Basics of Business Process Management

Recently i have got an idea of putting BPM series of articles on this blog since more more and more people i meet in various companies looking to solve their IT problems and business process automations, but they dont have a clue of what BPM is all about.I now feel that every customer has to be educated on what benifits they will get out of BPM implementations.

I thought that i will start this thread and put some insight on BPM. To start with Basics:
Most people believe the myth that Business Process Management is a software. In fact business process management is a discipline , a practice a nd a methodology to build business applications. Business Process management doesn't replace applications but you develop those business applications BPM way. Implementing these applications BPM way ensure benifitts of BPM to those applications.

The most general way of understanding BPM is to understand the components of the BPM. There are several components identified but most general are follows:

1) Process Identification : One need to know what are the processes.
2) Process Documentation : One need to document process requirements and workout final requirements. People also use Visio kind of tools for documenting.
3) Process Definition : One needs to implement the documented processes and define it in system application.
4) Process Execution : Once processes are defined, they need to be put for execution.
5) Process Monitering : Once a lot of request parse through executing process, one need to monitor and control processes.
6) Process Re-Engineering : With Monitering this is possible to identify bottlenecks in defined process and one can further optimize this.

This is complete cycle of BPM methodology in a business application.

Next would be detailed features possible on BPM implementation.

Ritesh