Business process management (BPM) is a fascinating technology that has come to the forefront of business thinking because of its potential for dramatically improving the productivity and agility of organizations. BPM addresses the problems and challenges faced by every businessperson in every organization. In this document we provide a brief introduction to BPM and its two component technologies, workflow automation and enterprise application integration (EAI). The goal is to enable the lay reader to understand the significance of this powerful technology, and the profound impact it has on the productivity and efficiency of an organization.

BPM, Workflow Automation and EAI

Every organization has numerous business processes that involve humans. These business processes define the tasks, the rules, the people and the applications engaged in delivering goods, services or information to internal and external customers of the organization. Some common business processes that are readily recognizable include:

§ Order Processing that dictates how customer orders will be received, entered, manufactured, shipped and invoiced.

§ Performance Reviews that define how, when and by whom employee performance will be reviewed.

§ Customer Complaint Process that describes the mechanisms for handling complaints issued by a customers.

§ Loan Processing that defines how a financial institution processes loan applications and the rules and approvals that must be obtained.

§ Purchase Order Processing that lays out the rules and paperwork that must be processed in order to control the acquisition of goods and services.

§ Claims Processing that specifies how an insurance company will receive, review and process claims.

Many other examples of common business processes are provided in Table 1.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a software product category and technology used for automating business processes. There are five major characteristics of BPM:

1. Convert paper-based business process into electronic processes that eliminate paper forms, file folders, documents, and the inefficiencies associated with these.

2. Incorporate control features that ensure integrity of processes and compensate for human or system failure.

3. Increase the speed of response and reduce the lag time.

4. Provide real-time feedback about the status of processes.

5. Measure the time and cost of processes so that they can be optimized.

BPM has major benefits that are discussed later in this chapter.

Workflow Automation (WFA) is a subset of BPM that deals with automating business processes that primarily involve people and desktop applications used by people, also known as human-centric business processes.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the other subset of BPM that deals with automating business processes involving enterprise or backoffice applications.

Workflow Automation and EAI are parts of the BPM space as shown in the figure. While on the surface they look similar, there are substantial differences between EAI and workflow automation that are discussed in separate sections of this white paper.