The prospects of Business Process Management (BPM) have generated huge excitement among Enterprise Owners and IT Owners, alike. This is mainly due to the fact that BPM efficiently handles the most core component of Business – Process.

The most frequent and basic question asked by the stakeholders – What is the first step in BPM implementation? The answer is quite simple – Process Modeling.

Process Modeling refers to the set of activity for documenting the Business Process using a combination of graphical notations and text. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the most widely accepted and used language for Process Modeling. Krawler jSonic Process Modeler is a powerful web based process designing and modeling tool, which uses standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).

Process Modeling enables process owners to analyze the current state of Business Process and perform the gap analysis for optimizing and improving the same. While carrying out the Process Modeling activity, participants can:
•    Learn the importance of each task in the process
•    Understand their role and responsibility in carrying out the process
•    Identify task that are comparatively more time consuming i.e. Bottleneck Identification

Once the process is modeled – roles, forms, and business rules – are assigned to individual tasks in the process.

In conclusion, Process Modeling provides the basic foundation on which further BPM activities – workflow automation, reporting, and more – are carried out.

The ever changing market conditions across the world have forced organizations to rethink the way they carry out business. Organizations are focusing on optimizing and managing operational cost, improving customer service delivery, adopting strategy (IT & Non-IT) for flexibility and much more.

For businesses to be successful, a comprehensive framework involving People, Process, System and Technology (popularly known as PPST framework) plays a critical role. Let us briefly visit these four components.

• People refers to management, employees, vendors and customers. The People component is the most critical and decisive factor that determines the state of business.

• Process refers to the way in which various business activities are carried out. A well defined process framework guarantees success, consistently.

• System refers to various enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM and PLM, among others. These enterprise applications are generally tightly integrated with their respective domains. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is only attached with marketing, sales and customer service.

• Technology refers to platform (UNIX, Windows) and architecture (n-tier, client server) on which the enterprise applications are employed.  Integration and communication issues between various enterprise applications are encountered due to heterogeneous platform and architecture.

So the question arises now is – Do we have a software system that incorporates the PPST framework?

I firmly believe that Business Process Management provides capabilities for effectively and efficiently managing people, process, system and technology.

Krawler offers a unique Business Process Management solution – jSonic BPM. It offers functionalities such as Process Management, Workflow Automation, Collaboration, Reporting, Data Management and Web Services that incorporates people, process, system and technology aspects. Some of the major functional capabilities of jSonic BPM are:

• Design, model, execute, automate and optimize the cross-functional business processes.
• Manage Process users at each process activity
• Add value to the existing enterprise applications
• Integrate with heterogeneous platform and architecture through an SOA framework
• Provides Collaboration features such as Document Management
• Web Services based for communicating with any web enabled device

The next question that arises now – What are the key Business Process Management offerings?

The main BPM offering can be summarized as:

• Holistic View of Business
• Understanding about the most fundamental component of business operations – Business Process
• Leverages on existing enterprise applications
• Effective communication between stakeholders
• Flexibility and adaptability to face any dynamic business conditions

In a nutshell, Business Process Management offers a comprehensive solution for managing enterprise operations through management of business processes.  BPM provides a complete solution for cross functional business process management that involves people, system and technology aspects.

BPM, in the true sense, acts as a business enabler by empowering organizations to handle any business opportunity or threat effectively.