Business Process Management Solutions
Business process management, or BPM, is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients with the specific goal of promoting efficiency and flexibility. Business process management solutions are sets of software applications designed to make BPM easier and more manageable. Properly deployed, business process management solutions should help the organization align the functions of the business with the needs of the client. While business process management solutions are quite prevalent and have been actively sold into the Enterprise arena, many businesses question the value of these solutions over the long-term.
Scope of Business Process Management Solutions
Business process management solutions are a great way to get the business on the right track. Being more responsive and more aligned with the customers needs is easier with business process management solutions because it ensures that all of the company's resources are aligned with customer requirements. There are many things that business process management solutions provide including financial planning, financial reporting, financial management, and accounting. In addition the business process management solutions will usually provide accounting, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, and human resources planning. Beyond these services, the business process management solutions will also help with the operational issues and customer data in the way of call center help, customer relationship management, and sales force automation.
Benefits of Business Process Management Solutions
The single biggest benefit of well deployed business process management solutions is to ensure that any work being done by the organization is easily identified and tied to customer needs. The ultimate measure of success and benefit of a business process management solution is measured in customer satisfaction, revenue and profitability of the organization. For these reasons, business process management solutions have found great advocates in the Enterprise community.
Business Process Management Solutions and the Mid-sized Business
Unlike other technologies that have easily migrated to the small and mid-sized business sector, business process management solutions have had a much harder road in this market segment. The reasons for this are many, but two of them are key - cost and difficulty of implementation. For business process management solutions to be effective they need buy-in from the entire organization and they need to be deployed across the entire company. While this can be justified in a larger Enterprise, smaller businesses have a much harder time seeing the return on investment from such a large deployment and plan.
Business Process Management for Non-Enterprise Companies
While a full scale BPM deployment may not make sense for a small or mid-sized business, there are a number of technologies often used in BPM that make sense for sub-enterprise organizations. Data integration and the tools associated with it can be very helpful in tying multiple systems together to enable a more unified view of the customer. With data integration even small and mid-sized companies can achieve some of the benefits of BPM without having to invest the type of resources typically associated with BPM solutions.
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