BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS BECOME THE KNOWLEDGE LINK

At the heart of the new architectures is BPM. BPM is an emerging technology
that heralds a replacement for the painful experience of past reengineering
projects, where processes were redesigned in a one-off exercise, which led to
At the heart of the new architectures is BPM. BPM is an emerging technology
that heralds a replacement for the painful experience of past reengineering
projects, where processes were redesigned in a one-off exercise, which led to
The business processes that are
crucial to an enterprise�s strategy are by their nature both complex and dynamic.
�Complex and dynamic� means the processes have many steps and participants,
and the participants are free to run a process in a way that is best suited to the
situation they are in. This condition is illustrated in Figure 2.6. Until now,
available technologies have been unable to deal with these processes as they
would ideally be executed. Instead,
they have dealt with them by dumbing
them down, making them less strategic
by either remodeling the processes
to fit into a package or leaving them as
manual processes. Package processes
are less likely to allow a company to
distinguish itself from its competitors.
Rules-based processes are limited to
the number of different situations that
the process designers can dream up and
cater to; anything else is an exception,
to be handled outside the process.
BPM for the first time lets businesses
take full ownership of their
processes without the limitations of
underlying technologies. BPM does not
so much change processes � which are the things people do � as allow people
to change them by providing a supporting technology that is more flexible than
anything that exists today.
BPM is a framework that consists of tools and services that provide real-time
visibility, continuous management, and optimization of end-to-end business processes
that interact with people, systems, and across organizational boundaries. The
BPM methodology is based on the following set of assumptions:
_ Business processes operate in a state of perpetual change and adaptation.
_ Processes interact with other processes and cross-cut each other.
_ Processes can be distributed, end to end, long-lived, collaborative, and
transactional and involve several participants (people and systems).
_ BPM is based on a technology solution, a BPMS, to create directly
executable business processes that evolve.
Central to a BPMS is Business
Process Management Languages
(BPML). There are a number of standards
emerging, with which these languages
comply. These are illustrated
in Figure 2.7. The supply chain processes defined, for example, in SCOR� and
collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR) are all definable
in the BPML. This feature goes to the core of the benefit of these new tools.
BPMS is not business process reengineering, enterprise application integration
(EAI), work flow, or another package application. It is the synthesis and extension
of all these technologies into a unique whole. This unified whole
becomes a new foundation upon which the enterprise is built, one more in tune
with the nature of business processes and their management.
A complete BPMS platform incorporates all of the following types of
functionality: