Business processes define how a company operates and stands out from competition. Globalization, increased competition, and the need to adapt to stricter regulations require efficient process optimization in order to achieve operational excellence. Competitive advantage lies in the ability to adapt the business processes to the always-changing conditions in a quick and efficient manner.
This leads some business professionals to go into areas they do not fully understand, like learning how to leverage IT platforms to better manage business processes. When tackling this problem, Business Process Management (BPM) should be used: a management discipline and a set of technologies that provides support to the process management.
The term BPM encompasses how business processes are studied, identified, changed, and monitored, in order to ensure they run smoothly and can be improved over time. The BPM field of work is significantly growing, with expectations of a global $10 billion value by 2020, according to a study by Winter Green Research.
BPM can be a convergence of workflow technologies, enterprise application integration (EAI), management of documents and contents, management of business rules, among others. This makes it a perfect target for software developers.
Some time ago, BPM software vendors focused on the technological implementation layer but, today ,they are providing BPM services with a full range of features and functions. These services aim to provide support to managers and process analysts, as well as technology developers.
BPM software solutions such as Comindware Process allow business users to automate, manage and optimize complex business operations with ease, while greatly improving business processes. The software solutions focus on providing fully integrated work management unifying processes, projects, tasks and cases on one platform, while capitalizing on features offered by cloud servers, which securely keep data online and always readily available.