According to an HBR survey, nearly 70% of all digital transformation projects fail mainly due to a lack of preparation and road map ahead. Sound familiar when it comes to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation?
Before you kickstart a digital transformation initiative such as ERP implementation, it is essential to reflect and work on all the factors that impact its success. That's where a BPM solution can come to your rescue. It fortifies your Dynamics 365 ERP implementation by enabling you to align business roles, processes, and technologies with your organization’s overall business strategy.
Moreover, when implementing Dynamics 365 ERP, a one-solution-fits-all approach can painfully fall flat. Analyzing the true problems that you want to solve not only gives you clarity but allows all the stakeholders to confidently implement the project.
Your requirements can be unique depending on your industry and the business challenges. Therefore, it is crucial to select the right BPM solution that best matches your requirements, for a successful outcome.
At To-Increase, we’ve been aligning and connecting our software tools with Dynamics 365 to offer more efficient and flexible solutions that drive digital transformation for our customers and partners. And, with our RapidValue Business Process Management (RV BPM) Suite, we aim to help companies effectively align their business processes with application technology.
Therefore, in this blog, we will talk in detail about the functionalities offered by both Microsoft’s Business Process Modeler and To-Increase’s Rapid Value BPM Suite to help you decide which one is a better fit for your business needs.
What is Business Process Modeler (BPM) in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS)?
Lifecycle Services (LCS) for Microsoft Dynamics is a collaborative platform that helps you effectively manage the lifecycle of your implementations by keeping track of all the methods and processes applied. Business Process Modeler is one of the many tools provided under LCS that help in delivering the right data to the right people, at the right time.
LCS BPM helps you create, view, and modify standard processes for Dynamics 365. It also ensures:
- Standardization of your process flows
- Alignment of your business processes with the industry standards
- Identification of fits and gaps between your requirements and Dynamics 365 functionalities, and addition of missing processes
What is RapidValue BPM Suite (RVBPM)?
RapidValue BPM Suite is a value-driven business process modeling solution inside Dynamics 365 that helps you implement and operate the ERP efficiently. It allows you to align your people, processes, and technology with your business strategy while reducing risk and improving ROI.
Deeply embedded with Dynamics 365, RapidValue empowers your customers and partners to convert their business processes and goals into effective solutions and process guides. It is a simple, user-friendly tool that uses a centralized BPM repository run by Dynamics 365 to help you manage end-to-end process knowledge and drive results.
What are the Features of LCS BPM and RVBPM?
As a feature-rich business process modeling solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365, RapidValue supports the entire implementation process. Its features include mapping processes and business goals, creating and editing a customer process template, tracking and managing business process design, testing solutions, and documentation of training. Thus, RV BPM helps align your project with business goals. Additionally, it can also leverage LCS BPM’s task recorder functionality.
LCS Business Process Modeler is a tool that helps create and improve business processes for a customer project. It comes with a basic fit/gap tracking and extraction to Word for training documentation. It includes a task recorder within Dynamics 365 that allows the creation of process flows in BPM, and it is easily accessible within the Dynamics 365 solution for online support.
Using RapidValue BPM and LCS BPM together helps Dynamics 365 users align technology with strategic goals, reduce risk during implementation, enable system adoption, and optimize software efficiency throughout your ERP lifecycle.
RVBPM supports an integrated flow with LCS BPM to create an entire end-to-end scenario from the BPM perspective, from defining the model to managing the business process model in RV into LCS.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the functionalities offered by LCS BPM and RV BPM, one by one to understand how they can offer winning capabilities when used together
Capabilities supporting the diagnostic phase
RV BPM
Customer process hierarchy is created using standard RV templates and by consolidating other customer solutions. RV allows you to capture your organization’s mission, goals, and metrics, and link them all to processes. It helps in linking your processes to the specific project phases.
LCS BPM
In LCS BPM, the initial customer process hierarchy can be created using the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) templates and merging with other customer solutions by drag and drop. It cannot capture your overall goals. Therefore, it fails to link your processes to the project phases, and you will need to add them separately.
Capabilities supporting the analysis phase
RV BPM
The standard RV flow templates that represent business processes speed up analysis. RV’s process verification enables you to capture tasks, requirements, and gaps. You can assign questions to flows and tasks to individuals, and track status within RV. You can even split your process flows into sub-processes and then expand them further within the flow diagram. You can create flows, capture requirements, and link them directly to the apps in Dynamics 365. This means you can segment and review the gaps based on the apps.
LCS BPM
BPM process verification helps capture gaps. Any changes made to the standard flow are recorded as gaps automatically. However, it does not facilitate an easy way to track the progress of tasks. You can create flows for applications outside of Dynamics 365 without any direct links. A task guide can help create the missing flows according to the steps taken in AX. Although there are lots of details including several processes, actual flows are limited and must be created.
Capabilities supporting the design phase
RV BPM
During process designing, RV ensures the trackability of all the processes until they are complete while making certain any related captured task is worked on.
LCS BPM
You can track the design development via the tasks in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) which can be linked to work items in LCS.
Capabilities supporting the development phase
RV BPM
You can test any customization using flows to indicate expected results and track progress.
LCS BPM
You can create flows and track progress using Azure DevOps linked to LCS tasks, thus performing testing in LCS BPM.
Capabilities supporting the deployment phase
RV BPM
With RV, you can perform solution and User Acceptance testing by creating test suites and cases. This allows you to track the status and the number of times each test case was used. It also facilitates end-to-end testing by combining single flows. RV also produces training documentation including a list of activities.
LCS BPM
With LCS BPM, you can generate a process in Dynamics 365 using the task recorder and verify if this customized process is working according to the plan. However, you cannot create test cases and scripts to verify various results.
Operational support
RV BPM
You get role-specific access to the relevant process support data. It also allows you to create the task recorder information in Dynamics 365, which can be saved in RV.
LCS BPM
It does not offer role-specific access training documentation. But you can create the task recorder and save it in BPM, which is accessible through online help in the Dynamics app.
Mapping business goals
RV BPM
You can map your goals and KPIs to processes, and thus align your technology with business strategy to deliver real business value.
LCS BPM
You can link some KPIs to your business processes using templates.
Creating business process hierarchy (BPH)
RV BPM
You can create a business hierarchy and integrate it with other solutions to get relevant content. You can deselect and flag the processes you do not need. Hierarchy can adapt to a phased implementation within a single project, which means you get a phase-specific view of the processes.
LCS BPM
You create a business hierarchy by combining your global, corporate, and other solutions. You can either delete irrelevant processes or add more as required. However, LCS BPM does not facilitate phased content, and you need to create a separate BPM for each project.
Business process hierarchy content
RV BPM
Content, processes, flows, and task guides come combined from global and customer solutions. You get best-in-class business-focused flows created by experts manually for all standard processes along with task guides readily available.
LCS BPM
Content comes from global and corporate solutions. However, it does not include flows and task guides. The flows here are based on the Dynamics 365 app, using the list of activities created via task recorder.
Content structure
RV BPM
The value chain structure is focused on industry and companies can recognize it using a clear business departmental structure to recognize it.
LCS BPM
It is a highly complex structure based on APQC and has a difficult deployment process as it does not enable speedy implementation and knowledge transfer in Dynamics 365 projects.
Creating of roles
RV BPM
This feature enables you to filter individual- or role-specific information, tasks, and activities, which can further support the security aspect in Dynamics 365.
LCS BPM
LCS BPM role creation feature does not support filtering relevant data.
Creating sub-processes
RV BPM
You can simplify a complex flow by creating its sub-processes, which can be expanded and accessed from a higher-level flow. RV allows you to model multi-level complex processes with decision points.
LCS BPM
You can create sub-processes in LCS BPM, but it does not allow direct expansion from the higher-level flow and has separate access. It’s a rather simple tool with no decision points or sub-processes.
Connecting with other applications
RV BPM
Rapid Value can create flows, activities, forms, and link them all with applications outside of the Dynamics environment. It includes task guides and replicates the required steps.
LCS BPM
LCS BPM can generate 'unconnected flows', but these cannot be directly linked to the apps outside Dynamics 365.
In-depth form view
RV BPM
Rapid Value offers interactive process guidance that lets the users get an in-depth view from visualizations to forms and functions in Dynamics 365 and other apps.
LCS BPM
You can view forms only if the client is stored locally.
The powerful synergy of RV BPM and LCS BPM
When choosing between Rapid Value BPM Suite and Business Process Modeler, keep in mind the functionalities these two solutions offer. Then, choose the one that best matches your actual business requirements.
LCS Business Process Modeler functionalities are only limited to registering business processes for Dynamics 365, and cannot support non-automated business processes. However, together with the RapidValue BPM Suite, it supports both your automated and non-automated processes and helps you connect with other applications beyond Dynamics 365.
So, if you’re interested in learning how RVBPM can help you with additional capabilities, you may also want to know the overall cost of the RapidValue BPM Suite. RapidValue offers two types of licenses and has a simple subscription-based pricing model as follows:
