Business Process
Management (BPM)
with PegaSystems
By: Segue Technologies, Inc.
Seamless Transitions to Success | www.seguetech.com | 703.549.8033
Business Process
Management (BPM)
with PegaSystems
By: Segue Technologies, Inc.
All links featured in this book can be found at
www.seguetech.com/blog
Copyright © 2019 Segue Technologies, Inc.
Table of Contents
4 Introduction
8 CH 1: WHAT IS BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT?
9 Typical Phases of a BPM Effort
10 CH 2: CHOOSING A BPM TOOL
14 CH 3: THE PEGA BPM SOLUTION
17 Modernizing Business Processes with the
Pegasystems Platform
23 Credits
Introduction
Despite their many organizational differences, corporations,
government agencies and non-profits all share a common principle
of delivering specific outcomes for their customers and stakeholders.
These outcomes are achieved through the design and implementation
of connected operations, activities and workflows; also known as a
“business processes.” Given the critical link between processes and
outcomes, it is not surprising that successful organizations spend
considerable time and effort on process improvement. Especially
since process improvement often necessitates major changes to
their IT infrastructure, particularly when migrating to the cloud or
modernizing aging business applications.
MOVING TO THE CLOUD
A growing driver of process and system modernization is the need
to migrate to the cloud. Cloud migrations are huge undertakings
for any organization; however, they can have tremendous benefits.
Some organizations seek hands-off scalability that can handle
temporary spikes in bandwidth without paying for that capacity
all the time. Other groups take advantage of the high-availability
uptime the cloud provides without paying for round-the-clock
staffing. In addition, cloud offers a transfer of risk, whether through
built-in automatic updates, secure data management, or even
disaster recovery plans.
To meet cloud migration goals, many organizations will choose to
simply move their existing systems to Infrastructure as a Service
BPM with PegaSystems Introduction 4
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
(IaaS) environments - commonly known as the “Lift and Shift”
strategy. While this approach checks the box for being in the cloud,
it does little to address any systematic issues – you lift and shift the
problems along with the application.
SYSTEM MODERNIZATION/REENGINEERING
Modernizing and improving processes typically demands updates
to, or a complete reengineering of, existing business systems. This
introduces significant areas for consideration on cost, timeline, and
resources to implement these changes. The traditional development
approach is to gather requirements and work with a development
team to custom code an application to meet those needs. Although
this is an absolutely acceptable method, these projects often run
over budget or are delayed due to factors such as:
• Inaccurate estimation – unclear or changing requirements
• Availability of resources with specific software language/
tool experience
• Infrastructure limitations, compatibility, or delays in setup
• Ability to test/verify effectively and early in the
development cycle
To avoid these issues, many organizations are opting to use no-code
or low-code platforms to develop business applications, or more
importantly, business capabilities. These platforms are quickly
gaining popularity and are typically provided to customers in a
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering so that users don’t have to deal
with setting up the infrastructure and development environments
needed to support their applications. Ultimately, these PaaS models
minimize the need for formal development processes and even
development teams at all, allowing business users to go straight from
identifying requirements, to implementing capabilities themselves.
Introduction 5
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT
To meet these challenges of cloud migration and modernization,
organizations are implementing Business Process Management
(BPM) solutions as an essential organizing practice. BPM gets to
the heart of analyzing and improving operational capabilities to
meet evolving business needs. Organizations across a wide range
of industries – Financial, Government, Insurance, Healthcare,
Transportation to name a few – are realizing substantial return on
Investment (ROI) from their BPM initiatives.
In the past, BPM efforts were often focused on internal processes
like finance, operations, or human resources and partner facing
processes like supply chain. However, there is a growing focus –
particularly in the expanding digital environment – on customer
facing processes such as insurance claim processing, new
subscription service onboarding, requesting government services,
submitting property taxes and so on.
Introduction 6
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
In this eBook, we look at how a leading BPM Platform offers an
adaptive, cloud-architected software that empowers people to
rapidly deploy and easily extend and change applications to meet
strategic business needs. PegaSystems is no/low-code application
development platform which includes BPM and Case Management,
Mobility, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Social (chatbots
and virtual assistant), Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-
powered decisioning tools. Use of a BPM platform such as Pega
can address the cost and complexity associated with BPM efforts
and minimize these challenges when future evolutions require an
organization to again modernize their processes. These platforms
allow organizations to focus on the capability; extracting what they
need to run their operations from the constraints of standalone
custom applications.
Introduction 7
CHAPTER 1
What is Business
Process Management?
Business Process Management (BPM) is the effort by which an
organization defines, models, understands, improves and monitors
their activities, operations and workflows. BPM coordinates the
behavior of people, systems, information, and things to support an
organization’s strategy and goals. It focuses on delivering maximum
value, as defined by the organization, in the most efficient manner
possible. Organizations implementing BPM initiatives look to
achieve the following benefits:
• Increased alignment of process to outcomes
• Meaningful and measurable costs savings
• Improved customer experience and satisfaction
• Revenue growth
• Higher quality products or services
• Increased process transparency
• Increased responsiveness
• Agility to quickly adjust to changing conditions
• Accelerated time to market
• Continuous improvement
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
Typical Phases of a BPM Effort
Most organizations are not static. They operate in larger, competitive
environments that continually create new challenges and new
opportunities. As an organization changes – grows, pivots into
a new line of business or new market, faces new competitors, or
adjusts to new regulations – so too must its business processes. It’s
important to recognize that processes do not operate in a vacuum.
For this reason, it is useful to think about business processes as a
set of discrete, but connected, activities involving a range of related
stakeholders. Therefore, business processes must be specific to the
stakeholder mission, tied to the larger organizational context, and
current. To effectively achieve this within an organization, BPM
efforts will vary in size, scope and complexity, however, most involve
the following basic phases:
1. MODEL: Identify, define and create a representation of
the complete process so it can be easily understood and
communicated
2. EXECUTE: Based on the model, develop and implement
the process so that it can be repeatably performed - Apply
automation if possible
3. CONTROL: Ensure the process is consistently followed
4. MONITOR: Collect meaningful and measurable data to
determine the effectiveness of the process in delivering the
expected value and benefits
5. OPTIMIZE: Use the data collected through monitoring and
feed back into the modeling, to determine if further process
improvements can be made
Chapter 1: What is Business Process Management? 9
CHAPTER 2
Choosing a BPM Tool
BPM initiatives that leverage leading software platforms can
effectively drive digital transformation initiatives across the
enterprise. These solutions allow users to digitally model, build and
run a variety of related processes and workflows to support strategic
objectives. Collecting process data through monitoring features,
directly supports optimization efforts. Not surprisingly, the BPM
solution market is broad, with a large number of vendors offering a
wide range of products - everything from large, enterprise platforms
to small products with a niche organizational focus.
When choosing a BPM tool, you must first consider the
organizational goals that you are trying to achieve. Next you need
to analyze the current state of your process management and what
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
resources are available to devote to the improvement effort. In
addition, you need to forecast future requirements that could affect
process management. This is not something to rush; gaining a clear
and complete understanding of your needs may take some time,
especially if there are multiple stakeholders with differing opinions
to align. Thorough analysis, with documented options aligned with
the business needs, is critical to gaining organizational concurrence
in BPM tool selection.
Once you have a clear vision of where your organization is and where
it wants to go, it is time to evaluate potential BPM solutions to get
you there. The following are factors to consider of the various tools:
1. COST: BPM software prices vary widely depending on several
factors such as capabilities, userbase size, customizations,
on-site versus cloud software, to name a few. Generally, an
enterprise cloud BPM solution is likely to be priced between
$50 - $100 per user per month. Some on-site BPM software
requires you to purchase expensive licenses and pay annual
maintenance fees that can be cost prohibitive if you have a
smaller userbase and budget.
2. USABILITY: A poor user experience will slow adoption of the
BPM tool, whereas an intuitive user experience motivations
adoption. The more intuitive the interface, the less training
it will take staff to produce results. Most BPM tools are based
on a drag-and-drop interface to create workflows and forms,
but more complex actions such as setting up integrations may
be less intuitive to non-technical users. If the timeline of your
implementation is short, a more intuitive BPM tool can be
implemented with little to no training. If your timeline is less
compressed or you choose a more complex BPM, you can take
the time to have your staff trained prior to implementation.
Usability may also need to consider the technical proficiency
of your staff.
Chapter 2: Choosing a BPM Tool 11
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3. INTEGRATION: BPM is what brings your business software
together into your operational workflow. This is an essential
feature if you have multiple backend software tools that support
your processes. A BPM solution that cannot communicate with
legacy software systems may not be a complete failure, but
without proper integration, you could be doing a lot of manual
data transfers between systems, which negates the gains of
automation. Be sure that your BPM offers integration paths
for your core processes such as API support, REST APIs and
webhooks.
4. RESPONSIVENESS: With the proliferation of mobile devices,
the quality of the User Interface (UI) to support a better user
experience has grown tremendously. A better user experience
often depends upon that user’s device and browser, so if you
have a userbase with a diverse set of workspaces, you need a
BPM solution that is dynamic to provide a great UI for a wide
range of devices. The idea behind responsive web design is that
instead of writing multiple design UI’s for multiple devices, a
single design will automatically support viewing in multiple
devices. Many BPMs include built-in mobility capability that
delivers responsive, mobile and web user experiences with one
deployment.
5. HOSTING: Essentially all BPM tool options you might consider
will have cloud and on-site hosting offerings. The most
important consideration for this option is whether you have the
manpower and technical resources to support on-site hosting,
and then whether that route is more advantageous than the
cloud. Security concerns, for example, might make on-site
hosting more appropriate for your organization. However, the
trend is for organizations to move towards the cloud and this
is even being seen in government enterprises. Cloud hosting
offers low upfront investment, significantly lower risks and
more scalability options.
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A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
Additionally, technologies such as Robotic Process Automation
(RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Analytics, and Mobile applications
are natural extensions of effective BPM initiatives. These have the
potential to deliver significant benefit, not just for cost savings, but
for greatly improved customer experiences.
Choosing the right business process management software can
enable process improvement efforts throughout your organization.
Carefully evaluate your options to ensure you have the right tool for
your needs, before committing significant resources to one solution.
Chapter 2: Choosing a BPM Tool 13
CHAPTER 3
The Pega BPM
Solution
Pegasystems (Pega) is a BPM tool that allows you to build scalable
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), process automation,
Case Management, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps, all on
one unified platform. Pega uniquely leverages digital process
automation (DPA), including artificial intelligence and robotics, to
unify business processes and customer journeys from end-to-end.
Pega’s visually driven, low-code development environment fosters
collaboration between business and IT, enabling quick development
of applications, faster time to value, and reduced development costs.
Pega focuses on enterprise-wide implementation by maximizing re-
use across departments. Pega empowers business stakeholders to
manage their processes in a no-code environment, while allowing
developers to architect applications in a low-code environment. As
an enterprise platform, Pega can be transformational to the culture
and productivity of your organization. Instead of passively watching
the backlog of feature requests grow, users can spec out or even
implement new functionality themselves. Applications that were
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previously siloed based on technical or functional requirements
can now be grouped or combined based on the business cases
surrounding their usage.
Pega is a single, unified platform, which contains model-driven code
components, a standardized database architecture for all hosted
systems, case management tools for requirements building, and
an operating system which ties everything together. All Adaptive
and Preventative Maintenance activities for the platform are done
as part of any Pega upgrade release and consider the impacts of
changes for any component that resides on the platform. Pega’s
unified architecture makes it one of the best BPM tools for large
enterprises which deploy it fully.
Pega empowers your expert users, analysts, and tech-savvy support
staff to contribute directly to developing applications instead of
relying on specialized IT staff. This reduces the dependency on IT
to create the functionality for you, while also placing the decision
points in the hands of the people who know your business needs
best. Pega users are business stakeholders that aren’t professional
developers but are still able to build applications through the tool.
While there is a learning curve to educate “Citizen Developers”
on Pega’s solution development methodology, Pegasystems offers
an extensive training suite that includes online training courses
and sandbox exercises, a robust knowledgebase, and an active
community forum.
Pega is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Pega Cloud enables
you to scale your BPM solutions to your needs without worrying
about overprovisioning or hidden costs. Additionally, Pega facilitates
building for change - change in what your users need, changes
in your regulatory environment, or even changes in how your
business works. If your needs change in the future, it’s relatively
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A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
straightforward for users to update business rules, or move your
cloud deployment to another environment or security posture that
better suits your needs.
VISUALLY-DRIVEN
Fosters Collaboration Between Business & IT
Enabling Quick App Development at Reduced Cost
DIGITAL PROCESS AUTOMATION
Leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Robotics to
Unify Business Processes & Customer Journeys
TECHNOLOGY READINESS
Level 9 -Actual Systems Proven Through
Successful Mission Operations
The Pega BPM platform has the capability to not only support
your current business operations, but also to grow with your
business needs. It is a leading BPM solution because it aligns with
the Enterprise modernization needs of large organizations. Pega
provides a federated development environment that allows for
sharing apps between organizations, governing data fields, rules,
and processes. Pega users can set up foundation levels for business
rules that allow rule inheritance and enforce data standards.
Furthermore, automation tools move applications across different
development environments and development teams.
Segue has significant experience in system analysis and assessments
and working with customers to determine the tools and approaches
that best support their missions within their constraints. In working
with Federal customers in selecting BPM platforms, we have found
that Pega is the best choice among highly rated solutions.
Chapter 3: The Pega BPM Solution 16
A Segue Technologies eBook BPM with PegaSystems
Modernizing Business Processes
with the Pegasystems Platform
The Pega platform is centered on the Agile SCRUM methodology.
While it is becoming increasingly accepted to adopt Agile for system
development, by pushing smaller and more frequent releases into
production faster and efficiently, an Agile approach is also a major
benefit in system maintenance, often referred to as “DevOps”. Pega
has Agile baked into its entire suite of tools, with guidelines and
“models” coupled to Agile principles, which significantly enables
modification choices and decreases time-to-delivery. The Pega suite
supports each member of the Agile development team in their roles:
• BUSINESS ANALYSTS (BAS) can quickly create working
prototypes using the Designer Studio to help elicit
requirements;
• DEVELOPERS (PEGA CERTIFIED SYSTEM ARCHITECTS
(CSAS) can use the App Studio and Dev Studio to quickly
build and test intuitive user interfaces;
• CSAS AND TESTERS can easily create automated unit tests
to ensure rules and other application components function
as intended and bolster the Continuous Integration
pipeline;
• RELEASE MANAGERS can create release pipelines with
guardrails, test execution, package, and deployment
to seamlessly take applications from development into
production
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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Pega supports Agile development through “Agile Studio” – an Agile-
oriented work tracking system based on the Scrum framework.
Agile Studio has the four standard Scrum roles of Stakeholder,
Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team. It includes
Products, Releases, Backlogs, Sprints (time-boxed iterations of
work), Planning tools, Dashboards and Reporting, and everything
else you need to successfully manage an Agile project.
Work in Pega Agile Studio is organized around Products and
Releases. A Product is the top-level organizational container and
represents the system being developed. You might have one or many
Products depending on your business model, or in the case of a
single large Product, you might break it down into multiple smaller
Products. One example of this would be a System-of-Systems, where
each subsystem is organized as its own Product. Each Product then
has one or more Releases, which are planned and tracked against
a schedule.
Agile Studio includes several Backlogs, which contain Epics and
User Stories. The highest-level backlog is the Product Backlog, which
is the full collection of epics and stories for the Product. Beneath
that is the Release Backlog, which contains only those items which
have been chosen for inclusion in a release. At the lowest level is the
Sprint Backlog, which is limited to only those items which are part
of a time-boxed Sprint.
Dashboards and Reports allow you to monitor the progress of your
application development. One of the most important charts available
in the Agile Studio dashboard is the Burndown Chart, which shows
how much work is planned for a sprint or release, the planned rate
of work completion, and the actual rate of completion, so you can
quickly and easily see if you are on track to meet your goals and
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timelines. Agile Studio also has a wide variety of canned reports, and
if those don’t meet your needs, you can also create custom reports
for the information you need.
RAPID PROTOTYPING
The Pega BPM platform uses an approach called Directly Capturing
Objectives (DCO) to allow BAs to visually capture requirements
directly in the Pega Designer Studio, creating effective prototypes
in real time. Prototypes created by a BA, and more complex
requirements, business rules, and algorithms can then be refined and
perfected by a CSA. This approach is more agile than a traditional
Requirements Document to Software conversion because it:
• Produces working software more quickly (even if not
complete)
• Fails fast (if the customer sees you building the wrong
thing, they’ll identify it sooner)
• Is responsive to change (real-time collaboration inherently
welcomes and captures change throughout the process)
TESTING & QUALITY
The Pega platform provides several mechanisms to support
continuous testing per Agile. First, when an Analyst or Architect is
building a component of the system, they can run the component
(isolated from anything else) to see how it behaves. Through this,
they can ensure their configuration has the intended effect at the
component level. Unit Tests can be created to test components,
processes, data models, transformations, and other isolated and
integrated aspects of the system. Scenario testing allows developers
to record interactions with the system to develop automated tests,
not only for individual components, but also to test the full user
interface and process flows as well.
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Pega has a dashboard which shows test statistics, including overall
scores for guardrail compliance, test coverage, and pass/fail rates of
unit and scenario testing. This dashboard also shows tests broken
down by case type, allowing you to quickly see what areas of your
system need additional test attention.
DEPLOYMENT MANAGEMENT
The Pega Deployment Manager enables assisted or fully automated
migration of applications between environments (e.g. from Staging
to Production). A CSA, build manager, or other designated person
creates a deployment package containing all products, components,
rules, user interfaces, and other pieces of an application. The
deployment pipeline can be configured to check application
quality, ensure guardrail compliance, validate successful test case
execution, and deploy to one or more environments. Deployment
pipeline execution can be fully automated for hands-off, repeatable
deployments, and include stage gates that require manual
intervention to proceed (such as review of test results prior to
approval to proceed to release.) The Application Packaging wizard
can also export an application for deployment in disconnected
environments.
SYSTEM MODIFICATION
Code manipulation, database design, and implementation have been
drastically simplified with Pega and do not require staff to have a
specialized computer language or Computer Science Degree. This
feature of being a no-code solution alone is a cost game-changer
for Pega, when compared to looking at an aging system written in a
software language no longer current or supported, or that requires
reverse engineering in order to implement any modifications or
enhancements. With a supportable and modern platform like PEGA,
future maintenance costs are more manageable, predictable, and
sustainable, with business users able to make updates on their own.
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USER INTERFACE – RESPONSIVE MAINTENANCE SUPPORT
In addition to updating actual application code as part of
maintenance, developers and testers must validate the potential
impacts to the User Interface (UI) given various browsers and device
(laptop, tablet, mobile) platforms. The Pega Omni-Channel UX™
is a responsive, standards-based UI that reduces the time and cost
to design and deploy multi-channel applications by employing a
“Design once and Deploy everywhere” capability. Applications
automatically adapt to the user’s device screen size, tailoring the
experience to the current user and situation. This eliminates a
tremendous amount of development and testing.
SYSTEM REENGINEERING
Re-engineering involves building processes into specifications and
then implementing those into the system. Even among the most
efficient software teams this identification and implementation
phase often becomes chaotic and much time is spent on validating
and tracking these processes through configuration management
and version control. Pega has incorporated features where instead
of creating many processes to meet various situations, you create
one process that is automatically tailored to each situation, reducing
time to delivery and once again the cost of maintenance. The Pega
Situational Layer Cake™ automatically specializes processes to
match a current situation, adjusting the solution by any number of
dimensions, such as customer type, product, channel, department,
geography, language and time, all of this while providing reusable
functional logic for adaption to other requirements when needed.
Pega efficiently delivers repeatable, differentiated solutions by
first capturing those policies and procedures that are common and
shared, and then specializing them to meet the diverse needs of the
business solution being addressed.
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MAINTENANCE WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT
Pega greatly assists organizations in automating workflow (handling,
receiving, routing and reporting) across multiple channels and
organizational silos. Pega’s Adaptive Decision Management features
allow business users to leverage big data for intelligent business
operations that adapt and improve in real-time and go beyond
workflow to retrieval of relevant data and adapt decisions. Business
stakeholders can act independently of software engineers and not
require their support to create specialized data views and reports.
Case Lifecycle Management features within the platform organize
work by goals, stages, and steps instead of complex processes and
transactions, which allow greater understanding and comprehension
among stakeholders and leads to faster identification of modification
requirements and implementation.
When one considers all components and tools offered by the Pega
BPM platform vendor, ROI becomes apparent. When reviewing
BPM platform options, an IT decision maker must ask:
“Can we substantially increase time-to-delivery while also reducing
maintenance costs?” Pega achieves this through a no/low code
platform with a comprehensive Agile development tool suite. In
addition, the ability to train business users to develop and maintain
applications, along with streamlining licensing costs with hosting
creates cost efficiencies over what would be incurred if the tools and
platform were managed separately.
Chapter 3: The Pega BPM Solution 22
Credits
www.gartner.com/it-glossary/business-process-management-bpm
www.business-process-management.cioreview.com/vendors/top-20-bpm-
tech-companies-2018
www.pega.com
www.pega.com/products/cloud
www.pega.com/products/pega-platform/case-management
www.pega.com/products/cloud/pega-trust-center
https://academy.pega.com
www.seguetech.com/segues-discovery-process-infographic
www.seguetech.com/what-is-bpm
www.seguetech.com/top-five-bpm-tools-for-the-enterprise
www.seguetech.com/common-problems-with-cloud-migration
www.seguetech.com/how-to-choose-bpm-tool
www.seguetech.com/difference-between-no-code-and-low-code-platforms
www.seguetech.com/appian-vs-pega
CONTRIBUTORS
Brian W. Callahan – President and CEO
Mike Behrmann – Executive Vice President
Ron Novak – Executive Vice President
Mark Shapiro – Software Architect
Jason Norgaard – Program Manager
David Diehl – Software Engineer
Nicole Pearson – Requirements Analyst
Matthew Kelley – Chief Strategist
Carly Peak – Graphic Designer
Credits 23
Thank You for
Reading Our eBook
We hope you found it informative and interesting.
If you are interested in working with Segue, please
contact us so we can learn about your needs and
plan a development path that works for you.
CONTACT US
SEGUE TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
703-549-8033
www.seguetech.com
