Business process management (BPM) is a method of efficiently aligning an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. As organizations strive for attainment of their objectives, BPM attempts to continuously improve processes - the process to define, measure and improve your processes – a ‘process optimization' process. The Earth seen from Apollo 17. ...

Overview

A business process is a collection of related, structured activities that produce a service or product that meet the needs of a client. These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. So BPM is very important in any organization.

Approaches within BPM

BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and technology

People

BPM is considered by some to be a philosophy. BPM alignment to the customer means that customer-facing staff are best suited to understand customer needs and must be empowered to make improvements. Many of these improvements can be done without the use of new technology.

Technology

BPM System (BPMS) is sometimes seen as the whole of BPM. Some see that information moves between enterprise software packages and immediately think of Service Oriented Architecture(SOA); while others believe that modeling is the only way to create the ‘perfect’ process, so they think of modeling as BPM. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a computer systems architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. ... The term business model describes a broad range of informal and formal models that are used by enterprises to represent various aspects of business, including its purpose, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, trading practices and operational processes and policies. ...

Both of these concepts go into the definition of Business Process Management. For instance, the size and complexity of daily tasks often requires the use of technology to model efficiently. Bringing the power of technology to staff is part of the BPM credo. Many tout BPM as the bridge between Information Technology (IT) and Business.

BPMS could be industrial specific and can be driven by a software such as Agilent OpenLAB BPM. Some other products may focus on Enterprise Resource Planning and warehouse management. Validation of BPMS is another technical issue which vendors and users need to be aware of, if regulatory compliances are mandatory ^{[1], [2], [3], [4]}. The task could be performed either by an authenticated third party or by user themselves. In either way, validation documentation need to be generated. The validation document usually can either be published officially or well retained by users ^{[5], [6], [7], [8]}. ... Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. ... Manufacturating Resource Planning (or MRP2) - Around 1980, over-frequent changes in sales forecasts, entailing continual reajustments in production, as well as the unsuitability of the parameters fixed buy the system, led MRP (Material Requirement Planning) to evolve into a new concept : Manufacturating Resource Planning (e. ...

Business process management life-cycle

The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into five categories: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.

Design

Process Design encompasses both the identifying of existing processes and designing the "to-be" process. 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.

Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process; a real world analogy can be having an architect design a house. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.

The proposed improvement could be in human to human, human to system, and system to system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.

There are several common techniques and notations for business process mapping (or Business process modeling), including IDEF, BPWIN, Event-driven Process Chains, and BPMN. Σ This article does not cite any references or sources. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Process Modeling. ... The family of ICAM Definition Languages, short IDEF, were initiated in the 1970s and finished being developed in the 1980s. ... The method of event-driven process chain (EPC) has been developed within the framework of ARIS and is used by many companies for modeling, analyzing, and redesigning business processes [Ferdian01]. As such it forms the core technique for modeling in ARIS, which serves to link the different views in the... The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business processes in a workflow. ...

Modeling

Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables, for instance, changes in the cost of materials or increased rent, that determine how the process might operate under different circumstances.

It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task? What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?

A real world analogy can be "wind-tunnel" test of an aeroplane or test flights to determine how much fuel it will consume and how many passengers it can carry.

Execution

One 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 combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making documenting a process difficult. Application software is a subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly and thoroughly to a task that the user wishes to perform. ...

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 can be 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. Look up computer language & a Brief History of it in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The commercial BPM software market has focused on graphical process model development, rather than text-language based process models, as a means to reduce the complexity of model development. Visual programming using graphical metaphors has increased productivity in a number of areas of computing and is well accepted by users.

Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution. Business rules describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization in achieving its goals. ...

Monitoring

Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and statistics on the performance of one or more processes provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.

In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.

The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools in generally provided by BPMS. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is software that aids in monitoring of business processes, as those processes are implemented in computer systems. ...

Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an 'a priori' process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks. Process mining techniques allow for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. ...

Optimization

Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase and identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and potential rooms for cost savings or other improvements and then applying those enhancements in the design of the process thus continuing the value cycle of business process management.

Future developments

Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. A common form is where individual steps in the business process which require human intuition or judgment to be performed are assigned to the appropriate members of an organization (as with workflow systems). A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. ...

More advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case many people and system interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions. Human Interaction Management is a name for the process used to support and monitor tasks while also permitting ongoing process development. ...

BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content management. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is any of the strategies and technologies employed in the information technology industry for managing the capture, storage, security, revision control, retrieval, distribution, preservation and destruction of documents and content. ...

Business process management in practice

Whilst the steps can be viewed as a cycle, economic or time constraints are likely to limit the process to one or more iterations.

In addition, organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective to optimize an area which has been identified as an area for improvement.

Use of software

Some say that not all activities can be effectively modeled with BPMS, and so some processes are best left alone. Taking this viewpoint, the value in BPMS is not in automating very simple or very complex tasks, it is in modeling processes where there is the most opportunity.

The alternate view is that a complete process modeling language, supported by a BPMS, is needed; the purpose is not purely automation to replace manual tasks, but to enhance manual tasks with computer assisted automation. In this sense, the argument over whether BPM is about replacing human activity with automation or simply analyzing for greater understanding of process is a sterile debate; all processes modeled using BPMS must be executable in order to bring to life the software application that the human users interact with at run time.

See also

• Business Process and Business Process Modeling
• Business Process Automation
• Business-driven development (BDD)
• Business process interoperability
• Business rules approach
• Business intelligence
• BPDM
• BPMN
• Enterprise resource planning
• Event-driven Process Chains
• Performance management
• Process management
• Six Sigma
• SUPER
• Total Quality Management
• Workflow
• XPDL
• YAWL
• BPEL
• Information security policies
• Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF)

A business process or business method is a collection of interrelated tasks, which solve a particular issue. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Process Modeling. ... Business process automation, or BPA is the process a business uses to contain costs. ... Business Driven Development is a methodology for developing IT solutions that directly satisfy business requirements. ... Business process interoperability (BPI) is a state that exists when a business process can meet a specific objective automatically utilizing essential human labor only. ... Business rules are abstractions of the policies and practices of a business organization. ... The term business intelligence (BI) dates to 1958. ... BPDM, the Business Process Definition Metamodel, is a proposal being developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). ... The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business processes in a workflow. ... Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. ... The method of event-driven process chain (EPC) has been developed within the framework of ARIS and is used by many companies for modeling, analyzing, and redesigning business processes [Ferdian01]. As such it forms the core technique for modeling in ARIS, which serves to link the different views in the... Performance management may mean: Performance measurement is the process of assessing progress toward achieving predetermined goals, while performance management is building on that process adding the relevant communication and action on the progress achieved against these predetermined goals (Bourne, M.,Franco, M. and Wilkes, J. (2003). ... Process management is the ensemble of activities of planning and monitoring the performance of a process, especially in the sense of business process, often confused with reengineering. ... The often-used six sigma symbol. ... Look up super-, super in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. ... A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. ... XPDL is an acronym for XML Processing Description Language. It simplifies the management of document sets and makes document processing more reliable. ... Yawl sailing vessel. ... A business process language known as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which supersedes WSFL and is serialized in XML, aims to enable programming in the large. ... Service-oriented Modeling (SOM) to produce a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is referred to as SOMA (Service-oriented Modeling and Architecture). ...

Bibliography

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• Roger Burlton Business Process Management: Profiting From Process. ISBN 0-672-32063-0
• James F. Chang "Business Process Management Systems" ISBN 0-8493-2310-X
• Michael Harvey "Essential Business Process Modelling" ISBN 0-596-00843-0
• DEBEVOISE, Neilson T (2007 September 12). Business Process Management with a Business Rules Approach. BookSurge Publishing. ISBN 1-4196736-8-8. 
• Marlon Dumas, Wil van der Aalst, Arthur ter Hofstede (Eds) Process-Aware Information Systems, Wiley, ISBN 0-471-66306-9
• Keith Harrison-Broninski "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management" ISBN 0-929652-44-4
• John Jeston and Johan Nelis "Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations" ISBN 0-7506-6921-7
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• Michael Hugos. "The Greatest Innovation Since the Assembly Line: Powerful Strategies for Business Agility". ISBN 0-929652-39-9
• Andrew Spanyi. "More for Less: The Power of Process Management". ISBN 0-929652-03-0
• Andrew Spanyi. "Business Process Management Is a Team Sport: Play It to Win!". ISBN 0-929652-02-3
• Kiran. K.Garimella. "The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage". ISBN 0-929652-06-1
• Peter Fingar, Joseph Bellini. "The Real Time Enterprise: Competing on Time With the Revolutionary Business Strategy-Execution Machine". ISBN 0-929652-30-4
• Jean-Noël GILLOT. "La gestion des processus métiers". ISBN 978-2-9528-2660-0

Notes