This chapter gives an overview of the BPM technology and its core component, the workflow engine. We will analyze the different types of BPMS and the flexibility they provide in terms of workgroup collaboration and system orchestration. A brief outline of the topics covered in this chapter is as follows:
Business Process Orientation
What is a BPMS?
Types of BPM Systems
Components of a BPM solution
Open-source BPMS
Today's marketplace is more global and competitive than ever. Big players are trying to attract new clients along with maintaining the existing ones (thereby making more profit for shareholders), and smaller players are entering the markets with innovative products. To add to this, customers are demanding better prices and service and governments are continuously changing regulations.
Businesses redefine themselves in order to adapt to this environment or to create new market niches for exploitation. Technology plays an important role in realizing these changes and adaptations. With the appropriate technology and tools, businesses can reduce costs, raise margins, and make the most of the existing information to understand the clients better and thus create new markets based on this data.
Businesses are focusing on internal efficiency, which aims at realizing the goals of making profit, reducing costs, creating and maintaining customers, and negotiating with suppliers in faster, cheaper, and improved ways.
With the appropriate use of technology, businesses can benefit in many ways such as greater revenue, bigger margins, automated processes, improved decision making, and so on.
Every business has a set of connected activities and functions driven by business rules such as sales, account receivables, R & D, and so on. The daily operation of such essential processes costs a big chunk of revenue from shareholders. Business Process Management (BPM) technology promises continuous enhancement of the business processes.
To diminish these costs and maximize the profit generated, each business process must be efficient and smooth. The more visible these processes are, the more we can modify them to align with the organizational strategy.
Every corporate strategy and company mission wants to treat the customer in the best possible way it can, but are the customer service processes aligned with the strategy? Is the bureaucracy of my service as minimal as possible? Are my business processes impeding the efforts of employees to excel at customer support? Am I generating long-lasting bonds between my customers and my company?
These questions can only be answered by knowing the processes, the actors, the context, etc. Today's business executives are held accountable for the performance of the processes they manage. Accountability needs objective measures, and how can we measure what we don't know?
In the early nineties, a trend called Business Process Reengineering (BPR) emerged as a panacea to make business process more efficient. A common buzzword of those days was downsizing. BPR failed its goal; downsizing was associated with layoffs and more work for the employees and not with the ultimate efficiency goal. Reengineering proposed that the existing processes be discarded and new ones be created from scratch. This was a big and ambitious approach, a big bang change for the organization.
At the beginning of 2000, the term BPM was coined to refer to a new management approach, a holistic way to produce an agile and adaptive organization based on the enhancement of business processes. BPM unlike BPR is based in an incremental approach, improving the process step by step, with enough evidence to support this move. BPM is an old approach to manage processes, which has been renewed by using technology as the improvement tool.
With the advent of IT as a strategic partner and change enabler of the business, Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) appeared to support the BPM way of doing things.
Both BPR and BPM are based on the rational analysis of a business process from every possible dimension, destructuring it into its parts and relations, stripping the unproductive activities. BPR didn't take technology tools into account, but BPM advocates technology and feedback as the drivers of business process efficiency. BPM tries to automate as many activities as possible. Iterating as many times as needed, obtaining feedback, and making incremental changes to the process is the BPM mantra.
Efficiency is not the only goal of BPM. Companies are trying to gain a competitive edge over their competitors by perfecting their processes. A better process can win a customer; for example, in customer service a better process should reduce time to market and eliminate unnecessary internal bureaucracy.
The first BPM process improvement efforts started a few years ago with the replacement of the BPR methodology, forcing companies to rethink their strategy in operational efficiency and placing processes in a strategic place.
The first effect was creating a Business Process Improvement (BPI) area in every process-led organization in order to take care of process design, enhancement, and monitoring. Technology is a key change enabler in BPI, so it's not uncommon to see IT departments very involved in BPI projects.
BPM efforts generally take more than an iteration to get the process right. So you must analyze the existing process, add the improvement, and then take feedback from the real‑world operation. Then, you go back to the scratchboard, analyze the feedback (both numeric and from people), and add some other improvements until Key Process Indicators (KPI) are met. KPI are metrics that ensure that a process is running in its appropriate level of service, and are used to measure its Service Level Agreements (SLA).
Business functions can agree a service level with other business functions within the same company or with business partners and customers. The goal of BPM is to make the process exceed or maintain its current SLA.
Every effort to change a business process must take people into the equation. People have a hard time adapting to new roles, functions, and procedures and can really subvert the effort of BPM. BPR considered people as numbers, replaceable material, and this was a key factor for its failure.