Pervez Ibrahim explains why business process management (BPM) should be the ‘heartbeat of your enterprise’.

When you search for ‘BPM’ on the internet, the amount of information that comes up can be overwhelming - not to mention a little confusing. Every website seems to have a definition of BPM, and one BPM implementation can be different from the next. These differences, however, underscore the flexibility that can make BPM such a powerful business tool.

To get a deeper understanding of how BPM solutions can transform your business, it helps to get a better sense of what BPM is and how it works. Here's a brief introduction to BPM and why it seems like everyone is talking about it.

  1. BPM is not just a method of recording ‘as-is and ‘to-be processes’ just as physics and chemistry, algebra and geometry, drugs and disease are related. Similarly, the BPM, and automated business process is the heartbeat of your enterprise.
  2. BPM is a business strategy that every company needs and cannot survive without.
  3. With the arrival of internet-based applications most organisations, today, are making the BPM a top priority.

New technologies, such as cloud computing, mobile, and social media creates a need for BPM

  1. BPM helps an enterprise to meet its financial targets, and achieve the enterprise-wide objective.
  2. BPM is the method and the way for an enterprise to realise its strategic goals.
  3. BPM provides the solution for the underlying decision-making.

Business process management (BPM) brings people together; it forms a common language between all parties involved.

  1. It provides simplified solutions for tedious and complicated processes.
  2. Identifies and eliminates repetitive tasks.
  3. Escalates exceptions messages to the appropriate stakeholders.
  4. Enhances customer services.

BPM helps to direct the deployment of resources from throughout the organisation into efficient processes that create customer value

  1. BPM also provides continuous process improvements, which increases value generation and sustains the market competitiveness of an organisation.
  2. BPM delivers improvement opportunities, e.g., reducing costs, execution times or error rates.
  3. BPM aligns diverse stakeholders to a shared vision of the future, and leverages technology more effectively.
  4. BPM helps to control the cross-functional business process of an organisation (workflow).

The trouble with BPM...

Today’s BPM software applies to many techniques and approaches, and is fragmented and falls under BPM - modelling tools, execution tools, content management tools, which when viewed in isolation appears confusing.

Today, most organisations believe that the future of the BPM lies not in the multiple tools that are available today. There is a need for a genuinely integrated BPM tool that is simplified and incorporates enterprise strategies, value stream, value chains, value chain viewpoints (BPM), artifacts and architect, and RACI into one unified system.