Motivation:

Business process activities can be performed by the company�s employees
manually or by the help of information systems. There are also business
process activities that can be enacted automatically by information systems,
without any human involvement.
A company can reach its business goals in an efficient and effective manner
only if people and other enterprise resources, such as information systems, play
together well. Business processes are an important concept to facilitating this
effective collaboration.
In many companies there is a gap between organizational business aspects
and the information technology that is in place. Narrowing this gap between
organization and technology is important, because in today�s dynamic markets,
companies are constantly forced to provide better and more specific
products to their customers. Products that are successful today might not be
successful tomorrow. If a competitor provides a cheaper, better designed, or
more conveniently usable product, the market share of the first product will
most likely diminish.
Internet-based communication facilities spread news of new products at
lightning speed, so traditional product cycles are not suitable for coping with
today�s dynamic markets. The abilities to create a new product and to bring
it to the market rapidly, and to adapt an existing product at low cost have
become competitive advantages of successful companies.
While at an organizational level, business processes are essential to understanding
how companies operate, business processes also play an important
role in the design and realization of flexible information systems. These information
systems provide the technical basis for the rapid creation of new
functionality that realizes new products and for adapting existing functionality
to cater to new market requirements.
Business process management is influenced by concepts and technologies
from different areas of business administration and computer science. Based
on early work in organization and management, business process management
has its roots in the process orientation trend of the 1990s, where a new way
of organizing companies on the basis of business processes was proposed.
In their seminal book Reengineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer
and James Champy advocate the radical redesign of the business processes
of a company. They define a business process as a collection of activities that
take one or more kinds of input and create an output that is of value to the
customer.