Getting started with IBM Business Process Manager

Business process management (BPM) is the systematic method of examining your organization’s existing business processes and implementing improvements to make your workflow more effective and more efficient.

Every organization uses business processes to accomplish work. A business process is a set of business activities that represent the required steps to achieve a business objective. For example, you might have a business process that handles credit card disputes. In this case, the business objective is to resolve the dispute in an efficient and accurate way in order to minimize cost to your organization and to retain customer satisfaction. The process itself includes all of the steps needed to meet the objective (in this case, it might be activities like receiving the claim, examining the validity of the claim, deciding whether to remove the charge, and informing the customer of the decision).

Business processes often require a combination of internal activities and activities that must be performed by humans. Therefore, we can look at business process management as the intersection between people, processes, and technology.

The business process management approach is iterative; you don’t implement it once, never to be touched again. Instead, you design, model, create, simulate, monitor, and optimize your processes on a regular basis. The feedback you receive from testing and monitoring your processes drives continuous improvements to your organization’s workflows.