EBPM 101 - A primer on Enterprise Business Process Management

This year at CeBit, we had a lot of interesting topics to present. Clearly, the most frequented areas at our booth were the workstations where we demonstrated and explained our new Enterprise Business Process Management positioning and one of the key concepts of our new combined offering, called Model-to-Execute.

This article is the first in a series that we are going to publish over the coming weeks. We’ll start off with an overview of EBPM and Model-to-Execute and subsequent articles will drill down further into different aspects.

Enterprise Business Process Management is the umbrella term for all capabilities that Software AG offers when you combine the ARIS platform and webMethods. All aspects of business process management fall under this and the full spectrum of activities that relate to process management are covered.

If you map product capabilities against this graphic, you would find the ARIS platform covering the top half of Enterprise BPM and webMethods covering the lower half. So, the top half of this graphic is really everything that is driven and owned by the business whereas the lower half is focused on the technical implementation of processes. We call these two sides Process Transformation and Process Automation and they are both valid (although quite different) entry points for organizations that want to start with BPM.

For “Monitoring & Control” we have created a third entry point for organizations that want to embark on the BPM journey: Process Intelligence. This entry point is all about getting deep insights into how your business is performing and where there is room for improvement. Behind the scenes this is supported through a combination of real-time process monitoring capabilities from webMethods and the process analysis capabilities from ARIS.

You’ll notice that one of the small blue circles has not been covered yet: Implementation. This is an area where we spent a lot of effort on in the past months as it represents the border between business and IT. It is the line that you need to cross to get your ARIS processes automated using webMethods BPMS. This is where a lot of accidents can happen.

For making the interaction between business and IT as smooth as possible and for making sure that no accidents happen in BPM projects during the technical implementation of a business process, we have created a concept called Model-to-Execute.

Model-to-Execute resembles a methodology focused on Process Automation that is driven by requirements and definitions coming from Process Transformation efforts. This methodology is, of course, supported by product capabilities that allow for seamless interaction between the ARIS and the webMethods platform.

Stay tuned for the upcoming articles of our EBPM series. Each article will drill down further into the different areas of Enterprise BPM and explain exactly what it is and how it works.