The term Business Process Management (BPM) refers to a series of activities performed by an organisation to optimise its processes i.e. a collection of activities, tasks and documents that create value to the organisation or its customers. The term Workflow, which is often confused with BPM, refers to the movement of tasks or documents through the business process. BPM is a set of tools and services that allow organisations to think and act in a process centric manner.
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So putting aside for a moment this somewhat 'academic' description of BPM, let’s start again and simply answer the question; What is Business Process Management?
An organisation employs a series of business systems and applications to support its operations; 'Products'.
At the same time the 'People'; the organisations employees, customers, suppliers and business partners, seek to interact and utilise these products, in order to meet their personal, team, departmental or corporate objectives.
Over time and often in an unstructured and undocumented manner, a whole series of unofficial, and ad hoc 'Processes' are developed. The processes are often manual, untimely, non-compliant and rely on e-mail, spreadsheet or verbal 'hand-offs' between individuals in the process.
BPM is in short a means by which an organisation can bring order and control to a series of processes that may appear and actually be chaotic.
BPM is a set of tools and services that supports and enhances the interaction between the 'people' and the 'products'. The aim being to ensure that the organisations processes are efficient, effective and focused upon achieving the corporate goals and objectives.
In essence I believe that BPM allows organisations to ensure that the right person does the right task at the right point in time with the right information.
Simple really...
...blah...blah....blah
So putting aside for a moment this somewhat 'academic' description of BPM, let’s start again and simply answer the question; What is Business Process Management?
An organisation employs a series of business systems and applications to support its operations; 'Products'.
At the same time the 'People'; the organisations employees, customers, suppliers and business partners, seek to interact and utilise these products, in order to meet their personal, team, departmental or corporate objectives.
Over time and often in an unstructured and undocumented manner, a whole series of unofficial, and ad hoc 'Processes' are developed. The processes are often manual, untimely, non-compliant and rely on e-mail, spreadsheet or verbal 'hand-offs' between individuals in the process.
BPM is in short a means by which an organisation can bring order and control to a series of processes that may appear and actually be chaotic.
BPM is a set of tools and services that supports and enhances the interaction between the 'people' and the 'products'. The aim being to ensure that the organisations processes are efficient, effective and focused upon achieving the corporate goals and objectives.
In essence I believe that BPM allows organisations to ensure that the right person does the right task at the right point in time with the right information.
Simple really...
Thanks for explaining it so succinctly Jon. I like the sound of bringing order to a series of processes that appear to be, and in fact, are chaotic. I can think of immediate applications!
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