What is business process management

Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to improving an organization's business processes.

BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient, and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. BPM is a subset of infrastructure management, the administrative area of concern dealing with maintenance and optimization of an organization's equipment and core operations.

A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment, that will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal.

 The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), a non-profit organization, exists to promote the standardization of common business processes, as a means of furthering e-business and business-to-business (B2B) development. To this end, the organization has developed the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based metalanguage for modeling business processes.

BPM provides a powerful workflow engine that automates complex e-business processes that integrate enterprise systems, business-to-business applications, and data interchange.

BPM runs on BEA WebLogic Server and includes a Java-based process engine that manages the run-time execution of business processes.

BPM is used by integration specialists to design, execute, and monitor enterprise-wide business processes that span applications, systems, and people.