As with any technology,BPM isn’t a goal in itself. Instead, organisations use BPM to improve their business processes. BPM technologies can make processes faster, letting businesses be more responsive to their customers. They can also make those processes more reliable, more consistent, and less error-prone. In a very real sense, business processes are the business, and so making them better is a clear path to improving the business itself.
Even though different organisations use quite different processes, there’s still a great deal of commonality across different businesses. For example, many processes depend on a group of people working together to perform a defined group of tasks, often in a prescribed order. Writing a proposal fits this model, for example, as does approving a document and many other business processes. It’s also common for processes to depend on different kinds of software working together, usually in a quite structured way. BPM software can make decisions, ranging from choosing simple options to making complex rule-based choices. It is also extremely useful to be able to monitor processes, as is having some way to describe those processes. These similarities across different organisations are what make BPM technology possible. By extracting the common elements of business processes, then implementing automated support for this commonality, BPM technologies offer a generally useful approach for process improvement.