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BPM stands for "Business Process Management" and refers to a management strategy, supported by technology, that can bring radical benefits to the design and execution of an organisation's business processes.
BPM systems support process-oriented change by providing a way to visually define business processes. This is done using a standard visual language called BPMN, which resembles traditional flowcharting, but can describe more sophisticated real-life scenarios.
This means that, for the first time, your Business Change and IT teams have a common language which they can use to communicate their ideas. The speed and quality of collaboration increases, and misunderstandings are avoided.
This alone would be powerful, but BPM systems go further, because the process diagrams can be executed by computer. This means that processes can be implemented automatically, dramatically reducing the cost-of-change and time-to-value.
The technique is sufficiently agile that it can be used to create new processes or overhaul existing ones, and there is no need to stop at one iteration, so your business can get better and better, day after day.
Once a BPM system is orchestrating a process (that is, running a diagram), you begin the reap the operational rewards: the system ensures that the process goes through all the necessary steps, and automatically routes tasks to the required participant, which can be a person or an existing service or system. The result is more consistency, lower overheads, and more effective automation.
Furthermore, a BPM system can report back, in real-time, on a wide variety of factors at all stages of a business process, so you can automatically track SLAs, view throughput KPIs, or monitor issues. Business leaders can finally 'look inside the process' and take decisions to improve what they are seeing.
BPM today is being used by businesses across all sectors to lower their costs, improve their agility and gain a competitive advantage.