Business Process Management (BPM) is a technology that is emerged to the top in the last few years. The reason is very obvious. We are living in a dynamic world where the market place around us is changing at a very rapid pace. Every organization has to be fast and flexible and have the ability to quickly adapt to demands of the new economy. It is no longer the case that the strongest will succeed, but the organization that can respond quickly to the change. Being Agile is the key to be successful.
Organization have realizing that to be agile and continuously transform and thrive in a dynamic environment, the information technology (IT) infrastructure has to be flexible. In the past decade organizations have already made huge investment in ERP, CRM and Financial package applications. These applications along with the legacy applications are housing most of the business processes in an organization.
Business Process Management tools allows IT managers to utilize the investment in existing IT applications by building flexible business processes using services provided by existing applications. That’s a huge cost saving for organizations that have invested money and time for defining processes in existing applications unlike the top down approach of building brand new applications based on agile principles.
The Business Process Modeling feature of BPM tools provides user friendly visual interface for orchestrating the business process. This means that business users with limited technical skills can actively participate in building of the business processes unlike in the past where IT experts had to extract the business knowledge from the businesses users and utilize that for building applications.
Since the rules are no longer embedded inside code which can be understood only by IT developers and need long SDLC processes for change. The processes can be easily modified as and when required providing the flexibility that is required in the current dynamic economy.
BPM not only offers flexibility, but provides transparency and visibility into the business process providing enhanced customer satisfaction since the organization is in greater control of the process and has the ability to identify bottlenecks and fix them, thus providing the opportunity to improve the process.
BPM also provides a central repository for all the process data throughout the organization opening the possibility of providing real-time business intelligence capabilities.
Finally with the enhancement in user interface building capabilities, the BPM tools provide excellent platform for developing cross department, multi-user collaborative workflow applications.