Management refers to the process and people performance measurement and management. It is about organizing all the essential components and subcomponents for your processes. By this we mean arranging the people, their skills, motivation, performance measures, rewards, the processes themselves and the structure and systems necessary to support a process.

Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving an organization's business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, the administrative area of concern dealing with maintenance and optimization of an organization's equipment and core operations.

A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit organization, exists to promote the standardization of common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and business-to-business (B2B) development. To this end, the organization has developed the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based metalanguage for modeling business processes.

During the last decade business process management (BPM) has moved beyond fad status. The specialists consider that BPM suites are rapidly becoming the next big thing, not just in IT but also in corporate management. As momentum grows, vendors from every imaginable market space have jumped on the bandwagon, attaching the BPM label to everything under the sun. Companies that embark on BPM initiatives need software tools as well as consulting work to properly support their efforts.

In today’s business environment of mergers and acquisitions, highly competitive markets, and increasing regulatory pressure, coupled with the widespread move to implement business initiatives that require a flexible IT infrastructure, organizations find it harder to justify spending on projects that are short term fixes. BPM solutions take a holistic view of an organization and how operations are run. In implementing a BPM solution, business processes are evaluated and analyzed in order to integrate people and applications for the tasks contained in these processes. BPM abstracts the processes from the applications and from the integration effort. In doing so, the complexity of integration is decreased, while overall manageability of the process is increased. This new layer effectively separates the control of the end-to-end business processes from the application layer and confers a supervisory role for the processes to manage the automated enterprise. As the BPM solution is implemented using a top-down, process-centric approach, every level of the organization gains a deeper and broader understanding of the way that business is conducted. BPM builds in an inherent flexibility to an organization’s infrastructure while leveraging the application-to-application connectivity provided by an integration platform.

BPM and enterprise application integration (EAI) technology are very much complementary due to their different approaches. EAI uses a bottom-up approach that integrates the applications within the context of the business process. BPM typically uses a top-down approach that starts with defining and analyzing the business process and integrating the applications and people involved in that process. The combination of these two technologies can provide significant benefits to the business and to the IT side of an organization. The combination can provide an architecture that is open, application agnostic and can be modified quickly without any disruption to the underlying IT infrastructure. A true BPM solution ensures that your IT infrastructure is not a growth limiting factor.

The capabilities of a BPM solution include a number of related technologies, such as workflow, application integration, business-to-business connectivity, rules engines, process modeling, process analytics, and process clients. A true BPM solution will be more than simply the sum of these parts – a true BPM product will be able to function as the enterprise environment for the modeling, execution, analysis and continuous improvement of business processes.

TIBCO iProcess Suite is a complete process management solution that enables organizations to maximize their IT investments while providing maximum flexibility and control to the business process owners.

BENEFITS

The basic operational value proposition of the solutions offered by Enterprise Concept (especially the process based solutions) is the ability to process more with less effort and higher quality. In the context BPM has become a cornerstone technology for companies that must grow revenues and cut costs quickly while containing their growth in headcount. These companies have made the case for BPM based on three core benefits - efficiency, effectiveness and agility. Depending on the process, these different benefits will be realized in different proportions and in different cycles.

Efficiency
It is typical for a company to first see efficiency benefits when deploying BPM. Most processes have significant waste because of manual effort, poor hand-offs between departments and a general inability to monitor overall progress. The initial deployment of a BPM solution eliminates these problems – and the benefit is typically expressed in full-time equivalent time saved.

Effectiveness
Once a company has realized the basic efficiencies that a more controlled process brings, they will often focus on making the process more effective. These are where some of the largest gains are realized. The returns here are typically expressed in the context of handling exceptions better or making better decisions.

One telecommunication service provider found that by better controlling their billing disputes process better they were able to reduce by $3 million the amount they were paying out each quarter (approximately 10%). Their BPM deployment helped them identify duplicate issues, research disputes more completely and enforce more consistent payout policies. For processes that are regulated, this level of control and consistency provides an added benefit – the avoidance of fines because of incorrect, inconsistent or lack of timely execution of the process. In some cases, this benefit can be monetized (e.g. reduction in fines), but often this compliance benefit is viewed as critical even if a financial benefit cannot be directly associated with it.

Agility
The final key benefit BPM provides is agility. In the era of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and On-Demand market messages, agility is a well understood concept. In the world of process management, the ability to change quickly is essential. Our customers change their key processes 4-7 times per year. The driver for change can be internal or external. New opportunities can arise. New partners or customers need you to support a different way of doing business. Federal or international regulations can require you to change your processes. BPM provides the platform you need to be able to change your processes – faster and in a more controlled fashion than any other option.

Agility benefits typically include supporting federal regulations faster – eliminating chances of fines or delays in approval. Another example includes the ability to change a process to accommodate unforeseen events. An insurance agency can quickly adjust their claims approval threshold upward when a natural disaster happens in a specific part of the country. It can be difficult to calculate hard returns from agility, though most organizations recognize that the ability to quickly adapt processes is a critical competitive capability.