Organizations Gain Maximum Return On Investment Through Business Process Enablement From LAVA Systems Inc.

'Old Reliables' of corporate line of business systems get new lease on life through LAVA's unique business process and information enablement technology

Toronto, ON - 1998-05-13 - ...LAVA Systems Inc. (TSE:LVA) today announced enhancements to the firm's products that solidify its position as the leading supplier of solutions that seamlessly integrate an enterprise's corporate information with its desktop applications. LAVA's products can increase day-to-day staff productivity by over 50 per cent while increasing the return-on-investment realized by Global 2000 firms. These firms have come to depend on data stored in the repositories of line of business or enterprise applications - such as JD Edwards, SAP R/3, Oracle Financial and Manufacturing modules - residing on mainframes and mid-range systems such as the IBM AS/400(TM) and many UNIX platforms.

Characterized by Delphi Consulting as "LAVA's most competitive advantage" , LAVA's business process enablement technologies have long supplied a bi-directional link between legacy systems that run the business on structured data and the myriad of desktop-centric applications, including office application suites and document management systems. Today LAVA unveiled new developments in process enablement, specifically, LAVA IntelliDocs and enhancements to LAVA Enabler.

LAVA Enabler

LAVA Enabler has previously allowed line of business applications to be closely linked to LAVA's document management and workflow features, to form a complete document-enabled application. Now LAVA has added several major features. Enabler has always been bi-directional, allowing information exchange between the document management system and the line of business systems. LAVA's new product - LAVA Business Process Enabler - adds navigation features that allows users to be taken directly to the appropriate transaction screen in the line of business application. For example, with an invoice document, LAVA Enabler takes a user directly to the invoice transaction screen in the accounting application. A "blackboard" facility allows sophisticated exchange of data between the applications being enabled, thus removing the need to re-key data.

Another example of this enhancement in action is seen with call centre environments. Incoming calls are interrogated using automatic call display (ACD) recognition to determine who's calling in and therefore which case files need to be immediately accessed and displayed for the customer service representative. Enabler's search function quickly navigates through screens in the line of business application to get to the appropriate point to handle the CTI transaction. "Surviving Transformation to the Electronic Office" - The Delphi Consulting Group, May 1997

LAVA IntelliDocs

To complement Enabler, LAVA has developed LAVA IntelliDocs as an element of LAVA Business Process Enabler. LAVA IntelliDocs, currently in use at several major corporate customers in Europe and North America, is a document production tool that automates the creation of compound documents through the use of user-controlled templates that contain the intelligence to extract key information from corporate applications. Key words and even paragraphs of text are automatically pulled from line of business repositories to form error free pro-forma letters, for high-volume document production, without manual intervention. Alternatively, using its "Wizard" type interface, customer support staff can quickly produce high quality personalized documentation that can also draw key data from other applications. Key words can be defined as anything from a report, a graph, a single item of data out of an entire system or a 'block keyword' - a collection of items of data out of a host system blocked up to form an address, but removing blank lines for improved formatting.

IntelliDocs, as in 'intelligence in the document' as it is aptly named, takes the keywords in the document template; looks up the keyword definition file and then calls on the host system, retrieving data through back-end data repository connections. IntelliDocs can be characterized as a database publishing capability for core enterprise applications.

IntelliDocs Wrapped Around Vertical Solutions

IntelliDocs is of most value when integrated into an industry-specific solution, generating documents that are related to a specific vertical application. There are substantial benefits to be gained from totally integrating document management systems with line of business systems and generating either supporting documentation or new documentation around that process. LAVA is able to provide a complete vertical application environment using its process enablement technologies within LAVA Business Process Enabler. To take the insurance industry as a prime example, LAVA's claims processing application consists of 36 pre-defined workflows and enablement points to the insurance company's main line of business application. Data capture screens plus a document center of around 120 pre-defined claims documents are also supplied in what the Gartner Group terms a Document Enabled Vertical Application (DEVA). Key words can be re-mapped within standard, LAVA-provided documents to extract the appropriate data out of the client's particular line of business system.

LAVA's insurance-claims DEVA has already been integrated with the following products: Cogen from Continuum, Insure 90 from PMSC, TIA from CMG and Ultima from Total Systems.

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Margaret E. Dobbin
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Open Text Corporation
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Monta Kerr-Johnson
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