Business process management

Business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company's business processes. It can therefore be described as a "process optimization process". It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization.

As a policy-making approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and developed to announce value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continual improvement process methodologies and BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology. As such, many BPM articles and scholars frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.

BPMInstitute defined Business process management as:

The Workflow Management Coalition, BPM.com and several other sourcesuse the following definition:

The Association of Business Process Management Professionals defines BPM as:

Gartner defines business process management as:

It is common to confuse BPM with a BPM suite (BPMS). BPM is a professional discipline done by people, whereas a BPMS is a technological suite of tools designed to help the BPM professionals accomplish their goals. BPM should also not be confused with an application or solution developed to support a particular process. Suites and solutions represent ways of automating business processes, but automation is only one aspect of BPM.

The concept of business process may be as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, and outputs, arising from job shop scheduling problems in the early 20th Century. The management and improvement approach as of 2010^[update], with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that the term "business process" is sometimes used by IT practitioners as synonymous with the management of middleware processes or with integrating application software tasks.

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