What is business process management? Explained

What is business process management in practice

Every company runs on repeatable work: onboarding a client, paying a supplier, answering a claim. BPM treats that work as something to design and improve, not something that just happens.

Microsoft describes BPM as how organizations help ensure that any process change is the right one. The point is control over change, not change for its own sake.

The business process management meaning is simple. You look at how work flows, measure it, and fix what slows it down.

In a mid-size company, BPM often starts with one painful process, such as quoting or invoicing, and grows from there.

BPM vs project management and automation

• BPM

  Ongoing care of repeatable processes.

• Project management

  A one-time scope of work.

• Automation

  A tool that runs steps without people.

• Process mapping

  Drawing how work flows today.

IBM notes that BPM is often confused with task and project management, yet its scope is broader. Project management covers a one-time scope of work. BPM focuses on processes that repeat.

Automation is one tool inside BPM, not the same thing.

A study of business process automation found that most current efforts target work where humans interact with computers, and that academic work leans heavily on robotic process automation.

Harvard Business Review's Michael Hammer warned against simply speeding up old steps.

His point was to use technology to enable a new process, not to automate a broken one. See business process automation for the automation side.

Another useful split is workflow versus process: a workflow is one sequence of tasks, while a process is the wider business activity it belongs to.

Business process management systems and examples

• Finance

  Invoice approval and payment runs.

• Supply chain

  Order handling and supplier checks.

• HR

  Onboarding and offboarding steps.

• Service

  Intake, routing and follow-up.

Business process management systems are the software that helps teams model, run and monitor processes. The common drawing language is BPMN, which the Object Management Group calls the de-facto standard for process diagrams.

BPMN is meant to be read by the people who design and manage the process, yet precise enough to be turned into software components.

That bridge between business and IT is why BPM is often treated as an IT business process management topic.

Typical examples sit across a company. Supply chain teams use BPM for order handling and supplier checks. Finance applies it to invoice approval, and service teams to intake and follow-up.

Many teams begin with process mapping or process mining before choosing any system.

How AI fits into BPM

AI adds a layer on top of BPM. It can read documents, route cases and flag exceptions inside a process you already understand.

Adoption is still early. A U.S. Census Bureau study found about 5.4% of firms used AI at the end of February 2024, up from 3.7% in September 2023.

Among firms with 250 or more employees, about 7% used it.

Most users applied AI to substitute for worker tasks, and few reported cutting jobs because of it. The most common reason for not adopting was that AI did not apply to the business.

Standardize first. Research on process automation suggests the best candidates are rule-based, stable and need limited exception handling. For smarter handling of messy steps, see intelligent automation.