News from 2003

PricewaterhouseCoopers New Zealand has selected New Zealand software company XSOL, to support its business advisory services for middle market and corporate clients.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Lead Partner, Middle Market Advisory Services, Robbie Gimblett said the firm chose to adopt XSOL software due to its ability to provide clients with significant time and cost savings by streamlining business processes across a wide range of industry sectors and applications.

“PwC has long recognised the value in helping our clients to document, improve and implement best practice business processes. In this respect XSOL’s software fits the bill because it captures and documents current business process flows, providing flexibility for improved processes to be designed.”

In a short space of time, PwC and XSOL have already achieved significant success with mutual clients. XSOL software has allowed PwC to document and streamline business processes fundamental to the client’s business, sometimes resulting in 30% or more efficiency gains. An early success was with Canterbury International Limited – a project where the processes of Canterbury’s various divisions and subsidiaries in three different countries, were documented and reviewed in the space of just six short weeks – as opposed to several months that would normally have been required.

The project team also implemented a number of improvements to Canterbury during the project including process change, policies and IT system enhancements.

PwC has had similar success with companies operating in a range of industries, in their Financial, Systems and HR areas.

“PwC is convinced that XSOL software provides significant business benefits for companies that are seeking to ensure the consistent delivery of their business processes and the ability to continually improve the way they work”, commented Robbie Gimblett.

John Blackham, founder and CEO of XSOL commented: “Our vision for XSOL is to enable industry to realize the tremendous improvements in productivity that can now be delivered through Business Process Management (BPM).”

About PricewaterhouseCoopers:
PricewaterhouseCoopers is the largest professional services organisation worldwide and in New Zealand, helping clients build value, manage risk and improve their performance. Drawing on the knowledge and skills of more than 125,000 people in 142 countries, PricewaterhouseCoopers build relationships by providing services based on quality and integrity.

A research project into Enterprise Data Integration undertaken by XSOL in conjunction with the University of Auckland was profiled at the recent International Conference on Internet Computing in Las Vegas.

The project was established to explore how information from an unlimited number of dispte databases could be viewed by a company as a single aggregated data storage repository - with the same data access times as a local database. This was achieved using advanced data replication technologies.

The first commercial outcome of the three-year research project is an integration engine component to provide XSOL’s model-driven Business Process Management software with seamless data-integration with Enterprise applications. It leverages a company’s existing investment in information technology by allowing existing data to be carried over into the BPM world.

John Blackham, founder and CEO of XSOL commented: “It is critical that our customers are able to utilize the data and information resources they already have in place when overlaying a BPM solution to improve productivity in their organization. This is another example of XSOL’s market leading vision of enabling organizations to benefit from the dramatic potential of BPM to change business.”

“There continues to be intense interest from researchers and practitioners into how complex, distributed enterprise systems can be better-integrated. Our novel approaches generated considerable favorable feedback from conference attendees, along with several suggestions for future extensions to the technology”, added Professor John Grundy, Director of the Software Engineering Programme at the University of Auckland. The first release of the software to the market is expected by the end of 2003.

XSOL Limited, a New Zealand market leader in Business Process Management software, and Fusion5, an enterprise system services company, announced a strategic alliance under which Fusion5 will use XSOL’s ToOrder Business Process Mapping solution to provide implementation and support services to clients who have purchased a new ERP or CRM system.

As part of their Enterprise System implementation program, Fusion5 will use XSOL ToOrder to define their client’s business processes in the area in which new software is to be used. This allows a client to optimize their processes before the implementation and ensures a good fit between the packaged software application and the company’s own activities. This approach enables Fusion5 to increase the value of an implementation while dramatically reducing its time and cost.

XSOL ToOrder allows Fusion5 to run interactive workshops to capture their client’s knowledge, while producing high quality process implementation documentation - at the same time. What makes this process so productive is ToOrder’s everyday description of business structure and activities, plus its high level of interactivity. It allows people’s thinking to be captured very quickly, displayed, reviewed and altered in a group setting, with the results immediately captured in a professional documented form, either in HTML for distribution on-line or in Microsoft Word. XSOL ToOrder is an excellent fit with Fusion5’s products and services.

About Fusion5:
Fusion5 was established in December 2002 specifically to provide affordable, high value Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services to New Zealand businesses. Fusion5 focus on providing business solution and implementation services to customers who are about to implement an ERP or CRM system as well as providing on-going support services to customers using these solutions. Information about Fusion5 is available at www.fusion5.co.nz.

XSOL appoints Peter Romeyn as Sales Executive to sell the recently introduced Business Process Mapping solution.

After 28 years with Hewlett-Packard in a variety of sales roles, and several years as HP’s Auckland branch manager, Peter Romeyn joins New Zealand based Business Process Management software company XSOL as Sales Executive.

Peter Romeyn says: “Selling revolutionary new solutions that address today’s business requirements for agility and constant change is a refreshing change from hardware infrastructure sales. In many ways it’s back to where I started when computers themselves were an exciting new development.

Like XSOL is now, HP was a small company with an excellent team spirit and a strong desire to succeed in a new market. There is an air of excitement amongst the team at XSOL that we have the products that can dramatically change the use of computers. I enjoy being part of that environment.”