What is business process management? The key to enterprise agility

A company can only be as flexible, efficient, and agile as the interaction of its business processes allow. Here’s the problem: Many companies develop business processes in isolation from other processes they interact with, or worse, they don’t “develop” business processes at all. In many cases, processes simply come into existence as “the way things have always been done,” or because software systems dictate them. As a result, many companies are hampered by their processes, and will continue to be so until those processes are optimized.

BPM tools provide organizations with a systematic approach to managing and optimizing their business processes by helping organizations design, model, implement, and measure workflows and business rules. They frequently enable non-IT specialists to build business workflows and connect disparate systems. Core capabilities include:

Workflow management: for designing, testing, and executing the interactions between employees, systems, and data
Business rules engine: for creating business rules and conditions
Form generator: for building web forms
Collaboration: tools for discussion, decision management, and idea management
Analytics: for defining metrics and KPIs and generating reports
Integrations: for using data across systems and via interfaces such as Salesforce

Some of the top BPM tools include:

Agiloft
Appian
Arrayworks
AuraPortal
Bizagi
Bonitasoft
BP Logix
IBM
Newgen Software
Nintext
OpenText
Oracle
Pegasystems
SAP
Software AG
TIBCO Software

Business process management examples

The following case studies show how companies have used business process management to solve real-world business problems.

Mitel Networks turns to kaizen to streamline business processes: After a spate of acquisitions, Mitel Networks found itself with an assortment of 18 ERP systems, 12 CRM systems, 5 HR systems, and other duplicate software. It adopted kaizen, a philosophy and set of practices for continuous process improvement, to trim the fat.
Eaton’s RPA center of excellence pays off at scale: Industrial manufacturer Eaton is using BPM and RPA to identify and automate activities such as sifting through and generating responses to emails and orchestrating process flows in financial, HR, and other corporate systems.
Anthem taps RPA, AI in digital transformation push: Health insurance company Anthem is using BPM and RPA to balance data center workloads to make IT operations nimbler.

BPM vs. RPA

As noted in the above examples, many enterprises are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) as part of their strategy for streamlining business processes, creating some confusion around BPM and RPA.

RPA is an application of technology, governed by business logic and structured inputs, aimed at automating business processes. RPA tools enable companies to configure software (“bots”) to capture and interpret applications for things such as processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems. BPM, on the other hand, is a holistic approach to optimizing and automating business processes. RPA is a tool that can be used as part of a company’s BPM strategy.