What Is BPM and Why Is It Important to You?
At its most fundamental, business process management (BPM) refers to the management of explicit processes from beginning to end. Automation streamlines processes so that human capital can be reallocated to higher-value items while systems are integrated to extend processes and information throughout the organization for better decision making. With BPM, processes become corporate assets, which in turn can be used to create significant competitive advantage. |
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BPM provides a level of control and flexibility that allows organizations to respond to change, manage risk, and meet regulations whether internal or external. By being able to continually optimize processes, efficiencies are created that lead to lower costs and, ultimately, increased profitability.Gartner Research identifies the following elements as essential to a complete BPM system*:
- Graphical tools - Designed to analyze, model and define processes, these tools are targeted at solution designers who extract established process flows and design new flows. These flows are then specified in a friendly development environment for future execution.
- A runtime execution engine - This is the underlying state machine that executes the defined process flow. As the process flow is executed, the engine may invoke automated services or tasks that humans have to complete. The services may be provided by applications - legacy or new - or by other enterprises that might be trading partners or outsourcers. The runtime environment maintains the status (state) of each process instance or business event.
- Agility facilities - This function involves the enablement of inflight adjustments for flow, worklist management and work priorities.
- Tools to monitor and manage the flows - Monitoring may cover process performance, degree of completion or out-of-bounds conditions. Process management may cover process termination, compensating processes, load balancing and rerouting.
- Tools for post-completion analysis - These tools use the state data that is archived for business measurement and adjustments.
* T. Bell, and J. Sinur, "A BPM Taxonomy: Creating Clarity in a Confusing Market, " Gartner, 2003
