BPM

BPM - Business Process Management

To put it simply: BPM gives answers to the questions of who does what when and how in the corporation.

To be able to answer these questions is not only advantageous for the corporation itself but also improves the relationship with its customers.

Cut throat competition initiated by globalisation manifests itself via shorter technology cycles and puts extra pressure on businesses. The need for increased flexibility and rapid adaption to new market conditions is obvious and in the facilitation of this business processes play the vital part.

Changing petrol prices at gas stations or changing conditions in mobile phone contract offers within short timeframes require this flexibility in business processes to be able to implement the ability to act rapidly and compeditively in the open market.

Lower cost per minute in mobile communication means that previous higher prices should no longer appear on invoices. If something goes wrong and the company has already implemented a workflow management system around its BPM customer service can effectively explain and resolve customer complaints. The success of this depends on the Business Process being transparent and trackable at all times.

Using SOA in various services constitutes an overlying layer of Business Process Management which is a composition layer to orchestrate these solutions and services in a speedy and flexible way. This layer is constantly monitored and ensures maximum visibility and transparency.

Workflow management tools and human task management components are important factors here combined with a clear graphical user interface.

This way analysts and managers can model Business Processes on their computers in a graphical way without the need for programming skills like Java.

Using platforms such as IBM Process Server allows a separation of application logic and the logic of the Business Process and its management. Due to this separation processes can be standardised and are made more flexible and adaptable. The described separation through layers leads to this very flexibility as sudden changes in petrol prices can be implemented and adjusted independently from the existing applications.

One of the noticable trends is that customers are able to implement changes in their processes concurrently while running their business with no interruption of the process whatsoever.