Methods of Digital Process Management

• These solutions typically have a strength in digital processes management and automation. Increasingly BPM solutions can manage every aspect of a Business Process including the documents and digitisation. Powerful process management & workflow capabilities mean that they are often suited to customisations or complex and business critical process that require system or human integrations as well as extra governance and control. The more advance ones adhere to the industry standard for Business Process Modelling and Notation (BPMN 2.0).

• BPM solutions can be on-premise and cloud-based SaaS offerings that typically fall into 2 categories:

  Application Specific These BPM solutions are typically optimised for automating and managing one or a collection of very specific end to end processes within a department such as Expenses, Account Payable, Employee or student Onboarding etc. Their strength is that they can typically be configured or customised to handle the specifics and variables of any such processes – somethings generalist solutions required a lot of customisation to achieve. This specific strength can also be a weakness as it can encourage silos and duplications in systems.

  BPM Platforms – Today BPM or workflow platforms can be highly customisable and tailored single platforms to manage and automate any business process or workflow. Typically such BPM solutions will include a broad range of information management capabilities from data capture and storage, process management, integration and automation. “Point solutions or modules” are used to provide templates for popular processes or functions allowing the platform to be customised more easily to meet specific processes and applications. Customisable BPM platforms can remove silos in information and documents, systems and cost. Key Applications include contract management, finance workflows, sales proposal management, Internal or external approvals, HR document workflows, sales order processing, case management, project management and customer specific workflows.

Many businesses run their operations on several Core business IT systems such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Supply Chain Management (SCM) system. These systems are used to manage the core operational processes and information of a business – ie financial, customer, supply. BPM principles are used to help update and managed these systems and processes because of their critical importance. However, updating, customising these systems is widely recognised to be complex, time consuming and expensive. This is one of the principle reasons for the raise in BPM and workflow solutions. BPM solutions nearly always work alongside and integrate with these central systems to fill any gaps in specific, custom and departmental processes

Whilst not necessarily a BPM solution, RPA solutions have become more of a platform solution and include workflow and orchestration in the same way as Document or Business Process Management solutions have incorporated Automation.
RPAs strengths are in the automation of manual and repetitive tasks involving structured data rather than management and optimisation of workflows and end to end processes.