Business Process Management

What is Business Process Management?
Why should I care about BPM?

Business process management (BPM) is best described as:

a process that improves business processes.

It holistically aligns all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of internal and external customers while promoting business effectiveness and efficiency through innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology.

In simpler terms - "BPM increases both your effectiveness and your efficiency internally and externally." The well-known and very successful Japanese concept of Kaizen uses principles very similar to those of BPM.

Unlike Business Process Reengineering, BPM operates incrementally and improves processes continuously. BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach allows. Studies show BPM helps increase customer satisfaction, product quality and delivery speed, and reduces time-to-market.

This overall improvement in effectiveness and efficiency translates directly into increased bottom-line profitability.

An additional and critical factor is that competitors cannot easily emulate or match your business process and so you create and retain a competitive advantage.