Introduction to BPM

The next several sections provide an introduction to to Business Process Management.

What is a Business Process?

Companies large and small have business processes that they regularly execute. Let's just call them "processes" for brevity's sake. Insurance companies have processes to process a claim. Banks have processes to approve loans. The government have processes to award contracts.

Business processes have the following charateristics:

  • A business process is comprised of some number of individual tasks.
  • Tasks are performed in an order prescribed by network of task connections.
  • Processes can branch to multiple alternative sets of tasks depending on the state of the process.
  • Processes can branch to multiple parallel paths as well.
  • There are multiple kinds of tasks. Some tasks are performed by users. Some tasks are performed by calling services. There are many other kinds of tasks as well.
  • Processes store data to be used by tasks to perform their functions.
  • Processes allow tasks to add data for use by downstream tasks.

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Business Process Management (BPM) is the organized and directed activity of a company to control, monitor and improve the quality of their business processes. They do this with the aid of a BPM platform made available by dozens of commercial vendors.

BPM platforms provide the following functions:

  • Provide developers with the ability of define and store process models.
  • Provide developers with the ability have certain tasks completed by making service calls.
  • Provide users and administrators with the ability to start process instances.
  • Provide users with the ability to assign user tasks to specified users.
  • Prvide users with the ability to assign user tasks to members of a specified user group.

The goals of Business Process Management are:

  • Better Process Reliablibility
  • Faster Process Execution
  • Reduced Training Requirements
  • Incremental Process Improvement
  • Provide Process Metrics
  • Cost Savings

When is BPM Applicable

This is difficult to answer exactly, but BPM may be applicable when:

  • Processes are performed on a regular basis.
  • Successful process execution is crucial to the business.
  • Current processes are error prone.
  • The speed of process completion is very important.
  • Processes are well defined.
  • Multiple business groups and/or people participate in process execution.