What is Business Process Management?

BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organization. Discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

IT giants are either buying business process management (BPM) vendors or expanding on existing BPM capabilities. Business Intelligence vendors are partnering with BPM vendors, as are purveyors of business activity monitoring and business rule vendors. Plenty of businesses are adopting the technology, too.

BPM is getting a lot of attention. Forrester Research estimates that BPMS license, services and maintenance revenue will grow from $1.2 billion in 2005 to more than $2.7 billion by 2009 – an adoption trend vendors and practitioners alike can't ignore

Think of BPM suites as offering a way to build, execute, monitor and improve automated processes that may go across organizational boundaries - a kind of next-generation workflow.

BPM features have also emerged from the enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors. These are enhanced versions of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products. These systems support the design, development and execution of system-to-system processes while integrating them by means of Web services and asynchronous messaging.

An empirical study by Kohlbacher (2009) indicates that BPM helps organizations to gain higher customer satisfaction, product quality, delivery speed and time-to-market speed.

Business Process Management LifeCycle

In below diagram you’ll see the traditional lifecycle stages of BPM.

• Design: Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.
• Modeling: The design requirements are translated to visual models at this stage. This stage also involves a "what-if analysis". But actually BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering) is a discipline of its own and a continues process in which the model monitoring points (BAM – Business Activity Monitoring) are identified in a process; These points are later used to improve the processes. As of now BPMN v2 is the dominant modeling language with over 74 implementers (vendors) including Fujitsu, IBM, SAP and Microsoft.
• Execution:There are specialized softwares that can execute the BPM model; these softwares provide framework and facilities to execute modeled processes.
• Monitoring:Once a process starts its execution monitoring points (BAM – Business Activity Monitoring) can be identified in a process (e.g. average approval time, number of escalated requests etc.) These parameters can later be used to further improve the process.
• Optimization:We take the input from previous stage (or concern raise by business users) to further optimize business processes.