Feeling more secure about workflow

The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) in Canada is using business process management software to help meet provisions of the province's new Securities Act, which went into effect in November.

The Commission selected BizFlow from HandySoft Global to manage 45 different, complex processes. As an important part of its BPM initiative, the BCSC will manage substantial changes to the vetting and approval processes of filings made by public companies, as mandated by the new Securities Act.

Says Loring Bohach, project leader at the BCSC, "Process improvement is everyone's objective here, and with this solution we can implement and adapt processes much quicker and easier than before. For example, we've been able to change the prospectus review process to have work routed automatically. Our review and approval process is streamlined, with fewer errors from rekeying data and delays from hunting down paper files. The system empowers users to manage their own workloads effectively to ensure optimal service levels."

With a mission of protecting and promoting the public interest by regulating trading in securities, the BCSC oversees a variety of different regulatory processes, including monitoring financial disclosure documents and applications for initial public offerings (IPOs). Prior to implementing the new BPM solution, each of the BCSC's various departments developed their own tools to track their work, making it almost impossible to have an agencywide view of a work process. Additionally, manual routing of paper documents made it impossible to share background information once a document was being processed.

"As we mapped our processes in preparation for managing them with BPM software, we found that although we are a relatively small organization, compliance with provincial regulations and national guidelines makes our processes very intricate, and therefore we needed a solution that could handle this complexity," Bohach says. "BizFlow's client-based licensing model enabled us to get an incredibly robust solution without having to go to a large seat count. Furthermore, its seamless integration with our existing Hummingbird (hummingbird.com) document management system was critical to our selection of the BPM platform."

BizFlow will also help the BCSC make business decisions, such as automatically recommending future regulatory oversight schedules for securities market participants, based on risk factors captured during process workflows, according to a recent press release from HandySoft.