process: Using Open Text's Production Document Management technology, a customer can scan and store invoices, capture data and insert it into an ERP application, he explained, which triggers the verification process in Open Text BPM . The workflow notifies each agent of the invoice's status and lets users outside of the ERP application approve invoices, Glazer noted. For one customer automating invoice verification, Open Text's system integrates with Microsoft Outlook and SAP (NYSE: SAP - news) to consolidate the multi-stage approval process and match approvals with incoming invoices all on one unified screen, he said. Open Text BPM automatically collects and analyzes data on processes as they happen, said the vendor, allowing companies to make changes so that the workflow is more efficient