How are business processes implemented with and without BPM?

Sometimes, BPM advocates suggest that every organizational activity should be described or automated using a formal business process model. Even the most enthusiastic supporters do not propose that BPM be adopted to that extent. Instead, the goal of BPM is to focus on processes that are more valuable in creating value, those that would have significant benefits if optimized, and those that require rapid change and evolution to stay aligned with competitive markets.

However, to properly understand what BPM is suitable for, it is also very important to understand other ways of doing things: both less structured processes and more structured ones.

Many tasks performed within a company occur through unstructured collaborations and communications based on simple mechanisms such as email, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and real-time communications via phone, IM, and text messages. When we use these types of tools, do processes occur? The answer is often yes. Ongoing tasks are sometimes called implicit interactions, which have a starting point and an outcome, but work does not proceed in a predictable step-by-step pattern. An example of this process is hiring. This process begins with describing a job and ends with hiring, but it is not initially clear how interviews, evaluations, and meetings will proceed.

In most cases, BPM does not intervene in this space, although, based on common communication patterns and document forms, it is possible to identify processes that could benefit from BPM support.

Processes that are somewhat unstructured dominate business activities. In Business Process Management: The SAP Roadmap, Jim Hegeman Snib, An Roesenberg, Charles Muller, and Mark Skavilo show that only 20 percent of all processes used to run a business can be automated.

Enterprise applications like ERP provide a standardized implementation of common business processes in modern organizations, mainly covering about 20 percent of processes that can be automated. In the early days of enterprise software, it was found that companies should not invest in creating their own custom programs for accounting, finance, control, budgeting, invoice processing, etc. Enterprise software vendors created applications that implement standard processes through abstract configuration. These applications quickly gained popularity with the introduction of the first comprehensive ERP packages in the early 1990s. A sequence of other applications such as CRM, SCM, and PLM, among others, followed. Today, we have a comprehensive foundation for tracking and automating routine transactional activities within large companies.

Enterprise programs have transformed into systems that record a wide range of non-automated activities using stored data. Additionally, organizational programs include performance units such as taking orders, creating invoices, purchasing orders, and payments, and they establish relationships with suppliers, which may be the final outcome of non-automated processes like purchasing.

The gap between existing organizational applications and unstructured communications is filled by BPM. Today, it is clear that important organizational processes cross the boundaries of organizational applications. Processes such as order-to-pay or purchase-to-pay may involve multiple organizational applications, such as taking orders in CRM, creating invoices and purchase orders in ERP, and managing production and research in SCM.

BPM, especially when combined with services that can input and output data to organizational applications and other information sources, provides a way to explicitly define management and automation of processes covered by organizational applications. BPM also allows processes involving people and systems from outside the company to be defined. In this way, BPM supports processes that occur across a wide business network.

The characteristics of processes that are currently automated by BPM are as follows:

• They are more organized than loose collaborations based on email and similar mechanisms.
• They are more flexible than transactional processes within organizational applications.
• They operate across a broader range of processes within organizational applications and cross the boundaries of the company and applications.
• Their flow is explicitly defined, managed, and automated.

It is important to note that the scope of processes currently automatable by BPM is limited by the number of available web services. Over time, not only higher-level web services but also lower-level web services should be accessible. Organizational applications will facilitate areas that can create other areas. In such a world, BPM can be used not only for high-level orchestration and coordination as previously described but also for more structured automation. Furthermore, the boundaries between unstructured collaborative processes and BPM orchestration may also fade away. In other words, the current division between unstructured processes, BPM-style processes, and structured processes will transform into a continuum, expanding BPM's ability to represent workflows from start to finish.

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