Choosing the Right Business Process Management Solution (BPMS)

Processes are key to your organization, they align your resources, supporting structures, and technology to allow your organization to optimize its business strategy and gain competitive advantages. However to get to this point, some of those processes need to be optimized, to correctly allow the organization to run properly.

A BPMS could be your solution however the issue now is choosing the right one. In this article we will discuss all the different options of BPMS, however it’s important to keep in mind when choosing a BPMS to identify the right features that will meet your specific needs. To do that correctly you will need to know the three major categories that are available to your company.

Discussing the different types of BPMS

BPM solutions are divided into three major categories, these include document centric, human centric, and integration centric. Although the differences between these two options are blurring significantly as the market continues to consolidate, most of these tools continue to have a primary focus. Here are some definitions of the three:

Document Centric

A solution tailored to organizations that are involved in law, clinical testing, contract management or other industries that specialize on papers and reports, if this matches your organization then this is the right solution for you.

A document-centric BPM focuses on the importance of the flow of documents from one team to the other, due to the high focus on documentation within the organization or industry. This solution helps move documents from formatting and verifying to moving and getting the document signed.

A document-centric process supports your companies processes by organizing the document flow that your employees use. It’s main goal is to analyze the process and find any obstacles or limitations that may prevent document flow from occurring efficiently. Although this BPMS primarily focuses on documents, employees are still a major component and should work with one another to ensure best-practices within document management

Human Centric 

Human-centric BPM describes the relationship between people and tasks to allow for far greater collaboration. This approach acknowledges that there are several activities that are only able to be completed by employees. Subsequently this approach ensures that these tasks still have an efficient process flow in place. Giving your organization the ability to reassign tasks, pause and resume at later dates, such an approach can reduce risk, improve management and improve the rate of compliance within your organization.

The tasks an organization with this BPM would conduct are reviewing data; creating contracts, proposals and reports; developing images for design; authorizing/ approving; etc.

Although the tasks are still actively carried out by humans, automations are built into the human centric BPMS through notifications, alerts and warnings that help users understand when an activity is ready or isn’t ready to be performed.

Integration Centric

Integration-centric BPM models distance themselves from any human interfaces as much as possible by focusing on repetitive transitions and automated workflows. We build and improve applications to combine business process management with SOA (service-oriented architecture) to allow the organization to keep up with changing market conditions. SOA defines how computer programs and other entities interact with each other. This combination allows this BPMS to reduce overhead costs for management and allow your application objects, or system artifacts to be reused thanks to its model-driven development.

Choosing the Right BPMS

When all is said and done, you need to consider how your organization is currently run and how you want it to be run in the future. Choosing the right BPMS is not an overnight decision but also must not take so long that the benefits are lost. The benefit of having an organized and partially automated- business process.