Doing Business In The Future - Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) is a set of activities performed by organizations to improve or streamline their business processes. Since software tools are usually used to aid these activities, these software tools are referred to as Business Process Management Systems.
- Business Process Management Systems
Business Process Management has been in place for some time now. Due to the introduction of software tools, however, there has been renewed interest in the body of knowledge pertaining to BPM. These software tools make design and implementation of Business Process Management easier, cheaper, and more efficient. There are three categories of Business Process Mmanagement activities - design, execution and monitoring.
1. Design
Designing BPM involves capturing the existing processes in a business environment. These processes must be modeled in a way that they can be simulated and tested. Modeling these processes usually involves graphical representation methods that document the processes and stores this data in repositories.
2. Execution
Traditionally, to implement automation in a business organization, developers would have to be contracted to develop applications that automate certain processes. Unfortunately, the scope of these projects was often too narrow. The result of which is that the automation is not well integrated into the business environment since the automation only deals with a particular department or function. BPMS champions a method that pushes for the development of applications that encompass the entire business process. It aims to fully automate the business environment only stopping to query the user when human intervention is absoultely necessary.
3. Process monitoring
Process monitoring involves observing and taking note of the performance of the individual processes so that evaluation and intervention become more straightforward for the business organization. From the information gleaned from here, the business organization