How Bonitasoft supports you to rethink processes with Charles Souillard
#049 Let’s explore Bonitasoft’s approach to revolutionizing process automation.
#049 Let’s explore Bonitasoft’s approach to revolutionizing process automation.
In this episode, I’m talking to Charles Souillard, CEO and Co-Founder of Bonitasoft. It’s a BPM tool with a focus on flexibility and user engagement in process automation. We describe its core features, including visual process modeling and analytics, designed for a wide range of users.
The discussion also covers how Bonitasoft facilitates user involvement in process optimization and supports the disruption of established processes. Additionally, we look at the trends in the BPM market and what Bonitasoft plans for its future development. Charles also gives some very interesting examples.
Today’s Guest:
Charles Souillard
Charles is CEO and Co-Founder of Bonitasoft. After co-founding Bonitasoft in 2009, he became CTO and 6 years later COO of the company. Since September 2022, he leads Bonitasoft as CEO.
Before co-founding Bonitasoft, Charles was head of the core Bonita software development team within Bull Information Systems. Charles holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Polytech de Grenoble.
Bonitasoft’s mission is to unleash the full potential of development teams to create automated, process-based, sustainable applications that support innovation and competitive advantage for business.
Their product, the Bonita Platform, is primarily used to automate business processes. But as you will learn, you can also use it for process insights.
With an ecosystem of more than 240,000 members and customers in 75+ countries, Bonitasoft provides an open source platform for digital process automation. In 2024, there are 74 employees in France, Spain, and Canada.
You’ll learn:
- What the underlying philosophy of Bonitasoft is
- What the core elements of the tool are
- How the Bonita Platform looks like
- How to proceed to automate processes
- How you can use the platform to analyze your process performance
- How Bonitasoft supports to involve the people into the work on processes
- How Bonitasoft supports to disrupt established processes
- What the future trends of the BPM tool market in general are and what Bonitasoft has on their roadmap for the future
- How to start process automation with Bonitasoft
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Transcript
Please note that the transcript was generated automatically and only slightly adjusted. It does not claim to be a perfect transcription.
Mirko00:19
Yeah, welcome to episode 49 of the New Process Podcast. Today, we’ll deep dive into process automation by exploring Bonitasoft. Therefore, I’m talking to Charles Souillard. Charles is CEO and co-founder of Bonitasoft. After co-founding the company in 2009, he became CTO and, six years later, coo of the company. Since September 2022, he leads Bonitasoft as CEO. Before co-founding Bonitasoft, charles was head of the core Bonitasoft software development team within Bull Information Systems. Charles holds a master’s degree in computer science from Polytech de Grenoble. Despite his extensive experience working across cultures, he is through and through Grenoble, born, raised and educated in the innovation capital of the Alps, where Bonitasoft has its worldwide head office.
01:14
Bonitasoft’s mission is to unleash the full potential of development teams to create automated, process-based sustainable applications that support innovation and competitive advantage for business. Their product, the Bonita platform, is primarily used to automate processes, but, as you’ll learn, you can also use it for process insights. With an ecosystem of more than 240,000 members and customers in more than 75 countries, bonita Soft provides an or maybe the most widely used open source platform for digital process automation. What’s also super interesting is that the entire Bonita company has made a commitment to the community and customers to continue to work hard to make both the open source as well as the commercial editions better every day In 2024. There are 74 employees in France, Spain and Canada, and what I find also interesting is that BonitaSoft was certified as a great place to work in 2023.
02:18
So in the interview, you will learn what the underlying philosophy of BonitaSoft is, what the core elements of the tool are, how the Bonita platform looks like and how to proceed to automate processes. Charles also gives some very interesting examples. You will learn how to use the platform to analyze your process performance. We are talking about the new process principles and how Bonitasoft supports to involve the people into the work on processes, as well as how Bonitasoft supports to disrupt established processes. In addition, charles shares his view on future trends of the BPM tool market in general and what Bonitasoft has on their roadmap for the future. Finally, he also gives some advice on how to start process automation with BonitaSoft. So enjoy the interview with Charles Suillat and please excuse my poor French pronunciation. I did learn French at school but, as you can hear, I wasn’t really successful with it. Anyway, enjoy the interview.
Speaker03:21
And now let’s start to rethink processes.
Mirko03:31
Yeah, welcome to the new process podcast, Charles. I’m super curious to learn more about bonita soft today. So welcome, Charles. Yeah, it’s great to have you and, as always, let’s start right away with a check-in. So what do you prefer in an aircraft, aisle or window seat?
Charles03:43
oh, actually I would say I prefer window seat. You know I don’t like much spending time. You prefer, in an aircraft, aisle or window seat. Oh, actually I would say I prefer window seat. You know I don’t like much spending time, you know, in an aircraft. So most of the time I prefer, you know, sleeping and I don’t like very much being disturbed by other passengers or, you know, flight crew. So my goal is to be fully rested and ready to start working when I land. So I would definitely say Windows 6.
Mirko04:07
Yeah, that’s a good approach. And what is your favorite airport?
Charles04:11
For the same reason I don’t have. Actually, you know, I don’t like airports very much because they are kind of a waste of time for me. I have a lot of work to get to do every day, so if I have to choose one, I would probably say San Francisco. So if I have to choose one, I would probably say San Francisco, but for a reason being close to the great burgers areas you have in San Francisco, there are several places where you can have a great burger before starting the journey. So this is the main reason.
Mirko04:40
Okay, that sounds good. Perfect, yeah, nice. And what was the best process you have ever experienced?
Charles04:48
Maybe I can share an experience we are quite proud of at Wintersoft because there are some strong results associated with that use case. We have been working with a company that operates in lotteries and betting games and those guys have to operate with a lot of physical sales outlets and we have been working on a process for this company, helping those outlets to get self-care agreements, settlements, and they move from three weeks to less than an hour, which has tremendous results. And what we like about that use case, apart from those goals achievement, is that it’s involving both customers providers, employees, many systems, document management, apis you know, business roles. It also ended up with, you know, a portal for business customers as well as internal employees. So a lot of different features have been used and this company is targeting to have its entire product and services portfolio to be covered with Bonita. So that’s a pretty major, nice use case for Bonitasoft.
Mirko05:53
Yeah, and that’s cool, that’s super interesting. Perfect, and how would you describe your relationship to processes?
Charles06:00
Personally, I love them. I’m a pretty organized and structured guy and also because I’m convinced, you know, processes actually help organizations improve the way they operate. They are a key approach because process is not only about tooling or automation. It’s mindset, it’s a way to think. It gives a lot of visibility into the business. It allows business users to make very informed decisions, to enter an iterative, continuous improvement loop. It’s also a great approach to cross department boundaries.
06:36
This is, you know, we can talk about that later, but I’m sure this is where business process management in general is providing a lot of value. It’s also a nice approach and tooling that increases collaboration between teams. You know we have technical teams actually implementing processes and business teams benefiting from those process-based applications and it provides, you know, very strong and established results, like you know, reducing failures, reducing mistakes. It also plays a strong role in keeping motivation of employees high, you know, because if they can use friendly and efficient applications, they are happy at work. So it enables business owners and knowledge workers to boost their efficiency. So I definitely love processes.
Mirko07:23
Okay, can you recall when this love began? Was there a specific moment when you realized that, or did it just happen over time?
Charles07:33
Oh, that’s a nice question. I guess when I really realized that was when we achieved our first customer use case, because it’s always different when it’s something you feel or you think that is pretty, you know, individual or self-centric. I have to say that it’s more than 20 years ago in a previous company where I was already I was a developer in a previous life, but in a BPM department already and you know we implemented several customer projects using a process-based technology and at that time we already project using a process-based technology and at that time we already have seen the benefits from putting processes in place. So I guess it’s more than 20 years ago. With a customer reference, I would say.
Mirko08:13
Okay, and then fast forward 20 years into the future, where we are now. So you are now CEO of Bonitasoft. What is the underlying philosophy of Bonitasoft?
Charles08:24
From the beginning, our mission has been to unleash development teams. We are convinced that processes have a major impact when they are about complex processes and core or critical use cases. So we made a strong choice at the beginning of the company was to equip development teams with a strong tool suite that enables them to produce, you know, very strong process-based application with the expected level of integration within the information system and that, you know, actually provide a real answer to business needs. So that comes with some. You know we cannot say that and have the entire market as an ideal customer profile. So we are working with mid-to-large organization, of course, those ones looking at improving their operational excellence.
09:18
Our tool is targeting, you know, is designed by developers for developers, but actual produced applications is for employees, customers or providers, as we said for the concrete example about the lottery company. So I would say we are helping organizations spinning up app delivery. So we help them with involving a broader audience in process design thanks to some standard notations, and we also help development teams overcome application development challenges. So we have to play on both sides of the game. So this is what I would say we definitely focus on complex processes with cross-department initiatives and it comes through two product lines as of today. So we have one product dedicated to automating processes, so this one is designed for development teams and it helps those teams to build customized business applications so that we have a very customized, tailored experience offered to end users. And the second one, which is a more recent one, called Bonita Process Insights, which is targeting business users and helping them to analyze, understand and improve processes over time, with a lot of KPIs, objectives and this kind of stuff.
Mirko10:37
Okay, that’s interesting. How does the tool look like? How does it feel? So you said there are different types of users, but can you and that’s the challenge in a podcast to explain how something looks like? But can you give us an idea of how Bonita stuff looks and feels like?
Charles10:54
Yeah, so we have several components. As you can imagine, we have something that we call a studio. This is where developers spend most of their time doing visual programming, so they have to model processes using the BPMN standard notation. They can model business data and user interfaces using what we call our UI designer. So this is a main component. It’s an application they can install on their desktop or laptop and it’s pure visual programming. There is no coding in that part.
11:24
But, as I said, we are focusing on complex processes and complex processes require a tailored approach and to fulfill that requirement we have built a very open architecture, coming with a lot of extension points, and those extension points are available in many places of the product suite and developers can use them to extend the solution, but following their favorites and best practices, so they don’t have to code inside our tooling.
11:52
We expect all developers that already have their own IntelliJ, github, whatever. Everything is already set up for them. So we have preferred doing developer tools integration rather than recreating a new development environment for them. So you know, one thing is Bonita Studios, the other thing is using their own tools to extend the solution using widely adopted and open languages. We are leveraging only Java, html, css, javascript only standard and widely adopted technologies, and only standard and widely adopted technologies. And then you have the resulting applications that are the ones going to production and being used in life by end users. So they are modern web applications. So what the soft is producing is a web application, process-based application, and users even don’t know they are using Benita at the end.
Mirko12:42
Okay.
Charles12:43
So this is about the automation suite and on the processing side product, it’s a very simplified process intelligent tool dedicated to business users. So it’s a really modern UI kind of BI capabilities applied to processes. You can drill down filters, use data set and this kind of stuff.
Mirko13:01
Okay, that’s super interesting, and you said in the beginning I, as a developer, could map processes in BPM 2.0 and use this as basis for automating processes.
Charles13:13
Yeah, this is actually the notation that we have chosen for years now to help both IT and business to collaborate, because there is this very important phase of the modeling of the process that needs to be, from our perspective, an iterative approach, and it’s useful at several times in the journey. The first one is, of course, the modeling phase, but, as you understand, our second product is more on the optimization phase. But on both moments of the journey, you need to have a good representation of what your process is actually doing and you need to have in the same room both IT and business to explain and then improve, implement the next version of the process. So this is why it’s very important to rely on a standard notation, and we have chosen BPMN2 that is widely adopted as well.
Mirko14:00
Yeah, okay, yeah for sure. But this is often the discussion with my customers which notation should we use to map processes? And I always say it depends on the purpose why you are mapping processes. So if you’re planning to automate processes, yeah for sure, bpmn 2.0, full blown makes sense. But if your purpose is to map processes of the overall organization, to use the process documentation to discuss processes with employees, then maybe BPMN 2.0 in a full blown version, even if you take out all the complexity, may not be the perfect notation to use. But in your case your customers are using the process mapping only for specific business processes they want to automate, not for the overall organization to discuss with the employees, right?
Charles14:55
Definitely we are not a full process mapping technology. Our customers are modeling in our tools. They are modeling only processes they want to automate, so it’s obviously a subpart of all processes of a company.
Mirko15:09
Yeah, okay, so that’s good to know. Can you share an example of a business process on how to automate that with BonitaSoft, just to get a better understanding of how this really works?
Charles15:23
I can say it depends. Each customer has its own approach. It depends if you’re automating or re-automating an already existing process or if you are designing a brand new process that is actually not yet automated. But in any case, you need to have this initial phase where both business and IT need to sit in the same room and define the major milestone of the process and this kind of stuff. Our recommendation is definitely not to look for the perfect solution day one.
15:52
Our technology has been designed to be integrated in a perpetual improvement loop. So our recommendation to customers is go live as soon as you can because, as you mentioned in the process mapping industry, you can involve employees in the tool directly. When it comes about to automation, you need to have live feedback from end users. So our recommendation is to go live as soon as they can and then improve over time. So initial phase is, of course, finding what we can call the MVP the minimum viable product or process and then design business data and user interfaces.
16:30
We have a strong journey about continuous integration and continuous deployment, testing this kind of stuff because, as I said, we are focusing our effort on complex and data processes, which comes with strong associated goals. So it needs to work and to be high-quality processes, applications. So we have continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous improvement in the loop. And then you go into production. You use our tool being Winter Process Insight to understand. Using filters, data set, you can compare versions, see what is working, not working, identify bottlenecks and then start a new improvement loop.
Mirko17:10
Okay, that’s interesting. Let’s make it even more specific. Let’s imagine I’m a process owner of an HR process like hiring new employees, and this is done more in a traditional paper-based way at the moment. So how would you approach this and what do I need to use BonitaSoft as a tool to automate this process?
Charles17:33
So what do you need to use? Bonitasoft is to have a development team that have the required skills to make the extensions to our solution. So, depending on the capabilities you are looking for, you may need some only user interfaces, specialist or backend developers to develop extensions to your information system. So I don’t know, maybe your HR system, I don’t know, luca, or whatever, if you’re also using some of them. And then you need to collaborate with that team to put on a paper and the developer will then move it to a BPMN diagram. So, design of your process. And then you need to build UI and business data. There is a phase that is collecting, which is not covered by our tool. Actually, you need to collect, probably with your employees, what are the hiring steps of your process. What are the hiring steps of your process, but we are assuming that it is done before jumping in our tool.
Mirko18:30
Okay, and then at the end, what do I need as infrastructure? Do I create a real application which I then install on my local infrastructure, or is that still something which runs on your platform? Infrastructure?
Charles18:45
or is that still something which runs on your platform? Yeah, we have both modern on-premise and cloud deployments as part of our offering, and we have really modern deployment. I don’t know how technical is our audience today, but we are leveraging this kind of poker Kubernetes technologies, as you can imagine, and you can deploy that on your own infrastructure, which is obviously always private cloud. Now no one has a hardware server in his bedroom anymore or we can for you. We have a cloud offering, we and we ensure the quality of service of the ed application, but all this is fully automated and, as I said, being part of a continuous integration process that we package with a tool to make sure the experience for developers and application owners is really smooth.
Mirko19:37
Yeah, okay, perfect. Thanks for this example. Okay, now we talked about creating processes. How can an employee figure out more about the performance of a specific business process?
Charles19:47
Sure, yeah, actually this is the scope that is covered by our product called Bonita Process Insight, which is dedicated to business personas. This tool has been designed to boost performance and productivity. So actually this is the goal of the tool to guide business users towards better decisions. And better decisions are guided by process performance analysis. So this tool comes with several dashboards. The first one is called the Overview Dashboard, and better decisions are guided by process performance analysis, so this tool comes with several dashboards. The first one is called the overview dashboard.
20:22
This is where you can drill down into your process executions and look for any details, look for bottlenecks and do some deep analysis.
20:27
And then you have the comparison dashboard where you can, on the same screen, have two execution data sets of the same or different process version, so you can compare if a new version is actually performing better than an old version. Or you can use the same version on both sides of the screen and have a different data set and say, maybe I don’t know, I want to know if you know if loan requests with a high amount have different performance than loan requests with a low loan amount, and then you can compare execution. And this is where you can also associate both IT and business, because we are leveraging this BPMN2 notation to represent the flows, the variants. This is a term that is often used in process mining industry. So maybe, as an example, you know, we have a customer in the insurance industry that is monitoring performance on many areas of the process. Of course they want to make sure that insurance request gets an answer in a really appropriate time, you know.
21:32
So this is where they use a goal setting feature of Bonita Process Insight. You can set a goal on a given process and look if you are above or under the threshold that you set. But they also want to monitor how long it takes to their employees to provide such an answer in the appropriate time. So they want to track the time spent on a given task if there are some transitions that takes more time to be executed, if there are some patterns, bottlenecks somewhere, so that they can look for areas of improvement. So this is definitely a tool oriented to track process performance so that we can help business teams with business data and process execution to improve the overall experience.
Mirko22:18
Okay, and to do this I need to automate the process with your software before. Or can I apply this to all kinds of processes?
Charles22:27
We made a strong choice on that. We are not a process mining vendor, so our process inside tool is fully connected and integrated with our automation data. So it’s lever, it’s leveraging bonita process automation the first product data to provide all those insights on the automation okay, wow, that’s.
Mirko22:46
That’s interesting. I think that’s something uh for the process architects out there who are working on improving their processes. So that’s super interesting to have this connection between the developers on the one hand side and more the business guys doing the evaluation of the performance and thinking about ideas on how to improve processes. That’s cool, wow. You know, I do a lot of research on how to get to a more human-centric BPM approach and therefore we have these new process principles and I would like to know how Bonitasoft supports to involve the people working in the process into the work on the process. So how do you do this?
Charles23:25
Yeah, so the main answer is on the design of the process, because this is actually what gets executed afterwards. So the BPMN2 notation is a strong bridge between technical and business users. So we provide a large set of elements, activities, gateways, transition so it drastically reduces the time to production and it also clarifies what is executed afterwards using this Bonita Process Insight product product. But we also have plans for the future to have end users directly involved in the improvement of the automation. I don’t know if there is a question on that later, but we are planning to leverage generative ai, of course, to involve end users in having kind of self-improvement of processes.
Mirko24:14
Okay, yeah, we can talk about your outlook into the future in a few minutes, but first I would like to talk about another new process principle, which is to disrupt established processes. I really love this to break patterns and to question existing processes. So how does Bonitasoft support to disrupt established processes?
Charles24:35
Yeah, you know the automation market is now designed by analysts as a really huge and wide market and it comes with several kinds of automations. And definitely Bonitasoft is playing the end-to-end automation play, which helps companies to revamp their processes in general, which is benefiting a lot to end users. And what is really beneficial thanks to this approach is that we can at the same time revamp the end-to-end process. While we reuse, we leverage existing solutions. So we have many customers saying that the benefits they get from using Bonita is to combine new stuff with existing stuff. So it helps organization, cross silos and department boundaries without breaking or disturbing the way some of the successful we can say processes actually perform. So it’s a very nice way to improve end-to-end processes. You know, using Benita because we have a strong connectivity framework, so it’s really nice.
25:42
We have some examples if you want on that topic. For example, we have been working with a company in Spain, you know, specializing in colon cancer detection and they were you. They were spending weeks activating I don’t know if you can say that or scheduling a surgery or detecting colon cancer and using Bonitas to have cross-silos, reduce the number of papers, identify stale processes, because I guess stale processes are a huge concern for companies and, as a result, they divided by I don’t remember 20, maybe the time it takes to identify and plan a surgery, and it’s saving many, many, many lives. So I would say the major impact of Bonita is rethinking or reorchestrating end-to-end processes.
Mirko26:29
Yeah, okay, that’s super interesting, so we already learned a lot about the tool. Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners? How bonita helps to rethink processes before we look into the future yeah, maybe on the philosophy we have.
Charles26:45
You know I mentioned several times, uh, you know, the importance that we have for iterative approaches. Bpm or processes are sometimes seen as too structured or too heavy approaches. I want to say that with Bonita, you can have an iterative approach. We support iteration. It’s a very good opportunity as well. With the architecture we have chosen, which is called self-contained application, you can design domain-specific applications and it comes with a lot of benefits in terms of isolation, maintenance, deployment or even time to market. You know, by identifying from a business perspective, you know, because processes are mean to better organization excellence. So it provides, you know, really nice results and it’s quite easy to set up and, well designed, it can be very fast and maybe something else.
27:37
Um, as a link to the previous questions on the end-to-end approach, we can say that we are really well shaped to be combined with rpa, which is also strong technology being part of the automation. Uh, it’s very good to combine both approaches. You know RPA is task-level automation and BPM is end-to-end process automation. So both combined can be a very, very nice perspective for companies. Rpa has a strong short-term ROI because it changes task-level performance right away, but it’s really hard to maintain and end-to-end processes are long-lasting profits.
Mirko28:15
Yeah, okay, cool. Thank you for these insights and let’s look into the future. So what trends do you see in the BPM tool market overall for the coming years?
Charles28:27
There’s something very positive about processes and I’m sure we’ll be okay with that, as you love processes as well, I would say is that there are processes everywhere and what we have seen you know thanks to app stores and any kind of new companies being created every day there are processes or workflow. A lot of applications are calling that workflow as well Modules in many apps. You can design small, easy processes in many, many, many applications. So my vision of the future for the BPM tool market is that our value will definitely be on handling complex cross-department processes. A lot of vertical specialist tools are already providing some simple workflow modules to handle internal or unique department processes. So I guess the future of bpm is complex cross-department processes, core business operations and with a strong mix of people, systems and boats.
29:28
this is a actually what we bet on at bonita soft. We are focused on building processes involving at the same time systems, humans and boats, and focused on end-to-end automation. So long-lasting automation I guess this is the future of the market.
Mirko29:44
Okay, and what about the hot topic AI?
Charles29:46
Yeah, so, of course, AI is part of the roadmap for us as well. You know we have this perpetual optimization loop in mind for Beneta Process Insight, as I explained, as of today, you can automate and then you can use BPI to understand, visualize and look for optimization areas, but you still have to implement the modification by yourself. So one of the usage we would like to do from GenAI is to be able as we have this advantage of having both automation data and the way we look at it, we know the models and the architecture and all that, so we can leverage Gen AI to automatically improve, just like the Tesla autopilot approach. We can identify the bottlenecks, suggest a fix and end user can just say, okay, fix it, and we can fix it by ourselves. So this is definitely something we plan to have in this perpetual optimization loop using Gen AI. And on the automation side, a lot of market vendors are going towards generating applications faster.
30:51
You can use AI for generating processes. You can just text-based approach and then you generate processes or UIs or data. I’m not saying we are not going that way, but probably not our main priority. What our customers are saying is that there is another area where Gen AI can be very, very fruitful. Maybe I can come back to my insurance use case I had previously in the podcast.
31:17
Insurance are receiving, like every day, thousands of requests from their customers and most of the time it’s an email. Best case, it’s a form in a portal where they describe their pain and why they are contacting you. They attach the document and they put figures or numbers in the email. My contract reference is but I did not receive the reimbursement for my surgery on December 12, which was 2000K, whatever. So it’s a lot of data. The 2000K whatever you know. So it’s a lot of data and you need a human to read that and to choose which process needs to be started and to feel the data appropriately. Probably Gen AI can be a strong enabler on automating that part which is not high value oriented for human. So this is something we are looking at as well.
Mirko32:11
Okay, that’s a super interesting example. I just had a workshop with a customer, I think, last week, where we talked about that. They are receiving requests or information from suppliers about availability of products and especially when products are not available, and unfortunately they don’t get that in a standardized format. They just get emails, and there we were wondering if it’s possible to send the emails to an ai, let that process the input and put that into a database to really process what the the suppliers send them.
Charles32:48
So that’s something we discussed I guess it’s the exact same use case in a different industry.
Mirko32:53
Yeah, oh, that’s cool. And to be more specific, what is on the BonitaSoft roadmap exactly for the upcoming releases?
Charles33:04
So we plan to boost our new release product, bonita Process Insight. We want to add Gen AI as soon as we can. Custom dashboard we want to improve this perpetual loop optimization. So that’s one of our major focus. On the other side, we we want to keep our dna on enabling and development teams being very productive. So speeding up the go to market on the automation side. So main teams are speeding up time to time to market on the automation side. So main teams are speeding up time to market on the automation side and improving the feature set and optimization loop for winter processing site.
Mirko33:39
Okay, cool, that’s interesting, and if I now remember, I’m the owner of this HR process and I want to have a closer look onto if I could use your tool to automate my processes. So what about the cost? What budget do I need?
Charles33:55
Yeah, so our pricing model is really progressive. You know you can start at a quite nice price. We are always focusing on a mid to large organization, you know. So it’s not a matter of $10 per month, of course, but our pricing is based on the number of process executions that you are actually executing. It starts around $50,000 a year and then it scales depending on the number of cases you have to automate. But it’s very progressive, the price per case, of course, decreasing with volume. So for automation and brain process insight on both sides, it’s process-based metrics because we are a process company that’s very good.
Mirko34:40
Okay, and so do you also provide the consulting capacity and the developers, or can I just get the tool and then I need other capacity to do the development?
Charles34:50
yeah, sure, so sure. So we have a professional services team that can get you up and running. We are providing training services as well as expertise, and we have a dedicated offering being what we call a turnkey. So a lot of our customers want to, you know, get a strong return on investment, and very quickly. So the best choice for them in that kind of situation is to involve our professional services team to get the first process in production as fast as they can, so it’s usually one or two months maximum. Again, we are focusing on complex processes. It cannot be one day. So, yeah, we have this bunch of professional services, but we also have a strong network of partners, integrators, partners. You can rely on them for large volume processes or projects.
Mirko35:38
Okay, so let’s imagine you made me curious and I want to learn more about the tool. Where can I go to, can I get a demo, or how does this work out?
Charles35:48
Yeah, sure. So there are several paths you can leverage. So I did not mention that. But we are an open source company. So we have two kinds of offering. We have a community offering that is open source and free, of course, coming with a limited set of features and some constraints, and then we have an enterprise offering. So, depending on the complexity of your project, if you are really a small company with a small project, the best for you is probably to get started with community. If you are a mid to large company and having in mind a more complex process, the best is to click on the contact a brain test software button on the website. And, of course, we can do a tailored presentation of our offering and product.
Mirko36:29
Okay, yeah, cool, so now I learned a lot. That’s perfect. So we already arrived at our final destination here, but before we are leaving the aircraft, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners? Yeah, maybe before we are leaving the aircraft, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners.
Charles36:45
Yeah, maybe a general statement about the market that keeps growing. As you may know, analysts are enlarging the market every year and it keeps growing several percent a year. So recent studies have shown that there is an increasing interest in automation projects. So we are on a trendy market. Companies have a heavy pressure on costs and automation is definitely a way to help them solve that issue by optimizing operational excellence. So I’m really convinced processes have a nice future. So, yeah, don’t hesitate, come and get in touch and it would be a pleasure to provide assistance on your project.
Mirko37:23
Okay, that’s super interesting. And just one question, because we just met, and do you have a recommendation for me of a tool, expert topic method, whatever I should have a closer look at to get new ideas on how to rethink processes. So do you have a recommendation? What to look at Doesn’t have to be out of the BPM space, it could be something completely different just to get new ideas on how to rethink processes.
Charles37:49
Yeah, most of the time the truth is on knowledge worker ends. So my major recommendation would be ask your teams, ask your customers, ask your employees, ask your providers where are their pains and most of the time you will identify ways to improve several areas of improvement, and most of them, as you will discover, rely on processes. So definitely kind of survey questioning framework. This is what I would recommend for you to identify your bottlenecks.
Mirko38:19
Yeah, Okay, cool. Charles, thank you for all these insights. I learned a lot. It was quite interesting. My final question to you is how would you describe your flight experience of this episode in just three words, oh it was deep.
Charles38:37
So thank you for the nice questions. So yeah, I would say deep, focused, and at some point we were in a, in an aircraft, so we would say zero gravity maybe perfect.
Mirko38:49
Yeah, so cool. So thank you so much for being my today. I’m really looking forward to more interactions with bonita soft in the future, and have a great day.
Charles38:59
So bye, bye, thanks, thank you, bye, bye.
Mirko39:08
At least I learned a lot about bonita soft and process automation today, so it was super interesting to explore more about that. You know I’m more the business guy, even if I studied information systems and used to code a bit. For me, it’s super important to bring business and IT together, and I think Charles shared some interesting examples of how to do it. So if you are interested in learning more about how to automate and analyze process with BonitaSoft, take a look at their website or reach out directly to Charles so I’ll put all the links into the show notes. Yeah, let’s take a brief outlook into the future.
39:50
Next week, the BPM event of the year takes place. I’m super excited to meet so many people of the new process community in person for the first time at the new process Conference. So the plan is to have a very special live podcast recording in the evening and, if everything works out, we’ll publish this already on April 24th To make sure you don’t miss any of the insights from the conference. Register for free on our community platform, new Process Pro, by going to newprocesslabcom slash pro. But for now, thank you very much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye, auf Wiedersehen.
Mirko40:46
Before you leave. As you might know, I’m doing a lot of research on how to rethink processes and how to get people excited about processes. If you’d like to find out more about how to rethink your own process, you can download my free new process checklist, which provides many impulses on how to push your process to the next level. To download it, just go to newprocesslabcom checklist. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
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