The number of patent applications relating to electromobility is rising all the time, as is the number of market-ready products and solutions in this field. This can be seen not least by how many new electric and hybrid vehicles automakers are announcing and bringing to market. Many places are seeing investments in charging infrastructure, and strong media interest in the topic of electromobility shows no sign of abating. Read more…

With the start of 2012, I would like to offer a few 2011 observations concerning BPM/Business Rules Management or IBPM (intelligent BPM) and continued predictive conditions for 2012.

Read more…

The claims processing automation project at the German insurance company HanseMerkur was the first joint project of inubit and Bosch Software Innovations – and it turned out not only to be a successful kick start for our customer, but also proof of the good interplay of our Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules Management (BRM) Suites. On December 19, the jury of the Global Awards for Excellence in BPM & Workflow honored the project with the Europe Gold Award. The jury stressed particularly that thanks to the automated processes on the basis of the inubit Suite (BPM) and Visual Rules (BRM), HanseMerkur was able to handle revenue growth of 15-20 percent and comparable growth in the number of cases without increasing staff. Nearly 30% of claims processing can now be issued automatically.

Read more…

The extent of government regulation of postal services in the US is relatively – some would say, astonishingly – high. The United States Postal Service (USPS) has a monopoly on the last mile, in other words, the actual delivery to the recipient. Other logistics providers compete to provide preparatory postal services, such as bundling and sorting mailings and delivery to USPS.

For major customers, these service providers generally offer fixed rates, which means that they can only improve their own profit margins when they can exhaust the best possible USPS discounts. At the same time, they face the risk of offering a rate structure that is too advantageous, at least for them. Discounts that are wrongly taken lead inexorably to significant fines from USPS and negatively impact profit margins.

Read more…

In a preceding blog article Processes, Rules, and Data – what more could you ask for? my colleague Dirk explained the interplay of processes, rules, and data at a conceptual level. Today I would like to dive into the details on implementing a small example made up of a simple Claim Management rule and a corresponding process and data management solution.

Read more…

… well ok, that title might be a little too catchy. But here's the story:

Using Java annotations to make programmers' lifes a bit easier, is one of the language features that is, in my opinion, underestimated. A long time ago I've introduced a mighty @Workaround annotation in our code base in order to mark, guess it, workarounds! I simply felt bad to implement temporary workarounds that should be removed once an issue of a third party framework was resolved. I felt bad because I thought of the poor guy(s) (including myself) who will maintain the software in future. How should he or she know that some weird code snippets were introduced due to bugs or inadequateness of third party software? How should he or she know if the ugly code can be removed and when? Well, here is the solution:

Read more…

Bosch prepares for the next version of the internet, Web 3.0: The Internet of Things and Services is a smarter web, enabling better ways to share information not only for computers, but also for even the most common things of our daily life. Predicted by technology evangelists and market researchers as well, the Internet of Things and Services will have large impact on us, society, and systems. In the coming years, more and more intelligent systems will be able to use the internet to communicate automatically with each other. In just 15 years, the resulting Internet of Things and Services will interconnect more than 50 billion components – from tiny sensors to high performance computers.

Read more…

Apache Wicket is a neat web framework to create web sites and web applications. I've been working with Wicket extensively for more than 3 years now, both at work and for my private project. Before I knew Wicket I've worked with JSF(1) and JBoss Seam 1. I think it's time to share some practices and experiences I've made during that time!

Compared to JSF, Wicket was a pleasure to learn and use. Nowadays I see Wicket as a kind of two-edged sword: I really like the framework. Properly used it can greatly improve productivity building web-based user interfaces. Used the wrong way it can lead to, well, a great code mess, bloated session sizes, serialization errors, bad performance, side effects and a poor user experience. Read more…

Electric mobility quite often is associated with hindrances, obstacles, not thoroughly evaluated technology that is not suited for day to day usage. “We need to do more R&D to come to solutions that make eMobility user-friendly” is a common saying even in eMobility trade shows. Why sit and think? The solutions are there, ready available, proven technology that only needs to be applied.

Read more…

A warm hello from the inubit Product Management team to our new colleagues at Bosch Software Innovations and our joint community! As the latest addition to the Bosch family, we are looking forward to contributing to new customer projects and the integration of the product lines.

In the last 12 years, inubit was involved in more than 450 successful BPM projects. Our lessons learned? BPM is no silver bullet, but it is a vital piece of the complex "enterprise application jigsaw". Of course there are many other pieces to this jigsaw, including portals and Web 2.0 UIs, human workflows, EAI and SOA, complex decision making and data validation, data management, data analysis, application monitoring and operations support, to name but a few.

Read more…