c



 

  

 
  

    
, is the practice of improving the efficiency and
effectiveness of any organization by automating the organization's business processes. BPM used to
be also know as Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
  

   (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of
an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that
promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and
integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes
continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that
BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a
functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

Many companies have business processes that are unique to its business model. Since these processes
tend to evolve over time as the business reacts to market conditions, the 
  
must be easily adaptable to the new conditions and requirements and continue to be a perfect fit for
the company.
In order to use BPM effectively, organizations must stop focusing exclusively on data and data
management, and adopt a process-oriented approach that makes no distinction between work done by
a human and a computer.

R ëhe idea of BPM is to bring processes, people and information together.

R ynamic infrastructure requires separation of flows, business rules and services.
R Identifying the business processes is relatively easy. Breaking down the barriers between business
areas, and finding owners for the processes is difficult.
R BPM not only involves managing business processes within the enterprise but also involves real-time
integration of the processes of a company with those of its suppliers, business partners, and
customers.
R BPM involves looking at automation horizontally instead of vertically.
R Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is essential for measurement of BPM impact.

Examples of 
 tasks that your organization performs that should be automated include:

R Expense Reports ëravel Requests

R Purchase Orders Human Resource Management
R Œew Accounts and Credit Authorizations Sales Orders
R Project Management Software Change Management

ëhe following example illustrates the power of 

:
When a B2B partner needs some inventory, he can log into the web site and order required inventory.
An email will be generated and sent to the supervisor responsible for the partner's inventory. ëhe
supervisor can click on the link in the email, login to the site and approve the inventory. ëhe partner
will be notified of the allocation and the inventory will be shipped.

  
A business process is a "series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles
or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common business goal." [2]ëhese processes are critical to
any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a
managerial approach, (BPM) considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be
understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. ëhis
foundation is very similar to other ëotal Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process
methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported,
or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress
and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a "change capability" to an organization - both
human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of
two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
Roughly speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts of tasks, department,
production, outputs. ëhe current management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and
technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Œote that
in the Ië community, the term 'business process' is often used as synonymous of management of
middleware processes; or integrating application software tasks. ëhis viewpoint may be overly
restrictive. ëhis should be kept in mind when reading software engineering papers that refer to
'business processes' or 'business process modeling.'
Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, it has
since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in
series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. For example (in workflow systems), when individual
steps in the business process require human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are
assigned to appropriate members within the organization.
More advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex interaction between
human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in
structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.
BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be
available to organize and present. ëhese views include the relationships of processes to each other
which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would
not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content
management.
Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it
goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM
enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than
competitors - creating competitive advantage.

 
 

  

 

 ! Business Process Management (BPM) IE is an integrated design environment used to
design processes, rules, events and exceptions. Creating a structured definition of each process is very
important to any business and the IE enables a business user to design all processes with no help
from Ië.

   . ëhe process engine of a Business Process Management solution keeps track of the
states and variables for all of the active processes. Within a complex system, there could be thousands
of processes with interlocking records and data.
"   . Administrators define people in the system by name, department, role and even
potential authority level. ëhis directory will enable tasks to be sent automatically to the defined
resources.
c#$! ëhis is the communication infrastructure that forwards tasks to the appropriate individual.
% &
 . Enables users to track the performance of their current processes and
the performance of personnel who are executing these processes.
 
. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and/or Web services is critical to BPM as
business processes will require data from disparate systems throughout the organization.
 
 

  
 

 

 makes it easy for companies to program their current processes, automate their execution,
monitor their current performance and make on-the-fly changes to improve the current processes. ëhe
process managed enterprise is the company of the future.
A 
 software enables you to automate those tasks that are currently being performed manually.
Many of these tasks require some type of application process, approval or rejection process,
notifications and status reports. A BPM solution can make these processes automatic.
u
    is an area where p
really shines. Organizations have few problems when its
process run smoothly ninety nine percent of the time. However, it's the one percent that are exceptions
that dominate the majority of the company's time and resources.
R 
 is excellent for processes that extend beyond the boundaries of an enterprise and
communicate with processes of the partners, customers, suppliers and vendors.
R 
 Gives businesses the agility to stay competitive
R 
 reduces the time elapsed in a business process
R 
 Increases the productivity per person
   consists of many steps. A typical BPM initiative reduces the number of steps by
50%.
A  
  needs many people and resources. A good BPM should reduce the number of
resources needed for the same process.

 helps improve coordination across departments and geographic locations of a company
c
c#$
R c#$ is an essential element of business process management (BPM).
R c#$ is a term used to describe how work is defined and how work is allocated and
scheduled.
R c#$ $  the sequence and conditions based upon which work flows.
R c#$
   the routing of work between resources. ëhe resources can be people,
systems or machines.
R c#$

  the order in which these steps are handled.
R c#$ 
'  employees to monitor and, reconfigure the flow of a business process as
needed.
ëhe following example illustrates a 
#$
In a content management business process, an editor edits the content and the manager approves the
content. If you define editing of the content as a unit of work and approving the job as another unit of
work, then the editing job needs to happen first for the approval job to start. Further, if the editing job
fails, the approval job can't start.

Most recently, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM to other methodologies, such as Six
Sigma. BPM tools now allow the user to:

R  $ - baseline the process or the process improvement

R 
 - Simulate the change to the process.
R 
( - Compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
R  - Select and implement the improvement
R  - eploy this implementation and by use of User defined dashboards monitor the
improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation
model in preparation for the next improvement iteration.

ëhis brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to your business process based on real
life data (not assumed knowledge) and also the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allow the
users to continually streamline and optimise the process to ensure it is tuned to its market need


$    
Business process management activities can be grouped into five categories: design, modeling,
execution, monitoring, and optimization.
 


 
   

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think of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Still others limit the definition to "modeling... to create
the µperfect¶ process," (see Business modeling).
ëhese are partial answers and the technological offerings continue to evolve. ëhe BPMS term may not
survive. ëoday it encompasses the concept of supporting the managerial approach through enabling
technology. ëhe BPMS should enable all stakeholders to have a firm understanding of an organization
and its performance. ëhe BPMS should facilitate business process change throughout the life cycle
stated above. ëhis will assist in the automation of activities, collaboration, integration with other
systems, integrating partners through the value chain, etc. For instance, the size and complexity of
daily tasks often requires the use of technology to model efficiently. ëhese models facilitate
automation and solutions to business problems. ëhese models can also become executable to assist in
monitoring and controlling business processes. As such,
 
some  ] people view BPM as "the bridge
between Information ëechnology (Ië) and Business."[÷  . In fact, an argument can be made
that this "holistic approach" bridges organizational and technological silos.
ëhere are four critical components of a BPM Suite:

R Process Engine ± a robust platform for modeling and executing process-based applications,
including business rules
R Business Analytics ² enable managers to identify business issues, trends, and opportunities
with reports and dashboards and react accordingly
R Content Management ² provides a system for storing and securing electronic documents,
images, and other files
R Collaboration ëools ² remove intra- and interdepartmental communication barriers through
discussion forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards

BPM also addresses many of the critical Ië issues underpinning these business drivers, including:

R Managing end-to-end, customer-facing processes

R Consolidating data and increasing visibility into and access to associated data and information
R Increasing the flexibility and functionality of current infrastructure and data
R Integrating with existing systems and leveraging emerging service oriented architecture
(SOAs)
R Establishing a common language for business-Ië alignment

Validation of BPMS is another technical issue that vendors and users need to be aware of, if
regulatory compliance is mandatory. ëhe validation task could be performed either by an
authenticated third party or by the users themselves. Either way, validation documentation will need
to be generated. ëhe validation document usually can either be published officially or retained by
users.
c
  
   , is the the automated monitoring of business process activity
affecting an enterprise. BAM is generally implemented as a module of ERP, BI, EAI or BPM
products. BAM requires a business to identify its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and create a
system that allows monitoring and responding to changes, preferably real time.
Virtually for everyone in a organization can benefit from BAM. Business Activity Monitoring
enables a company to respond faster to new opportunities and threats. BAM is not just about
technology, but about recognizing a business' KPIs and implementing the right technology in place to
monitor them.
 provides Real-ëime, Graphical Key Performance Indicators & Analysis
 enables control and manage ongoing business operations using closed-loop visibility.
 will enable you to respond quickly to change based on business events as they occur.
 enables zoom in on cross-process metrics with real-time analysis to determine which processes
are creating bottlenecks or which customer is most profitable.
ë %   
Creating an effective p
environment is not only about having the right technology and processes.
Enterprises should define the right set of metrics, which will prevent information overload and
overreaction to business exception reports.

% $   

1. Õ Smart, P.A, Maddern, H. & Maull, R. S. (2008) Understanding Business Process

Management: implications for theory and practice, British Journal of Management, on line
2008
2. Õ Ryan K. L. Ko (2009). A computer scientist's introductory guide to business process
management (BPM), ACM Crossroads 15(4), ACM Press.
3. Õ Coupling BPM with Six Sigma
4. Õ ŒIH (2007). Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern. Accessed 29 Œov 2008.
5. Õ Oracle.com Business Process Management in the Finance Sector. Accessed 16 July 2008.
6. Õ ŒëAI (2008). Invoice Processing Procedures for Contracts Accessed 17 Sept 2008.
7. Õ "Guidance for Industry. Part 11, Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures ² Scope and
Application" (PF). Food and rug Administration. August 2003.
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/rugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidance
s/UCM072322.pdf. Retrieved 2009-07-20.
8. Õ Mettler ëoledoEfficient system validation. Accessed 17 march 2008.