Performigence Corp.

ProcessGenius

How can Pepsi-Cola® Company be certain that their workers donҴ mistakenly turn Pepsi One into Pepsi Two? ProcessGenius has the answer.

ProcessGenius, created by Performigence Corporation, represents an entirely new area of knowledge management. Up to now, knowledge management has focused on document and data manipulation. Also, most of the tools require programmers and developers to determine what data is important and to develop the applications, even though they are not involved in the day-to-day processes of the organization.

In contrast, ProcessGenius empowers workers to create and deploy intelligent, interactive applications to capture communicate and manage their process-related information and operational knowledge. What makes this product even more exciting is that the applications can be easily updated or changed by the employees who actually use it without requiring them to have programming knowledge. Programmers and IT personnel are not needed to build the applications because the "geek stuff" is done by ProcessGenius. The workers can manage the content graphically and changes can be made instantly with no application downtime.

ProcessGenius consists of a process knowledge authoring tool that is built entirely in Allegro CL. "We used Allegro CL because we couldnҴ develop this product using a static language. It would have taken at least five times longer to do it even if we had tried," says Harry McElroy, Vice-President of Technology Development and chief architect of ProcessGenius. "The changes that happen to a process result in knowledge that must be updated dynamically; it must to be done at runtime. In addition, since the product has a knowledge-based intelligence system built into it, we needed the symbolic nature of Lisp. With Allegro CL, you can program the way the real world thinks.

"We use every nook and cranny of Allegro CL from the graphic interface to ODBC to rich text control," continues McElroy. "We were able to easily adapt the Allegro CL frameworks to our interface. The Common Graphics tool is very powerful. It enabled us to create a system that even a non-programmer could use."

McElroy became a fan of Lisp while working at McDonnell Douglas. He believes that developers often focus too much on hardware limitations rather than finding ways to leverage the ever-increasing computing power. "Programmers want to be macho, and want to brag about how they can massage the bytes and tweak about the maximum. However, thatҳ not important, because using hardware power to maximize functionality is the key to success," he says.

Performigence Corporationҳ first customer was Kraft Foods and the company has since added many prominent corporations and government agencies to their list of customers. Future implementations of ProcessGenius will include the use of AllegroStore to enable more powerful enterprise and multi-user access to process knowledge.

For more information, visit Performigence Corp. at www.performigence.com.

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