| Before Business Process Management, BPM, was | | | | business processes. |
| even a buzz word countless number of companies | | | | Automation takes BPM to the last and final level. |
| were rushing to develop in-house BPM Tools that | | | | Automating certain business processes is the ultimate |
| would map their business processes and eventually | | | | goal of BPM. Not all processes should be automated |
| automate them. | | | | however. The advanced BPM Tools will allow |
| More than a decade ago, creating such software tool | | | | descriptive modeling that not only models processes |
| required an army of programmers and budgets that | | | | but also organizational hierarchies, metadata and |
| were never met. Today, there is a slew of BPM | | | | business rules. Once all the required material is |
| Tools that can do pretty much whatever your | | | | modelled then the appropriate processes to be |
| company desires. There are tools that require very | | | | automated are selected. After running there is |
| little interaction by your IT group. There are even | | | | obviously the need to monitor the running processes |
| free Business Process Modeling Notation stencils that | | | | and then finally manage and improve on these |
| are available as Microsoft Visio plug-ins. These stencils | | | | processes. This is why a reporting feature is so |
| will be loaded into Visio which does not have native | | | | important. It is essential to find the bottlenecks within |
| BPMN support. They will allow for simple descriptive | | | | the processes. |
| modeling of your company's business processes. | | | | Simulation is an added bonus. You can model |
| Free BPMN Stencils may be free, but they really lack | | | | processes and then simulate to find the bottlenecks |
| the depth that proper enterprise BPM tools can offer. | | | | before the processes are actually automated. This will |
| Though higher priced, Enterprise BPM suites will offer | | | | avoid costly mistakes and identifying the bottlenecks |
| a collaborative environment usually scaled onto a | | | | can improve your processes before they are rolled |
| database of your choice. The advantage of such | | | | out and executed. |
| tools is numerous. For one, they allow many users to | | | | All-in-all a tool that allows descriptive modeling, |
| participate in the process discovery initiative. | | | | simulation, reporting and ultimately automation is what |
| Secondly, they add the ability to create rich business | | | | a company should be looking for. Of course all the |
| intelligence reports that are pulled from the database. | | | | features will depend on the scope of the business |
| Lastly, most tools will include some sort of workflow | | | | discovery and improvement project and the budget |
| automation built in for the execution of the mapped | | | | set forth. |