Business Process Management 101

About Business Process Management (BPM)

Business process management (BPM) is the use of information technologies and other tools to model, measure, manage, and improve core business processes in an organization in order to be more competitive in the marketplace and to serve customers better. BPM can provide cost benefits for most companies, increase customer satisfaction, enable business differentiation and reduce errors. Specifically, a well-implemented BPM strategy can provide these benefits:

• Reduce the time required to complete a process
• Reduce the number of steps needed to perform a task
• Reduce the number of errors in completing a process
• Automate procedural and administrative tasks
• Reduce the number of employees needed to complete tasks

Most successful BPM solutions incorporate the following components:

1. Business Process Mapping - modeling the core processes and interdependencies
2. Business Rules Engine - encapsulating procedural rules and decisions
3. Workflow Automation - routing information to the right people at the right time
4. Application Integration - middleware thato enables data exchange between software
5. Knowledge Base - data repository that stores business rules and other information
6. Business Activity Monitoring - system that monitors all activities in a process

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