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Business Process Management 101

Information Guide to Business Process Management (BPM)

About Business Process Automation (BPA)

In today's competitive global marketplace, you can significantly reduce costs and improve efficiencies by automating business process flows. Business Process Automation (BPA) is the term applied to technology components that substitute or supplement manual processes to manage information flow within an organization. There are four main technological components involved in a BPA system:

  • Business Rules Engine. Business rules describe the structure and operation of a company's business processes. Such rules are listed in procedure manuals, customer contracts, supplier agreements, and encoded in software applications. A business rules engine lets you separate software code from the actual business logic, maintain such rules in a central database (knowledge base) and thereby promote consistency.


  • Workflow Engine. A business rules engine alone rarely can complete all processes from beginning to end - typically a human will need to intervene at some point for exceptions and complex cases. In the context of a business process automation solution, a workflow engine enables the seamless transfer of information between software systems and people.


  • Application Integration platform. An organization's data is scattered among various databases, repositories, and locations, and accessed by various disparate software applications. If business processes are to be automated as much as practical, all key applications must support multiple communication protocols and differing data formats used between different enterprise application systems.


  • Data exchange standards. In order to support an efficient business process automation system, a company needs a common XML-based data exchange standard that reduces software development (and maintenance) efforts.



    • More info on business process automation

    Information Guide to Business Process Management (BPM)

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