About BPM

BPM is a management practice that optimizes end-to-end business processes – not functional units. This is both BPM’s strength and its weakness. Processes are the true source of enterprise value and optimizing them instead of functional units maximizes enterprise value. However, introducing BPM to an enterprise threatens existing functional unit management. In fact, done properly, owners are assigned to processes spanning multiple organizational units. Consequently, enterprises implementing BPM may be required to change their cultures to accommodate BPM's process-centric model.
BPM provides the following advantages to enterprises:
  • Operational efficiency
  • Manageability
  • Agility
  • Transparency.

Enterprises employing BPM can be more operationally efficient because BPM allows the enterprise to optimize processes. BPM enhances manageability because it measures everything about processes. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. BPM enhances agility because it allows process owners to rapidly change processes in the face of competitive threat, changes in regulation, and other factors. BPM enhances transparency and, thus, compliance because it records all actions taken within processes and makes the information available to stakeholders.
BPM is composed of the following activities:

  • Modeling processes
  • Executing process instances
  • Monitoring process performance.

These activities are performed in an iterative fashion.
Business analysts model processes using a standard graphical representation, the business process modeling notation (BPMN). This graphical notation is stored internally either in a proprietary or in one of several standard formats. Analysts develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for individual process steps. A process engine interprets the process model as triggering events (e.g., the receipt of a transaction) initiate process instances. In addition to directing the flow of work in a process, the process engine records the outcome of each process step. That is, who did what, when they did it, and sometimes why they did it (or at least why they said they did it.) These data are stored in a process event repository. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools present dashboards, initiate alerts, and present views of process performance useful to process monitoring. In particular, real time performance data are compared to the KPIs established during the modeling exercise. Business Intelligence (BI) tools merge process data with other enterprise data into views of enterprise performance useful for tactical and strategic decision-making. Based on information presented by these tools, process owners may elect to modify process models.
BPM is often misunderstood to apply only to repetitive procedures – not the soft and/or ad hoc activities of management and knowledge workers. Newer BPMS tools are now available that address these soft activities.