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Business process management

Solve process challenges to increase productivity and drive business agility.

What is business process management (BPM)?

Gartner® defines business process management as “a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes.” Managing business process requires coordination of people, systems and technology, and information to perform the tasks needed to drive business goals and strategy.

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Business process solutions 

Business process services

3 approaches to business process management

Business processes can vary, depending on their purpose. BPM is often discussed from the perspective of these three categories.

  1. Human-centric. These processes focus on streamlining human intensive tasks such as approvals via alerts, notification, and user-friendly interface.

  2. System-centric. This BPM approach involves the communication of information and data between systems via integrations and APIs to drive process.

  3. Document-centric. Some processes revolve around documents, such as contracts, and the routing, formatting, and signing, all while keep the information secured.

5 phases of the business process management lifecycle

A BPM engagement involves five main areas.

  1. Design: current processes are analyzed for opportunities to improve.

  2. Model: evaluate how the new process will work under different scenarios.

  3. Execute: implement the new workflows and technologies.

  4. Monitor: track and report key metrics to measure the success of the new process.

  5. Optimize: adjust the process as needed to improve efficiencies.

Benefits of business process management

Well implemented business process management solutions will create definitive and measurable results for an organization. Typical benefits include:

  • Improved customer response via enhanced efficiencies.

  • Highly engaged employees as menial tasks decrease.

  • Fewer errors such as errant data entry and missed customer communication.

  • Greater ease meeting regulatory compliance.

  • Increased business agility.

  • Advanced support for hybrid work environments.

  • More data and data analysis to inform decision making.

Examples of BPM

Key features of business process management applications

BPM automation tools and services

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