Business Process Management is a field of knowledge at the juncture of Management and Information Technology. It is closely linked with Business Management Strategies which are related with better management of the company and the most efficient allocation of resources such that the company attains its desired short term and long term objectives.
BPM goes a step further than mere business management strategies which takes the help of planning, organizing, directing and controlling to achieve its operational goals. Technically, BPM encompasses methods, techniques and tools to design, analyze, control and formulate the operational business processes involving humans and organizations and various sources of information. These operational business processes take into account the day-to-day activities in the running of the business as opposed to strategic decision making set to achieve the long term objectives of the company and usually undertaken by the top level management of the organization concerned.
BPM combining the techniques of management and information technology looks at the continuous evolution and improvement of operational business processes rather than one-off revolutionary changes studied by the field of business process reengineering which became particularly popular in the 1990’s. On this note, the task of the managers managing the business and to monitor the execution of business processes has been made much easier with the development of software tools called the BPM systems. Organizations or businesses often start a BPM project with an objective to improve and optimize a specified area. A business process mapping can be very useful in this context.
The activities which constitute BPM are:
Process Design: ------ This comprises of the design of existing business processes as well as the simulation of new ones. The software used to do this include graphical editors (to document processes), repositories (store process models) and various business process simulation tools that run a process large number of times to evaluate performance parameters such as the average cost.
Process Execution: ------ Generally comprises of an application that executes the required steps in the operational business processes. However, these applications seldom execute all the steps of the process completely and thus human intervention or software application defined in a computer language can efficiently solve the problem. As a means to reduce the complexity of model development, the BPM software market has focused on graphical process based development models rather than text language based models. Business rule engine can also be used to drive process execution and resolution.
Process Monitoring: ------- This constitutes tracking individual processes such as customer order so that information on their state and the required statistics can be easily derived. The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and whether it should be monitored on an ad-hoc or timely basis. In this context, process mining is a collection of tools and methods related to process monitoring.
The initial emphasis of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, but as time has changed, it has been extended to accommodate human driven process where human interaction takes place in a parallel manner with the mechanistic processes. An emerging class of BPM software known as the human interaction management is now used extensively in the support systems of BPM. BPM systems can be used to understand organizations through extended views which might also include relationships of business processes to each other and this feature makes BPM the backbone of enterprise content management.
The leading BPM firms in the USA are the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) and the Object Management Group (OMG) which have been instrumental in providing thought leadership and industry standards for this crucial industry. A pioneering body of Business Process Management Professionals is the Association of Business Process Management Professionals or ABPMP.