What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Overview

BPM (Business Process Management) is a discipline that aims to improve the efficiency of an organization by modeling and standardizing its core business processes. In this section, we describe and explain key BPM concepts and methodologies and outline how BPM software has evolved and continues to do so in response to BPM needs.

BPM refers to the planning, organizing and control activities performed by an organization to ensure that the meeting of process objectives is successful and not left to chance.

A process comprises the tasks, resources (including information) and behaviors that produce a result of value to an organization’s stakeholders.

Process objectives align with a company’s mission or purpose to meet the needs of stakeholders:

• Customers want products and services that meet requirements and create satisfaction.
• Shareholders/owners want efficient and well managed operations in the interests of cost reduction and profit maximization
• Employees want satisfying work.
• Society expects organizations to comply with statutory and regulatory requirements.

All of these needs can be turned into measurable process objectives which need to be managed for success.

The management of business processes covers their design, development, implementation, monitoring, maintenance and improvement.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) focuses on the analysis and design of processes within an organization.

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) focuses on providing real-time monitoring of business processes and activities as they are executed within computer systems, and in assisting in optimizing these activities and processes by identifying and detecting situations that correspond to interruptions and bottlenecks.

Business Process Improvement (BPI) focuses on the optimization of processes.

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