What is BPMS?

Business process management software (BPMS) helps a business define, deploy, and manage automated business processes, turning time-consuming manual processes into streamlined workflows within business applications.

With the addition of cloud, AI, and big data analytics capabilities, BPMS transforms into intelligent BPMS (iBPMS), further automating processes, speeding workflow development, and enhancing the orchestration of business processes.

BPMS enables you to use business process automation to streamline a variety of tasks, ensuring that processes are followed for activities such as document review and approval, document management, HR onboarding, and management of employee requests.

By automating triggered communications—such as task alerts via email, payment reminders, and thank you letters—BPMS improves workflows throughout your business. BPMS can even be used to orchestrate email marketing campaigns, helping you deploy the right message or response at the right time.

BPMS and iBPMS solutions make it easy to build workflow automation into a wide range of business applications, standardising processes and delivering:

Greater efficiency

Implementing business process management software means people throughout the company spend less time on repetitive manual processes, freeing them to focus on getting work done and driving increased productivity.

Increased agility

By enabling companies to document, standardise, and automate business processes, BPMS makes it easier to drive and respond to change through the rapid and consistent rollout of new processes across the organisation.

Streamlined collaboration

BPMS enables teams to route tasks and assignments automatically and ensures that new or updated processes are adopted in real time, keeping everyone on the same page all the time.

Enhanced compliance

Using BPMS to build rules into their processes, businesses can ensure compliance with existing regulations and quickly adapt to legislative changes with minimal disruption.

Better customer engagement and support

Because BPMS ensures the consistent application of business processes, companies can establish, enforce, and monitor key aspects of customer interactions. Customers and companies benefit from greater personalisation, automated ticket creation, uniform triggered responses, and consistent lead or case management.

Virtually anyone in your business can design and deploy automations that help them get more done in less time with a modern BPMS solution.

Just a few years ago, automating business processes automation was a complex process itself. Developers spent significant time with business-side stakeholders to map each task within a process before writing code for each automated process from scratch. Subsequent changes to a process meant more mapping, more coding, and more time spent on updates.

Today’s best BPMS platforms simplify process automation initiatives by reducing or eliminating the need for developer and IT support. These systems enable organisations to implement highly complex processes, and they allow teams and individuals to easily create and implement automated processes on their own.

So, the short answer to “Who uses BPMS?” is, anyone who needs to.

1. Identify and design the process you want to automate.

   Understand the business rationale for the process and examine any exiting documentation or process models that define it.

2. Model the logic or steps in the business process flow.

   Define the stages and steps in the business process within the BPMS, and test various business scenarios in the platform using built-in modelling tools.

3. Build your automation using point-and-click design tools—instead of writing code.

   Create the process flows and user interfaces for the business process using the BPMS solution’s library of pre-built templates and connectors.

4. Launch and share your automation with your team or companywide.

   Choose how to distribute your automation and to whom, then see how it works in the wild.

If your goal is simplifying business process management, it’s smart to create a shortlist of BPMS solutions that truly make automation easy for people to learn and use. Today’s best-of-breed automation platforms do that and much more. Be sure you can answer the following questions before starting your search:

What processes will you focus on?

Decide whether you need a solution to automate more routine tasks like invoice processing, or one that can support the automation of complex long-running processes such as budget management or performance monitoring.

Who will use it?

As a key component of effective digital transformation, the BPMS solution you choose should be geared towards usability for everyone in the company. Today’s best low-code BPMS solutions feature robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities that make for easier adoption throughout the organisation.

How will you deploy BPMS?

An important decision you’ll need to make is whether to deploy a cloud-based or on-premises BPMS solution.

The primary benefits of a cloud software as a service (SaaS) BPMS platform include a simplified rollout, since the application is up and running on day one; scalability, because you grow your subscription and not your infrastructure; and predictable pay-as-you-go cost.

The benefits of an on-premises BPMS platform are largely control (since it resides within your infrastructure) and security, because your data stays within your systems, limiting exposure.

Who will support your BPMS solution?

Implementing and maintaining an on-premises BPMS solution requires a significant investment in IT infrastructure and staff. With a low-code SaaS BPMS platform, the demands on IT are dramatically reduced.

What can you afford?

While cost is always important, remember to consider your expected return on investment. The more capable the tool, the more value it’s likely to deliver to your business.