It can be a tricky proposition to optimize a business process, especially in enterprise. Getting all the stakeholders on the same page, and making sure everyone is speaking the same language are obstacles to efficiency and productivity. Additionally, managing a huge influx of requests can be a daunting task, especially with paper based systems. ProcessMaker addresses all of those things, and wraps them up in a tidy little easy-to-use software package, available in 15 different languages. From their site:
Some of the features of the software include:
– A process map designer
– Drag-n-drop custom form builder
– Business rules and logic point-and-click interface
– Company branding capability
– Inbox for status updates on requests (which will soon be customizable)
– File uploading system for confirmations, screenshots, documents, receipts, etc.
– Ad hoc users for those outside the business process
– Built-in calendar
This piece of software is enterprise-ready, beautifully designed, and dead simple to use. Therefore, it’s not surprising to hear that the team who created it at Colosa, Inc. built custom, closed source, commercial workflow management systems for seven years before they realized the future of their business was in open source. After encounters with numerous clients that were looking for platform solutions, the team decided to rethink things a bit. Brian Reale, of Colosa, Inc. tells me, “Our conclusion was that we should re-orient our solution so that we would be found by the communities that would more naturally have an affinity for what we were doing – i.e. open source communities. In 2006 and 2007, myself and CTO Fernando Ontiveros really began looking into what it would look like to migrate to open source. After visiting a few conferences, talking to lots of CEOs of other open source software companies, and reading a lot, we decided to take the plunge and create an open source project based on our previous workflow developments.”
As with many open source projects, collecting income to support active development can be a huge obstacle. The case of ProcessMaker was no different. As Brian says, “For any open source company starting out, one of the big questions is how do you support your core team while the software catches on? In the beginning, we (like most projects) didn’t have a community of contributors so we need to generate the code ourselves in order to generate the momentum to attract others to our cause. As a company, we decided to finance our software building habit with our consulting practice. It probably took us about 8-12 months before we had customers using our open source solution that wanted to hire us for support and consulting on the open source software. From there, we just kept growing one customer at a time.”
Colosa, Inc. now boasts customers like Toyota, Lenovo, Honeywell, and many others in the fields of finance, education, government, manufacturing, and telecommunications. Clearly, they are doing *something* right. Brian offers these words of advice for open source project leaders: “Listen to other open source projects. The greatest thing about the open source community is its explicit willingness to share almost anything!” Brian also goes on to say, “We got a lot of initial help and valuable advice from Knowledgetree CEO Daniel Chalef and also from Mindtouch’s Aaron Fulkerson. I would highly recommend looking for some friendly projects which already have established communities and then see how you can integrate what you are doing with what they have. This is a great way to gain allies, win over community, and get some immediate traction.” Wise words.
There is an exciting future in store for ProcessMaker and Colosa, Inc, as according to Brian, they “are just getting started.” They have a release coming out later this month which offers up a customizable inbox; something that no other BPM software offers. As well, towards the end of the year they will be launching a new version of the drag-and-drop process map designer “which will have lots of great surprises.” Brian also says that, “Even with great new features like these, we are always focused on staying true to our roots – workflow simplified.”
If you want an example of a successful company-backed, open source project, look no further. And if you are interested in learning more about each of the features of ProcessMaker, you can check out the Features page of the site, or even request an on-demand Webinar. You can also keep up with what’s going on with the team at the ProcessMaker Blog.