StarPound Studio™

“
StarPound Studio allowed us to produce a powerful web-based loan acquisition product in 90 days.
— Pete Butler, Vice President, NCGI

Overview

StarPound Studio™ is a revolutionary visual business process modeling tool that bridges the "communication gap" between business users and IT resources. It provides a collaborative environment for end-to-end modeling and configuration of business processes. StarPound Studio™ allows you to quickly build composite applications that run on the StarPound Application Server.

StarPound Studio™ is a tool that helps business and IT collaborate, model, and configure business processes and the corresponding user interfaces. Deployed as an Eclipse plug-in, StarPound Studio™ includes a business process modeling palette based on the BPMN 1.0 standard and palettes for modeling web-based user interface flows and voice interactions (i.e., voice self service applications). StarPound Studio™ is provided under a free license, enabling business users to model a company's processes, including human-to-human workflow, human-to-system integration, and system-to-system orchestration.

With StarPound Studio™, you model what the application does, not how it is built. Typical modeling techniques model an application's implementation. These techniques require a model element for each element in the implementation. This results in complex models that are cluttered with technical detail. Implementation models are difficult to understand and maintain, and their usefulness is questionable. That's why so few model their software before they build it.

StarPound Studio™ promotes modeling what the application does, not how it is built. It is a specification model; some call it a Platform Independent Model (PIM). By capturing the bare essentials of what the application does, not how it is implemented, specification models are fast to create and easy to maintain.

Screenshots: Click to Enlarge

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Example #4

Benefits

Unique benefits of StarPound Studio™ include

  • Provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface for application modeling
  • Extends BPMN to support skills-based routing of work and communications
  • Provides data management using Business Data Documents and web services
  • Models the web-based screens that support a business process
  • Built on top of the immensely popular open-source Eclipse IDE
While no release date has been established, StarPound is also working on an AJAX-based application for quickly and easily mashing up StarPound business processes quickly and easily via the web.

StarPound application models include:

  • Web form tasks
  • Voice tasks (e.g. Tell prompts, Ask prompts)
  • Web service tasks (e.g. Call, Send, Receive, external web services, etc.)
  • Database tasks (e.g. Select, Insert, Update, Delete)
  • Call control tasks (e.g. Make Call, Conference, Transfer)
  • Script tasks
  • Gateways (AND, OR, XOR)
  • Events (Exceptions, Timers)

Features

StarPound Studio™'s features include:

  • Built on top of the immensely popular Eclipse IDE.
  • Generates BPMN compliant process models
  • Multi-channel Interface Flow modeling via plug-in palettes
    • Web (JSF)
    • Voice (VXML)
  • Business Data Documents
    • XML Schema
    • .xsd Import
  • Web Services
    • Enterprise Web Services Orchestration
    • .wsd Import
    • Synchronous and Asynchronous
    • Support for SOAP and REST
  • Skills-based routing for enterprise work distribution
    • Synchronous work
      • Phone
      • Collaboration
      • Chat
    • Asynchronous work
      • Process tasks
      • Web Forms
      • Email
      • Fax

Business Process Modeling

StarPound Studio™ is designed to include and extend beyond the standards-based modeling notation (BPMN 1.0) to support robust skills-based routing of work including communications. This allows enterprises with many departments, lines of business, and roles to accurately reflect business processes using simple role-based distribution.

Interface Flow Modeling

The StarPound Studio™ includes the ability to visually design the web forms and voice flows to support specific behavior to support a process for web and voice interactions. The web interface flow modeling palette enables users to model web-based screens that support a business process, both for external and internal users of the process. For a given user task, a web interface flow may be a simple, single screen or a complex series of screens involving decision points and data access. Similarly, the voice interface flow palette allows a user to define the steps in a voice-powered application, including telling information to the user and asking for information.

Data Management

With support for data management using Business Data Documents and web services, a StarPound Studio™ user is able to model how enterprise data should be managed throughout business processes. For each business process, a user may define one or more Business Data Documents that describe essential data to collect for successful completion of the process. Business Data Documents (as XSDs) are imported into StarPound Studio™. They can be consistent with leading business standards groups (e.g., OAG, SWIFT, ACCORD, etc.) or proprietary to an enterprise. By importing a WSDL file, a web service can be easily added into StarPound Studio™ for use in a process model.

Plug-In Architecture

StarPound Studio™ is delivered as a plug-in to the open source Eclipse environment, allowing users to easily leverage other Eclipse-based tools to augment process and interface modeling. There is a robust selection of other commercial and open-source Eclipse modules available and under development.

Workflow with Skills-based Routing

Traditional workflow applications and state-of-the-market BPM systems typically utilize role-based routing for distributing work. While this approach might work in basic scenarios, it just doesn't account for complex enterprise scenarios that involve high volumes of work that need to be routed to people with varying levels of capabilities (i.e., skills) across multiple logical groups and different geographies. This is made even more complicated when considering other factors that may need to be incorporated into work routing decisions such as work-load distribution, cost-based routing, and possibly the most important, a person's availability for work that requires real-time interaction (such as a phone call).

For some time now, Call Centers have been leveraging the Skills-Based Routing (SBR) capabilities of ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) platforms to discretely control the routing of phone calls. Ideally, BPM systems would incorporate the same kind of SBR algorithms when routing work to people and apply Skills-Based Routing across all types of work, not just phone calls. We call this Enterprise Work Routing (EWR). Using StarPound Studio™, a process designer can model the required skills, cost attributes, desire-to-use factors, and so on for each work item in a business process. At execution time, the BPM system would match those factors to the workers assigned to a particular queue in addition to considering the person's availability and workload. While such a system would be ideal for the distribution of real-time interactions in a multimedia enabled contact center, this could also be used to distribute other work across an enterprise, such as sales leads or new account applications.

Download

StarPound Studio™ is bundled with StarPound's CORE™ platform. To download StarPound CORE™, visit the download center.

Click here to visit the download center!