Business Process Management also known as BPM refers to a natural and holistic approach adopted by businesses to produce a highly efficient, agile and innovative and adaptive organization that far exceeds the goals achievable through the conventional management approaches.

The term can be also explained as a set if activities, which an enterprise can perform to either, optimize their business processes or adapt it to the new market and organizational needs. Software tools usually aid the BPM activities and applications thus are synonymously referred to the software tools themselves.

About Business Process Management :

Considering the cutthroat competition in the market and the frequently changing business scenario, businesses today need to develop an ability of continuously improving the efficiency of critical business processes. They also need to develop flexibility and an adaptive approach for easily implementing and optimizing processes across the extended enterprise. In these situation most organization are facing some common problems explained below and thus are adopting the BPM approach.

1. Inefficient business processes: Most organizations today are struggling with the challenge of inefficient business processes. The inefficiency challenges are arising to lack coordination and inter-operatabilty human workflow and system processes. The problem is also consequent of restrictions of support application environments to its business processes.

2. Delay in marketing the new IT projects: Often it is happening that till time the new IT project becomes available the business processes have already been

changed. The long time required in the accessibility of these IT projects is further resulting in reactive, rigid businesses.

3. Response limitations: Most organizations are falling short of giving a prompt response to business environment changes. The existing processes and workflow systems are not capable of promptly responding to business dynamics. In addition the processes are not capable of adapting to the new business requirements.

4. Limitations of real time visibility: In spite of having all the relevant information and Business Intelligence, most companies are lacking an operational insight. This restricts them from measuring process performance and optimizing business operations.

Business Process Management Activities:

To meet the above challenges the Business Process Management takes up various activities, which in grouped three categories design, execution and monitoring.

Process Design :

This includes the design of the existing process. As a part of BPM at times the existing processes may be stimulated for testing them. The BPM software provide with a graphical editor, which helps to document the processes and repositories to store the process models. BPM activities aim at getting the design of the process right. This eventually leads to better results as the flow on effect of problems at the design stage directly affects a large number of parts in the integrated system. For changing and evolving the business process and to flow those into the live system changes are required to be made in the process design. Much research is been done on integrating business process. Integration of process designs with software can help for creating graphical representations of workflow and implementing and maintaining these workflows. These will the make the process of business evolution less stressful and quick, assuming that the requirements are not static.

Process Execution:

The Business Process Management System (BPMS) category of software allows the complete business process to be defined in a computer language. This enables, direct execution by the computer. When performing the execution task the BPMS uses services offered by the connected applications to perform business operations, for instance calculating a repayment plan for a loan. In addition the BPMS may also send messages to human workers requesting them to perform the required task. Due to BPMS the process definition can be executed directly. As an advantage, changes in the process can be moved much quickly in operation.

Process Monitoring :

Process Monitoring includes tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen. For instance to determine the state of a customer order generally the tracking is kept as order arrived, awaiting delivery and invoice paid. This tracking enables to identify the problem at the right state thus can be corrected easily.

As the next step Process monitoring involves a statistical evaluation and provision of one or more process. Considering the same example here BPM helps to generate statistics on how quickly the order has been processes and how many such orders have been processed in the last moth or week. Similarly many other statistical provisions can be made.

Business Process Management is an automated process that aids in easy and successfully handling complex business policy of any enterprise. Business Process Management as software targets and provides a closed loop approach over three essential attributes of the business which include:

1. Business Process Integration: In software the human workflow and the system integration processes are integrated in model, which, closely match the real-world business processes.

2. Business Process Execution: The software automates the tasks in flows, eliminates unnecessary steps and supports parallelism in execution of tasks. These benefits streamline the execution of business processes and reduce latency and increase reliability.

3. Business Process Optimization: Optimization is resultant of improved efficiency in execution. The optimization is based on metrics on process performance monitoring.

BPM Back bone of enterprise content management :

The BPMS allows understanding the organization through an expanded view. The view includes all those attributes, which were not available to organize and present using the traditional methods. They mainly include the relationship of processes to each other. These when included in the process model provide an advanced report and analysis which was otherwise not available. Considering the usability and affectivity of BPM it is been considered as the backbone enterprise content management.

BPM in Practice :

In the industry when applying BPM enterprises often start with areas, which need improvements. A project team performs Business Process Mapping and uses various approaches such as IDEF (ICAM Definition Languages) and BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to depict the process, as they exist before the required changes. The same team also identifies desired changes in the work practices which will be implemented by other teams.