Business process management (BPM)

Business process management (BPM) Literature Review 2.1 Definitions 2.1.1 What is Business Process Management? Business Process Management (BPM) was influenced by concepts and technologies from business administration and computer science. BPM had its root in process-oriented trends and was treated as a management philosophy since mid 1990s (James F. Chang, 2006; Mathias Weske, 2007). Studies investigating BPM had been carried out several management principles and practices were associated. Most of these concepts were identical to Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Total Quality Management (TQM) concepts. In the book Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures, Mathias Weske had quoted from Davenport, who defined business process as: â€Å"a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome for a particular customer or market.† And â€Å"a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs.† However, Mathias Weske (2007) had adopted definition as: â€Å"A business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment.† These activities come together to make a business goal became achievable. Every single business process is performed by a single company, but it may interact with business processes performed by other companies.† From the business process definition, Mathias Weske (2007) had defined the concept of BPM as: â€Å"Business process management includes concepts, methods, and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment, and analysis of business processes.† The basis of BPM had explicit representation of business process with their activities and execution constraints between them. When BPM defined, people could analysis, improvement and enactment with BPM. In traditionally, business process had manually executed as usual by knowledge personnel, regulations of company, and installed procedures. Nowadays, company had more additional benefits by apply Information Technology like Business Process Management System (BPMS) when coordinating activities involved by business process. 2.1.2 What is Business Process Management System (BPMS)? According to definition of James F. Chang (2006), BPMS is â€Å"a new class of software that allows organizations to devise process-centric information technology solutions. Process-centric means BPMS solutions are able to integrate people, systems, and data†. BPM fills the gap between the wide-open, unstructured world of collaboration and the precise transaction processing of enterprise applications. It has become widely realized that important enterprise processes routinely cross the boundaries of enterprise applications. Processes like order-to-cash or procure-to-pay may involve several enterprise applications such as taking orders in CRM, ERP creating invoices and purchase orders, and managing production and fulfilment in SCM. BPM, especially in combination with services that can move data in and out of enterprise applications and other information sources provide a way to clear define, manage, and automate processes that span enterprise applications. BPM also allows processes that bring in people and systems from outside the company to the defined process. In this way, BPM supports processes that take place across an extended business network. The personalities of processes currently automated by BPM are as follows: They are more structured than the loose collaboration based on email and other such mechanisms They are more flexible than the transactional processes in enterprise applications They are wider in scope than processes in enterprise applications, crossing both application and company boundaries Their flow is explicitly defined, managed, and automated 2.1.3 What enabling standards and technology support BPMS?