Business processes go back as far as business itself. Businesses buy things, they sell things, they make things, and they issue and pay bills for things. Each of these actions is a business process.
Business Process Management (BPM) allows the top managers in the business to get an overview of their company's health. In a perfect world, it also allows them to make the adjustments that need to be made in order to keep the business running as smoothly and productively as possible.
BPM is more than just a software deployment. It's a combination of software capabilities and business expertise that creates value. Small tweaks to the supply chain, or striking a deal with a new partner or supplier are just the kind of moves executives can make based on what they learn with business process management. When executives can react to changing market conditions or moves made by the competition, these small tweaks can have sizable impact on the company's bottom line.
As they begin to embark on a BPM project, businesses should employ process modeling to get an understanding of the business processes that exist in their organization. Products like IBM WebSphere Business Modeler can help define, model, simulate, and improve business processes.
Businesses can begin to reap the rewards of a BPM project before it is even completed. Documenting and analyzing services all of the processes in an organization not only allows businesses to optimize the most important processes first, it can also help identify process that are redundant or unnecessary and making it hard for the business to operate efficiently.
A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) goes hand in hand with BPM. By turning existing computing assets into well-defined services, an SOA provides the food for BPM to consume.
Not only does SOA cut down on time, maintenance, and deployment costs, but by breaking data into small consumable services, it adds a degree of flexibility that BPM needs in order to work effectively. The services consumed by BPM can be changed as needed so business can expand into new markets, develop new products, and track new competition without rebuilding and deploying expensive solutions.
Business can keep track of the services that exist in their environment and encourage their reuse by using products like the IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
SOA and BPM also allow organizations to maximize past investments in IT. New business applications can be built efficiently and quickly using the services made available in a service oriented architecture and BPM without investing in new infrastructure and valuable software development time.
SOA and BPM can help businesses remain in compliance with industry and government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires that businesses monitor business processes and report abnormalities.
Service oriented architectures and business process management work together to enable business to partner more effectively. The flexibility and granularity of business data brought together using SOA and BPM can allow suppliers to work more efficiently with their manufacturing partners, for example.
Today's businesses need to the ability to react to changes quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel. Combining a service oriented architecture with business process management helps executives measure, monitor, and decide.
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