What is BPM ?
Business Process Management (BPM) is the understanding, visibility and continuous improvement of business processes. It refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their processes.
A business process management solution is about delivering improved business performance to easily automate processes, measure their impact, and upgrade them in response to new ideas or external business events.
A truly comprehensive business process management software tool allows the direct execution of business processes without costly and time intensive development of the required software. In addition, the tool can also monitor the execution of the business processes, providing managers of an organization with the means to analyze their performance and make changes to the original processes in real-time. Using a BPM system the modified process can then be merged into the current business process atmosphere.
Where Business Process Reengineering dealt with one-off changes to the organization, Business Process Management deals with the continuity and embedding of process orientation in the organization. Business Process Management has evolved as technology has caught up with management processes to the point that technology should no longer be the limiting factor in BPM.
What BPM Software is Not:
It is important to remember that BPM is about managing the entire lifecycle of a process. BPM products are not just:
- A process modeling tool that only documents processes. BPM software delivers process execution and hence the hard ROI.
- A new development environment to replace all others. Many companies are turning to BPM as a complement to their existing application development platform to better collaborate with business teams in process development and implementation.
- A replacement for existing back-end systems. BPM software leverages existing IT assets by orchestrating their functionality. In fact, it extends their life, accessibility and functionality.
