Business Process Management

Business Process Management BPM is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information. The term operational business processes refers to repetitive business processes performed by organizations in the context of their daytoday operations, as opposed to strategic decision making processes which are performed by the toplevel management of an organization. BPM differs from business process reengineering, a management approach popular in the 1990s, in that it does not aim at oneoff revolutionary changes to business processes, but at their continuous evolutionThe traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process. However, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a federation of software and human intervention. Due to the complexity of the federated approach, documenting a process is difficult. This makes changing or improving the process difficult. As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process as developed in the process design activity to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition is much more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.

Business Process Management Tools

Business Process Management BPM is an approach for managing processes from Your processmodeling tool most likely will be used by the same business PMC Solutions inProcess software is a robust business process management tool that will allow you to create your map and share it with everyone in the organization quickly and affordably. That is because inProcess is a Webbased tool. As such, you can share your information instantly, regardless of whether your members are next door or around the world, and without the expense of printing and shipping.With BPM, you can get to the point where you can see, on a secondbysecond basis, whats happening in your business and where in the business are the holdups and where process improvement says Dean Pipes, an integration architect at The Toro Co. in Bloomington, Minn. The yard equipment manufacturer uses a BPM system based on Vitria Technology Inc.s BusinessWare to pool its purchases from vendors to negotiate volume discounts.In fact, some of the BPM vendors utilize existing BI software packages to provide this capability. For example, Metastorm and Hyperion have developed a product called eWork Insight that is an addon solution to Metastorms eWork BPM suite.Process efficiency refers to how long processes are taking to complete and how many resources the process is consuming. In general, we want processes that move as quickly as possible and at the lowest cost. A standard BPM suite should be able to provide detailed time and cost information about each process that has been handled. The user can then export that data and perform analysis on the information to determine where improvements can be made. More advanced BPM suites provide the ability to take the data, make modifications to the process maps, and run simulations on the changes to determine if the effects are meaningful. If so, they can then move those updated process changes into production right from the BPMs modeling tool. This capability is sometimes referred to as roundtrip business process management.