Business Process Management (BPM): Managing the Work Itself
Business process management treats how work gets done as something to design, measure and improve deliberately. It works best when it knows which processes matter, and that is the question business architecture answers.
By Capstera Business Architecture Staff · Updated
13 min read
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline of designing, running, measuring and continuously improving an organization's business processes: the sequences of activities through which work gets done, from handling a customer order to closing the books. The term also covers the software, often called a BPM suite, used to model, automate and monitor those processes.
Every organization has processes, whether or not anyone wrote them down. A new hire learns how expense claims really get approved from the person at the next desk. A customer order follows a path that crosses five teams, three systems and a spreadsheet nobody admits to. These undocumented processes work, mostly, until volume doubles, a key person leaves or a regulator asks how a decision was made. Business process management is the discipline of making that work visible, deliberate and improvable: knowing what the process is, who owns it, how well it performs and what to change. It is one of the oldest management disciplines in the modern enterprise, and still one of the most practical.
Key Takeaways
- BPM manages processes as assets: designed, owned, measured and improved continuously, not fixed once.
- The BPM lifecycle runs from design and modeling through execution and monitoring to optimization, and then repeats.
- BPMN is the widely used standard notation for process models, maintained by the Object Management Group.
- BPM software ranges from modeling tools to suites that automate and monitor processes; process mining reconstructs real processes from system event logs.
- Processes describe how work is done; capabilities describe what the business can do. Use capabilities to decide which processes matter most.
- Every important process should have an owner and a few measures, including its lead time.
What Is Business Process Management?
BPM treats business processes the way finance treats money: as something to account for, govern and improve.
A business process is a sequence of activities, performed by people and systems, that turns an input into an output for a customer, internal or external. Business process management is the discipline that looks after those processes over time. It defines them, assigns owners, measures how they perform, and changes them when they do not perform well enough.
BPM grew out of several earlier movements: the quality and process-improvement work of the twentieth century, business process reengineering in the 1990s, which argued for radical redesign rather than incremental change, and workflow automation software. Today it usually means a steady, continuous discipline rather than a one-off redesign, supported by modeling standards, process ownership and software.
BPM is often confused with neighboring terms. Process improvement methods such as Lean and Six Sigma are techniques BPM uses. Robotic process automation automates individual tasks within a process. Business process outsourcing hands a process to another company. BPM is the management discipline that decides what each process should be and keeps it that way.
| Term | What it is | How it relates to BPM |
|---|---|---|
| Business process management (BPM) | The discipline of designing, running, measuring and improving processes | The umbrella |
| Business process reengineering (BPR) | Radical redesign of a process from scratch | A one-off intervention BPM may use |
| Lean and Six Sigma | Methods to remove waste and reduce variation | Improvement techniques within BPM |
| Workflow and BPM suites | Software that routes and tracks work through a process | Tools that execute and monitor processes |
| Robotic process automation (RPA) | Software robots that perform individual rule-based tasks | Automates steps within a process |
| Process mining | Reconstructs actual processes from system event logs | Shows how processes really run, for BPM to act on |
The BPM Lifecycle
BPM is usually described as a cycle. Each turn should leave the process measurably better.
- Identify and prioritize. Decide which processes matter most and are performing worst. This is where a capability map and value streams help most.
- Discover and model. Document how the process actually runs today, through interviews, observation and, increasingly, process mining. Model it in a standard notation.
- Analyze. Find where the process wastes time, creates errors, loops back or depends on one person. Measure lead time and rework.
- Redesign. Design the target process: fewer handoffs, clearer decisions, automation where it pays, controls where they are needed.
- Implement. Change roles, systems, policies and training so the new process becomes the way work is done.
- Monitor and control. Track the process's measures against target, with a named owner who acts on them.
- Improve continuously. Return to the start when measures drift, demand changes or a better design becomes possible.
Process Modeling and BPMN
A shared notation lets business people, analysts and developers read the same model.
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the most widely used standard for drawing processes. It is maintained by the Object Management Group, whose BPMN 2.0 specification was released in 2011. Its core elements are few: events, which start and end processes; activities, which are the work; gateways, which split and merge the flow on decisions; and sequence flows, which connect them. Swimlanes show which role or organization performs each activity.
Models exist at different levels. A high-level model shows the main stages of an end-to-end process on one page and is read by executives. A detailed model shows every step, decision and exception, and is used by analysts and, in BPM suites, executed by software. Mixing the two levels in one diagram is a common reason process models go unread.
Reference frameworks help with the first step, knowing which processes exist. The APQC Process Classification Framework, for example, offers a standard hierarchy of business processes that many organizations use as a starting checklist and for benchmarking.
BPM Software and Process Mining
BPM tools range from drawing models to running the work itself.
Process modeling tools capture and maintain process models, often in BPMN, with a repository so models can be reused and governed. BPM suites, sometimes described as intelligent business process management suites, go further: they execute processes, routing work between people and systems, enforcing rules, and recording what happened. Low-code workflow platforms occupy similar ground for simpler processes.
Process mining takes the opposite direction. Instead of starting from a designed model, it reads event logs from systems such as ERP and CRM and reconstructs how the process actually ran: every path, every loop, every exception, with timings. The discipline was developed largely in academic research led by Wil van der Aalst. Its value is that it replaces opinion about how the process works with evidence, and it often shows paths nobody knew existed.
Tools do not substitute for ownership. A process modeled in a suite but owned by nobody drifts as surely as one on paper.
| Kind | What it does | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Process modeling and repository | Captures, versions and governs process models | Documentation, analysis, compliance |
| BPM suite or workflow platform | Executes processes: routes work, enforces rules, records history | Case handling, approvals, cross-system processes |
| Process mining | Reconstructs actual processes from system event logs | Discovery, conformance checking, finding delays |
| Task automation (RPA) | Automates individual rule-based steps | Repetitive data entry between systems |
BPM vs. Business Architecture
BPM and business architecture are complementary. One manages how work is done; the other shows what the business does and why it matters.
A process describes how work is done: a sequence of activities with an order, roles and decisions. A business capability describes what the business is able to do, independent of how it is done: Claims Adjudication, Supplier Management, Order Fulfillment. Processes change often, as methods, systems and organization change. Capabilities change rarely.
The practical relationship is that business architecture tells BPM where to look. A capability heat map shows which capabilities are important to the strategy and performing poorly; the processes that realize those capabilities are where BPM effort pays off most. Without that view, process improvement tends to go wherever someone is complaining loudest, or to whichever process is easiest to model.
Value streams connect the two further. A value stream shows the stages of delivering value end to end; each stage is usually realized by one or more processes. Mapping value stream stages to processes shows where a process improvement will shorten what the customer experiences, and where it will only move the queue.
| Business process | Business capability | Value stream | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Describes | How work is done, step by step | What the business can do | How value is delivered end to end, stage by stage |
| Changes | Often | Rarely | Occasionally |
| Typical owner | Process owner | Capability owner | Value stream owner or executive sponsor |
| Typical question | How do we approve an invoice? | How good are we at Accounts Payable? | How long does it take from order to cash? |
| Typical measures | Cycle time, error rate, cost per transaction | Maturity, performance against target | Lead time, customer outcome |
Go further
- BPM vs. business architecture — Nine differences, and how the two work together.
- Business capability vs. business process — The distinction that keeps a capability map from becoming a process inventory.
- How to analyze a business process — A practical method for the analysis stage of the lifecycle.
- Lead time — The measure that shows what customers experience across a process.
A Worked Example: Prioritizing Process Work at a Distributor
An illustrative example. The distributor and its findings are invented to show how capability priorities focus BPM.
A distributor's operations team has a list of forty processes nominated for improvement, each with a sponsor convinced theirs is the most urgent. The BPM team has capacity for perhaps five a year.
Instead of ranking the processes by how loudly they are nominated, the team maps them to capabilities and lays them over the capability heat map. Two capabilities stand out as both strategically important and weak: Order Promising, because delivery reliability is how the distributor competes, and Credit Management, because slow credit decisions hold orders for days. The nine processes that realize those two capabilities move to the top of the list. Several others, including a long-running effort to redesign internal travel approvals, move down.
Process mining on the order-to-delivery value stream then shows where the time actually goes: orders above a credit threshold wait in a manual review queue that most of them clear without changes. The first redesign introduces automatic limits for repeat customers, and the measure the team commits to is the share of orders held for credit review and the order lead time, not the number of processes modeled.
Common BPM Pitfalls
BPM programs tend to stall in recognizable ways.
- Modeling everything first. Documenting every process before improving any produces a library that is out of date by the time it is finished.
- No process owners. A process without an owner who can change it and is measured on it will drift back.
- Improving processes that do not matter. Without a link to capabilities and strategy, effort goes to the easiest or loudest processes.
- Automating a bad process. Automation makes a poor process faster at producing poor results; redesign first.
- Measuring activity instead of outcomes. Processes modeled or workshops held are not improvements; lead time, error rate and cost are.
- Department-sized processes. Processes drawn within one department's boundary miss the handoffs where most delay occurs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is business process management?
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline of designing, running, measuring and continuously improving an organization's business processes, the sequences of activities through which work gets done. The term also refers to software used to model, automate and monitor processes.
What are the stages of the BPM lifecycle?
Identify and prioritize processes, discover and model them, analyze them, redesign them, implement the changes, monitor and control performance, and improve continuously, then repeat.
What is BPMN?
Business Process Model and Notation, the most widely used standard notation for drawing business processes. It is maintained by the Object Management Group; BPMN 2.0 was released in 2011.
What is the difference between BPM and RPA?
BPM is the discipline of managing whole processes end to end. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to perform individual rule-based tasks within a process. RPA can be one of the tools BPM uses.
What is process mining?
A technique that reconstructs how processes actually run from event logs in systems such as ERP and CRM, showing every path, loop and delay with timings. It replaces assumptions about a process with evidence.
What is the difference between BPM and business architecture?
BPM manages how work is done, process by process. Business architecture describes what the business does (capabilities), how value is delivered (value streams), and how they relate to strategy. Business architecture helps BPM decide which processes matter most.
What is the difference between a business process and a business capability?
A process describes how work is done, step by step, and changes often. A capability describes what the business is able to do, independent of how, and changes rarely. One capability is usually realized by several processes.
What is BPM software?
Software that supports business process management, ranging from modeling and repository tools to BPM suites and workflow platforms that execute and monitor processes, and process mining tools that analyze how processes actually run.
Pro Tips
- Map candidate processes to capabilities before choosing which to improve; let the capability heat map set the order.
- Give each important process an owner with authority to change it, and three or four measures, including lead time.
- Run process mining before redesign workshops, so the discussion starts from evidence.
- Draw processes end to end across departments; most delay sits at the handoffs.
- Redesign before automating.