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At the foundation of a successful business, business processes align resources to achieve goals. Whether delivering goods to customers, collaborating with partners, or coordinating employee efforts, business processes are unifying threads that bind together the fabric of an enterprise's products, brand, and value. Business processes are the heart of an enterprise's identity.
Too often, however, enterprises don't understand or control their processes. Management might have a model of an ideal process, but the reality of the execution may be strikingly different, leading toward redundancy, error, gaps, and inefficiency. Businesses without agile control over their processes often impede their own success and processes become quickly locked up into isolated units.
BPM is the ability to see and control all parts of a long-lived, multi-step information request or transaction that spans multiple applications and people in one or more companies. BPM means harnessing and enhancing the value of business processes within the extended enterprise, no matter who they involve. Companies have always created some type of process management system. These earlier solutions might have been custom-built combinations of workflow, document management, or systems automation with custom coding to round out the capabilities.
To understand the uses of BPM, start with the building blocks of the processes involved. The assets that fulfill a process are employees, customers, partners, applications, and databases - all working toward a specific goal. Each asset has intrinsic value and a part to play. Additionally, each asset interfaces with a process in a unique way. BPM entails integrating the value of each asset, providing a seamless interface, and coordinating the efforts of all assets to achieve a goal, in a given sequence, within a set time.
In many ways, business process management is the sophisticated next step from what we once referred to merely as workflow. Designed to enable and facilitate rapid, traceable, and repeatable business processes, it fosters better operational performance and the optimization of the informational, technological, and human resources at the organization's disposal.
The ability to monitor and measure the state of the processes being managed allows for the ready identification of bottlenecks and the pinpointing of redundant tasks that may exist in different departments or at parallel sites - the first step in bridging the islands mentioned just above. The second step is to reconfigure the process flow so the redundancies are eliminated, and to use standard interfaces to get the individual systems to talk to one another and thus to work under a single BPM umbrella.
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