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So what makes a BPM offering a good fit for midmarket companies? Not necessarily the same things that make it appropriate for larger companies. For example, top-tier companies need a strong financial consolidation module, but midmarket firms may not find the module as important, says Rayner.
"Satori has a financial consolidation reporting bit, but not the true, heavy-duty financial consolidation," says Rayner. "For the target market, that's not necessarily a big issue, [because] their consolidation requirements are very simple -- more aggregation than true complex financial consolidation."
With its vertical focus, Satori sets itself apart from some of the better-known BPM vendors geared toward the midmarket. To date, the company has more than 80 customers worldwide, most of which are in the legal profession. This year Satori is moving into other professional services sectors, such as IT consulting and architectural engineering.
Satori hopes midmarket companies will gravitate toward vertically focused products because they require less customization to get up and running. Less customization translates into savings on consultancy fees and quicker returns on investment. One of Satori's early adopters was Philips Lytle, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based law firm. Every year, the firm undertakes the complicated task of determining partner compensation based on performance. This traditionally labor-intensive, error-prone process used to require a team to work 100 hours around the clock during the busy budget cycle.
Philips Lytle turned to Satori's proCube software to automate the task. The firm chose the software partly because the product already had the nuances of the legal profession built into it. For instance, the software could access a data source using one application framework and one interface to streamline and automate partner compensation calculations, reporting, and analysis.
And that's just what happened, says Brian Eckert, director of finance and administration at Philips Lytle. "The level of automation has given the firm back 92 man-hours at an extremely hectic time in the accounting and budgeting cycle," he says.
The BPM software further allows the law firm's management team to see the actual profitability of each partner and demonstrate how partners can work at peak efficiency.
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