Introduction
Business Process Management (BPM) is one of the hottest market segments in the software industry today. BPM is the discipline of modeling, automating, managing and optimizing business processes to increase profitability.
The rapid growth of BPM is driven by the increasing recognition that success in today’s economy is driven by the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization and its business processes. Depending on the process, a BPM focus can improve organizational productivity and responsiveness, reduce costs, and/or accelerate cycle times. Ultimately, a quality BPM focus is a key driver for profitability.
The remainder of this paper will take a closer look at the evolution from workflow to BPM, business processes in general, the benefits that BPM can bring to your organization, the key technologies and considerations for choosing between them, and finally the non-technical issues associated with BPM initiatives.
From Workflow to BPM
The BPM market is composed of vendors whose products address the market needs from four different perspectives:
- Business Process Modeling and Analysis – which is focused on gaining a detailed understanding of business processes and the potential impact of changes to those processes .
- Workflow Automation – which is focused on automating human-centric processes.
- Enterprise Application Integration – which is focused on the exchange of information between heterogeneous systems.
- Business Activity Monitoring – which is focused on analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes and activities.
A complete BPM solution must provide capabilities in all of these areas. Of these perspectives, Workflow Automation has the most in common with BPM, due to its relative maturity and the evolution of solutions to address processes that involve a basic level of systems integration. The following table illustrates some of the differences between a traditional workflow solution and BPM. Workflow alone is not BPM.
BPM adds many new capabilities and requirements that go beyond workflow automation. These new capabilities enable organizations to address a much wider range of processes and address more of the lifecycle of a business process through upfront modeling and after the fact analysis and optimization. With BPM, continuous process improvement is a reality.
A Closer Look at Business Processes
What is a Business Process (and how can BPM improve that process)
A closer look at the definition of a business process will illustrate the BPM opportunity:
Definition: “A sequence of structured or semi-structured tasks performed in series or in parallel by two or more individuals to reach a common goal.”
The five essential points in this definition are:
i. A business process consists of a “sequence” of tasks. One task alone performed by one person is not a business process.
With BPM, simply modeling the process can help you identify some tasks that can be eliminated or automated to produce dramatic improvements.
ii. A business process is “structured or semi-structured.” This means that there is some logic or rules that dictate the sequence in which the tasks are performed. They are not performed on an ad hoc basis.
Whenever there is clearly defined logic, automation can be used to eliminate errors and make decisions on routing.
iii. The tasks can be performed in “series or in parallel.”
Most tasks follow a sequential or series of steps from beginning to end. These types of tasks are reasonably simple to automate and track. However, it is often hard to perform tasks in parallel where two or more actions are being performed at the same exact time without some form of automation and tracking mechanism. With BPM, not only is parallel routing easier, but you can also always be aware of where a particular process incident is in its lifecycle — knowing who is working on it now (or should be working on it) and where it will go next.
iv. There must be at least “two or more” individuals or applications involved as players performing different tasks in workflow. As information flows from person to person, the opportunity to lose something, make an error, or simply interpret it incorrectly grows. By automating steps and capturing information electronically, the likelihood of such errors decreases significantly. In addition, if applications are going to be involved somewhere in the process, having the information already in an electronic format simplifies integration.
