Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
As an approach, BPM treats processes as important organizational assets that must be understood, managed, and continuously improved in order to create and deliver value to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies.
ISO 9000:2015 promotes the process approach to managing an organization. ...promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing, implementing and improving the effectiveness of a quality management system, to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirements.Source: clause 0.2 of ISO 9001:2000
BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology.Managing Performance Through Business Processes, Dominique Thiault, Therefore, multiple BPM articles and scholars frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
BPM streamlines business processing by automating workflows; while RPA automates tasks by recording a set of repetitive activities performed by humans. Organizations maximize their business automation leveraging both technologies to achieve better results.
Definitions
The Workflow Management Coalition, BPM.com and several other sources[The Complete Business Process Handbook Volume 1: 'Body of Knowledge from Process Modeling to BPM by Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer, Henrik von Scheel, Prof. Mark von Rosing, et al. (Morgan Kaufmann, ) use the following definition:
Business process management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.
The Association of Business Process Management Professionals defines BPM as:
Business process management (BPM) is a disciplined approach to identify, design, execute, document, measure, monitor, and control both automated and non-automated business processes to achieve consistent, targeted results aligned with an organization's strategic goals. BPM involves the deliberate, collaborative and increasingly technology-aided definition, improvement, innovation, and management of end-to-end business processes that drive business results, create value, and enable an organization to meet its business objectives with more agility. BPM enables an enterprise to align its business processes to its business strategy, leading to effective overall company performance through improvements of specific work activities either within a specific department, across the enterprise, or between organizations.
Gartner defines business process management as: "the discipline of managing processes (rather than tasks) as the means for improving business performance outcomes and operational agility. Processes span organizational boundaries, linking together people, information flows, systems, and other assets to create and deliver value to customers and constituents."
It is common to confuse BPM with a BPM suite (BPMS). BPM is a professional discipline done by people, whereas a BPMS is a technological suite of tools designed to help the BPM professionals accomplish their goals. BPM should also not be confused with an application or solution developed to support a particular process. Suites and solutions represent ways of automating business processes, but automation is only one aspect of BPM.
Evolution and scope Business process management has evolved from earlier management and quality movements, including total quality management and business process reengineering, into a broader organisational discipline concerned with the end-to-end governance, performance, and continuous improvement of processes.
Contemporary academic and professional literature commonly defines BPM not only as a set of modelling or automation techniques, but as a management approach that integrates process design, execution, monitoring, and optimisation with organisational strategy, governance, and information systems.
In this sense, BPM differs from isolated process improvement initiatives by emphasising sustained organisational capability, cross-functional coordination, and continuous improvement over time, rather than one-off redesign efforts.
Comparison with program management It can be differentiated from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. From another viewpoint, process management includes program management. In project management, process management is the use of a repeatable process to improve the outcome of the project.
Comparison with project management A key distinction between process management and project management lies in repeatability and predictability. If the structure and sequence of work are unique, then it is a project. In business process management, a workflow can vary from case to case due to gateways, conditions, and business rules. The key is predictability: no matter how many forks in the road, we know all of them in advance, and we understand the conditions for the process to take one route or another. If this condition is met, we are dealing with a process.
Changes The concept of business process may be as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, and outputs, arising from job shop scheduling problems in the early 20th century. The management and improvement approach , with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that the term "business process" is sometimes used by IT practitioners as synonymous with the management of middleware processes or with integrating application software tasks.
Although BPM initially focused on the automation of business processes through information technology, the discipline has evolved to encompass human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or in parallel with automated tasks. For example, workflow management systems can assign individual steps requiring deploying human intuition or judgment to relevant humans and other tasks in a workflow to a relevant automated system."Automated workflows" http://www.automatedworkflows.com/services/custom-development/custom-automator-development/
More recent variations such as "human interaction management" are concerned with the interaction between human workers performing a task.
, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM with other methodologies, such as Six Sigma. Some BPM tools such as SIPOCs, process flows, RACIs, CTQs and histograms allow users to: visualize – functions and processes measure – determine the appropriate measure to determine success analyze – compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement improve – select and implement the improvement control – deploy 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 re-engineer – revamp the processes from scratch for better results
This brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to business processes based on real-world data (not just on assumed knowledge). Also, the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allows users to continually streamline and optimize the process to ensure that it is tuned to its market need.
research on BPM has paid increasing attention to the compliance of business processes. Although a key aspect of business processes is flexibility, as business processes continuously need to adapt to changes in the environment, compliance with business strategy, policies, and government regulations should also be ensured.Gong, Y. and Janssen, M. (2011). From policy implementation to business process management: Principles for creating flexibility and agility. Government Information Quarterly, 29 (Supplement 1), Pages S61-S71, Elsevier. The compliance aspect in BPM is highly important for governmental organizations. BPM approaches in a governmental context largely focus on operational processes and knowledge representation.Apostolou, D., Mentzas, G., Stojanovic, L., Thoenssen, B., & Lobo, T. P. (2010). A collaborative decision framework for managing changes in e-Government services Government Information Quarterly, 28(1), Page 101-116, Elsevier. There have been a number of technical studies on operational business processes in the public and private sectors, but researchers rarely take legal compliance activities into account—for instance, the legal implementation processes in public-administration bodies.
Life-cycle Business process management activities can be arbitrarily grouped into categories such as design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.Franz Bayer, Harald Kühn (ed.): "Prozessmanagement für Experten - Impulse für aktuelle und wiederkehrende Themen", Springer-lVerlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Design
Process design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the factors within it, alerts and notifications, escalations, standard operating procedures, service level agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure a correct and efficient new design.
The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system or system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses. Existing processes and design of a new process for various applications must synchronize and not cause a major outage or process interruption.
Modeling
Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).
It may also involve running "what-if analysis"(Conditions-when, if, else) on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" "What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?".
Execution
Business process execution is broadly about enacting a discovered and modeled business process.
Business process Enacting a business process is done manually or automatically or with a combination of manual and automated business tasks. Manual business processes are human-driven. Automated business processes are software-driven. Business process automation encompasses methods and software deployed for automating business processes.
Business process automation Business process automation is performed and orchestrated at the business process layer or the consumer presentation layer of SOA Reference Architecture. BPM software suites such as BPMS or iBPMS or low-code platforms are positioned at the business process layer. While the emerging robotic process automation software performs business process automation at the presentation layer, therefore is considered non-invasive to and de-coupled from existing application systems.