Overview
Business process management (BPM) is the practice of modeling, analyzing, and optimizing end-to-end business processes to help meet your strategic business goals, such as the improvement of your customer experience framework. BPM methodology can be applied to tasks and processes that are often repeated, ongoing, or predictable.
A business process is a set of activities that help a business reach a specific goal. Using BPM, you can evaluate your existing processes to find ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs and errors, and support digital transformation efforts.
BPM is a continuous process that can lead to improved business outcomes over time. With BPM, you can eliminate ad hoc workflow management practices and optimize business operations in order to deliver better products and services to your customers.
BPM methodology
- Analyze: As a first step of process optimization, you’ll need to analyze the process as it currently exists. Consider what works or where a problem, inefficiency, or bottleneck exists, as well as how it relates to other tasks or processes.
- Model: Look for ways to improve the process and design its ideal implementation. Use this process model to explore how your new approach would work with a variety of potential scenarios and variables.
- Execute: Once the process has been modeled, you can implement changes. Be sure to document what has changed and why.
- Monitor: After your new process has been implemented, you’ll need to monitor it to see if there is an improvement. Gather data to measure progress against business strategy. Do you see an increase in efficiency? Have costs gone down? Are products being delivered faster?
- Optimize and automate: Once you have applied BPM methodology to a process, you’ll need to continually monitor and optimize it. Improving processes can take time and the metrics for success can change, so BPM should be ongoing. Regularly look for new ways to improve. If the new process is working well, consider if any tasks can be automated.
BPM and automation
BPM is not a technology—it is a practice performed by people. However, BPM software and automation technology—similar to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data management tools—can be used to help implement identified process improvements. BPM is the first step into widespread business process automation.
Automation helps make your business more efficient by using software to perform tasks in order to reduce cost, complexity, and errors. While BPM is the methodology that allows you to better understand your end-to-end business processes, business process automation can be used to continually check and evolve your process efficiencies against those initiatives.
Why automate your business with Red Hat
The focus of IT has shifted from serving internal needs, like efficiency and cost control, to engaging with external customers and creating new business opportunities. That’s why Red Hat believes the traditional business automation model needs to evolve. Instead of focusing solely on streamlining processes, businesses need to develop new strategies to automate the business itself.
Red Hat works with the greater open source community on automation technologies. Our engineers help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your business performs, with IT that remains stable and secure.
Our solutions, services, and training give you the control you need to automate your business and free up the resources you need to build an innovative future.
