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Kissflow is a cloud-based forms automation solution offered by OrangeScape Technologies that automate business processes and tracks performance. It is suitable for business of all sizes and industries. Kissflow helps initiate...Read more
enVisual360 is a wealth management/CRM software solution that helps small to large enterprises monitor client and entity information. enVisual can be implemented as a cloud application or on-premise application. enVisual includes...Read more
Nintex is a workflow management solution that caters to a variety of industries including energy, health and life sciences, financial services and government. It is suitable for departments such as customer services, human resourc...Read more
monday.com, an award-winning collaboration and project management platform, helps teams plan together efficiently and execute complex projects to deliver results on time. monday.com team management and task management tool allows ...Read more
SpaceRunner is a cloud-based facility management platform that helps small to large enterprises monitor employee occupancy across corporate workspaces. It enables users to maintain employee logs with details including room number,...Read more
Enterprise Process Center, by Interfacing Technologies, is a business process management (BPM) suite that provides businesses several digitization and management programs within a single platform. The solution can be deployed eith...Read more
Confluence is a project management solution that enables organizations to create, collaborate, organize and review project documents. The system offers both cloud-based and on-premise deployment. Confluence’s editor feature a...Read more
1C:Enterprise is a business application development platform that enables businesses of any size to automate and streamline business processes across their organization. Developers can rapidly build business applications of a...Read more
Engage Process Modeler is a business process management (BPM) solution that offers process mapping, user management, process publishing, process feedback and reporting. The software is suited for organizations of all sizes. E...Read more
Process Street is a modern process management platform for teams. We help teams share their core processes, then transform them into powerful no-code workflows. Start with employee onboarding to set up new hires for success, then...Read more
Business process management: At first glance, this term seems to be a simple description of what bosses, managers and department heads do; they manage the processes of business. The term’s unstated implication is that processes are managed with the aim of increasing efficiency, profitability and/or competitiveness.
But business process management (BPM) is actually a technical term. It still carries some of the same implications noted above—the aim of BPM is to increase a company’s efficiency, profitability and/or competitiveness—but, as a technical term, it focuses specifically on the digitization of business processes. Software and application development play a central role.
(If you're looking for more generic software to simply manage a business, without the technical implications of BPM, that would just be business management software—not at all confusing, right? Don't worry, we'll clear things up.)
What Is BPM?
The 3 Types of BPM Software
Trends in, Direction of BPM Software Market
BPM is defined by Gartner as “a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT [information/operational technologies] investments to business strategy.”
With the definition out of the way, let’s see what BPM looks like in practice. Compare the following two scenarios to understand what distinguishes BPM from the ordinary and expected activities of running a business.
Over two-year period | Result | |
Business A (Without BPM) |
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Business B (With BPM) |
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As you might expect, BPM takes different forms and is shaped by a business’s size, segment and strategy. As a result, software used for BPM is available in many different forms.
You can focus your approach to the BPM software market by looking at it in terms of three general categories outlined by Gartner in a report by analysts Michele Cantara and Rob Dunie: “Select the Right Type of BPM Platform to Achieve Your Application Development, Business Transformation or Digital Business Goals” (content available to Gartner clients).
If we knew specifically which processes businesses would be managing tomorrow, we’d have retired yesterday… and we wouldn’t have written this Buyer’s Guide today. We can’t predict the future, but we have been observing BPM long enough to understand that these general trends in BPM technology and strategy are likely to continue.