Oracle

Companies have been using workflow and content management for many, many years. In IT we got used to the term Business Process Management (BPM) whenever we spoke of automated process execution. Not so strange since the term BPM was adopted by all the major software vendors and has received a lot of attention as “the” way to achieve process automation and integration.

There are however many different definitions of BPM, where some are technical and others are business oriented. But if we look at the Gartner definition:

Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information, and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT investments to business strategy

An interesting (and correct) remark by Gartner that technology is not required for BPM, however the general idea (in IT) has been that BPM equals process automation. The business process is summarized to a complete definition until the level that it can be executed as a program. The efficiency gains of automating the business process much exceed the up-front effort to fully identify it and make it executable. An effort which can initially be very large where the cost is only repaid over many instances of the process. So this approach will only work on highly predictable which is highly repeatable. It’s in some way identical to a factory production line where a huge amount of products justifies the initial up-front factory costs. Read the complete article here.

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