All organizations have business processes. A business process is a sequence of steps, to get a desired output. Now when we say sequence of steps, it’s not blindly one step after another. The business process needs some decision making.
Then the business processes are not like the Ten Commandments. They change very often. The things that can affect a business process are also very varied, from a genius physicist to a dumb politician, from inflation to deflation, from market demand to market surplus etc.
Process Automation - ERP
We know that the ERP solves lot many intra organization collaboration needs. The ERP had industry best practices. It automated the business processes. Then why do we still need BPM?
The butterfly effect
Because the ERP forgot about the butterfly effect. When an organization automated the business processes, they created a ripple in the process; they uncovered potential areas for improvement. These improvements in other areas, in turn created their own ripples.
These ripples, going back and forth, needed not only process automation but also process improvisation.
Now there are two groups, which improvise a lot. One is military, the other is business. Why, again, because of the cut throat competition.
In case of the former, it is literally cut throat competition.
When it comes to improvising, the businesses were constrained by the ERP.
Improvise = Configure?
The ERPs tried to correct this, by including lot of configurations. Basically they tried to define a business by a fixed set of parameters (200 - 2000 such parameters??).
But is it really possible? The business processes are like finger prints of an organization. They are unique for every organization. Every organization has its own challenges and opportunities. Even the opportunities and challenges change with time. And trying to map these varied processes to a fixed set of parameters, is like driving a F1 in a bed room.
It is making the lives of the CIOs and business heads difficult. Because the space, they have to maneuver around, is limited to the set of parameters defined by the ERP.
So what has changed now?
Now we understand this. With the BPM, now we give the businesses the race car and also the freedom to define the road, with their own bends and straight lines.