The case for BPM

:: Abstract

• Businesses today face the challenges to keep up with fasting changing market conditions.

• Conventional best practice IT methods are falling behind in speed to deliver improvements.

• BPM deliver new processes in days or weeks rather than in months.

• BPM increases business agility through enabling continuous improvement to process model while maintaining process compliance with no IT involvement and operational down time.

• BPM bridges the gap between business and IT and empowers both to collaborate with common clarity.

• BPM differs from traditional workflow in scope of automation, speed of intelligent adaptability, levels of efficiency, breadth of collaboration, flexibility of responding to unpredictable events, etc.

• BPMS is new genre of software solution for BPM and is designed to enable business users to quickly implement and deploy process-based applications in an easy-to-use process-modeling environment running on their desktops using reusable business activity modules and executable functional parts built by IT.

• BPM accelerates time-to-market by dramatically reducing the volume of custom coding required.

• BPM frees all sides of business management and IT in the enterprise from repetitive tasks to take control and collaborate to solve problems, optimize performance, motivate innovation, etc.

• BPM ensures process compliance is maintained but innovation is encouraged for continuous process improvement through performance measuring capabilities.

• BPM offers management the visibility through real-time monitoring, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and the flexibility to intervene under process control with full audit trail.

To sum up, BPMS improves agility, bridges management intent and execution, improves flexibility, aligns business and IT, and improves ROI.

Today’s businesses face a myriad of ongoing challenges, including improving operational efficiency, responding quickly to changing market conditions, improving customer satisfaction, and complying with frequently changing mandates and governance regulations. Businesses looking to succeed in today’s rapid-paced new economy must be agile and innovative. To accomplish this, businesses need their software to be more flexible, to be better aligned with their business, to consist of highly adaptive processes that can be enhanced by business users with little or no IT involvement, and to enable them to create enterprise-wide flows that encompass people, processes, and information. The process flows representing the end-to-end business operations can provide clarity to promote common understanding and effective collaboration. Business users must also be able to monitor and analyze these flows in real-time. The ability to create fluid enterprise-wide business flows that naturally span applications, enterprises, and human activities, not only provides obvious efficiencies, it changes the entire IT landscape. In the past, automation was full of inefficiencies that were a result of software’s inability to automate business processes in their natural end-to-end formation. Instead, multiple disjointed automated processes were created and augmented by manual activities. These fragmented processes were then combined throughout the enterprise, creating a substandard, difficult-to-maintain infrastructure. Creating business processes based on software limitations was far from optimal. The ability for software to support business, as opposed to the reverse, may indeed be the single largest benefit BPM offers. Unfortunately, today’s software systems, the execution arm for most business processes and the lifeblood of the company, not only fail to help, but, are themselves, the problem, because they are too rigid – stymieing business agility. These software systems are prohibitively expensive to maintain, integrate, and enhance. Integration and maintenance alone can account up to 60% of the IT budget for many enterprises. BPM offers the solution. It enables agile cross-functional business processes to be created from existing IT assets. All BPM initiatives require that information workers and IT work as a team, necessitating a new genre of software systems, called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). An effective BPMS must empower business users across all functional areas to quickly and iteratively enhance existing business processes and create new ones to adapt to changing market conditions, all with little or no IT involvement. This transforms businesses into highly efficient entities capable of continuously optimizing enterprise-wide business agility through their ability to accelerate the pace and improve the quality of their decision-making and task execution while providing visibility and predictability across multiple, well-collaborated business functions. Ascentn AgilePoint BPMS helps achieve BPM by enabling businesses to quickly build cost-effective and highly manageable process-based applications that facilitate continuously optimization of process and integration efficiencies. With AgilePoint, business users who hold the company’s real knowledge and make up the enterprise’s frontline can not only quickly construct sound and executable process models that span systems and functional areas in the enterprise but also deploy them for end-to-end automation right from their desktops. Now all different sides of the business management in the enterprise are able to implement and improve executable processes using reusable and executable business activity modules and functional parts built by IT. IT can now relieve itself from struggling to meet the never subsiding demands that are being carried out today through custom coding. Instead, it can finally play a more strategic and the true enabler role for the business and does not have to be involved in every improvement. The whole company becomes like a self-improving ecosystem and a process-managed enterprise. This is how agility can be achieved, higher profitability can be realized, and differentiated competitiveness can be derived through continuously optimized end-to-end business operations efficiency.				BPM arms companies with the powerful software platforms they require in today’s economy. • Increase business agility • Shorten cycle times • Provide immediate ROI • Differentiate from Competition The analysts agree that BPM is of great value: • 85% of IT projects fail to meet objectives (with 32% being cancelled outright) – Gartner • 90% of ‘process’ projects succeed. Over 75% provide benefits. – Gartner/AiiM • “Business Process Management (BPM) provides the greatest ROI opportunity of any IT initiative” – Gartner AgilePoint is the only full-fledged Microsoft .NET BPM suite that enables information workers to utilize Visio and InfoPath, and developers to use Visual Studio .NET to create, improve, customize, monitor, and analyze enterprise-wide and in-application business processes. Others offer the ability to create hard-coded workflows that have to be supported by developers and separate information workers from their business processes, preventing business users from creating, improving, analyzing, or taking control of their own business processes. Customers benefit from AgilePoint’s rich full-lifecycle process support and its seamless interoperability with Microsoft products, enabling the leverage of existing Microsoft product investment and Microsoft software knowledge for accelerated development and reduced risk. The combination of rich BPM functionality and powerful Microsoft products provides the first BPMS suite on the market that is comprehensive, and yet easy-to-use, manageable and affordable. AgilePoint’s leading functionality combined with unmatched price performance that is many times more cost effective than the competition is the surest way to achieve a competitive advantage and reduce costs.