What is BPM

The term Business Process Management (or BPM) refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize their business processes.

A Business process is a collection of activities and tasks that produce something of value to the organization or its customers. The term Workflow refers to the movement of tasks or documents through the business process

BPM Definition

BPM is a set of tools and services that support human and application interaction with business processes. BPM suites automate manual processes by routing tasks through departments and applications. These routings are rule and action-based, and are defined in a set of formulas. Actions can be automatically triggered, without an underlying rule requiring additional information; therefore, the process can be continuous and manual processes can be avoided. Organizations use BPM systems to improve the effectiveness of their core operations. BPM specifically coordinates interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. It automates the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away non-value adding activities, such as routine decisions, data, and form transfer etc., and instead, provides users with tailored lists of task. With today’s tight integration of process definitions and underlying applications, changes in the definition can be deployed and communicated virtually immediately. Additionally, BPM can also add value to a company requiring procedures to be created and published because it offers compliance management. Companies can use it to meet the US Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) and International Standards Organization (ISO) requirements. It can opening up a range of functions such as process (quantitative) analysis, and optimization. Thus, by implementing BPM, companies are able to orchestrate and leverage cross-functional business processes that are used over multiple systems, divisions, people, and partners.

BPM Example

Purchase Request workflow is an example of a common used business process.
A company receives many purchase requests from the company’s departments.
The HR department wants pens and paper, the IT department wants new computers and the sales department wants new phones.
Some of these requests are easy and cheap (pens and paper), some are expensive (computers).
The company doesn’t want to go over budget so they set up a business process
The request is sent to the department manager for approval.
If the manager approves and the request cost is less than $5000 then the request is sent to the purchasing department.
If the manager approves and the request cost is more than $5000, then the request is sent to the company manager for his approval. If the company manager approves, then the request is sent to the purchasing department. If the department manager or company manager declines the request, then a decline message is sent to the employee that sent the request.
If all have approved, then the purchasing department will send an approve message to the employee that sent the request.

BPM Solution Components

There are five main components that exist in any BPM workflow solution:

•Flow Chart. A design environment used to design workflow processes, rules and recipients. Many companies report huge improvements in process design merely from the act of sitting down and creating a design of each process. A must for BPM packages is for business users to be able to design all processes with no help from the programmers.

•Workflow Engine. The workflow engine is the heart of the system. The workflow engine runs the system by directing the process to the correct recipient, keeping track of the active processes.

•Organization Structure. The organization structure of the company. This shows the users in each of the company's departments, roles and groups. Emails can then be sent not only to a user but also to a group, a group manager or a role in the company.

•Reporting / Monitoring. Process monitoring and reports allow managers to track the performance of the workflow processes and the performance of personnel who are executing these processes.

•Integration. EAI enables BPM systems to connect to extenal applications and systems. This enables the workflow system to become part of the company's system instead of a stand alone application.