Definition of BPM
Business Process Management (BPM) is a management approach used for describing, contolling, modeling, and optimizing business processes. Business Process Management builds a bridge between various business processes and forms the basis for organizational and information-technological initiatives aiming at improving the value-added chain within companies and between companies and their suppliers. BPM subsumes Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (SRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Business Intelligence (BI).
The purpose of BPM is to continuously improve processes and from this perspective BPM can be considered as the "process optimization process".
Business processes are dynamic and complex and have to take into account a network of internal and external relationships. By means of Business Process Management such challenging cross-functional processes can be coordinated and automated. Within the scope of BPM, processes can be modeled and then aligned with the requirements of a company or business associate. In this respect, the ability to constantly adapt to frequently changing conditions plays a key role as immediate reaction to new business situations leads to a high degree of flexibility.
How does BPM work?
Business Process Management (BPM) consists of different steps:
- Design – Preparation of an appropriate and efficient theoretical design; identification of existing processes; design of to-be processes.
- Modeling – Introduction of variants to the theoretical process design to determine how different circumstances may affect the process
- Execution – Actual execution of a process with a combination of automated activities and human intervention
- Monitoring – Definition and monitoring of control parameters; tracking of processes; identification and verification of improvements
- Optimization – Optimization of processes based on process performance information that was retrieved from prior BPM phases
BPM integrates analysis and modeling of processes as well as their implementation and the monitoring of the results.
Goals of BPM
Business Process Management attempts to:
- improve the aligment of all aspects of an organization with customer requirements
- increase process transparency
- promote business efficiency
- maximally exploit employee potential
- improve product quality
- reduce costs
Get started with BPM
From here you can start to learn what Business Process Management means. The required steps are: Download ARIS Basic - the software for beginners in business process modeling - check video tutorials, start modeling, share your models and discuss the models and other BPM topics with other users.
If you haven't joined the ARIS Community yet do it now ;-)
