page_title: Business process management
section_title: Practice
hierarchical_section_title: Business process management / Practice
caption_attribution_description: Workflow/Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern
context_page_description: Business process management is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
  It can be differentiated from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. From another viewpoint, process management includes program management. In project management, process management is the use of a repeatable process to improve the outcome of the project.
  Key distinctions between process management and project management are repeatability and predictability. If the structure and sequence of work is unique, then it is a project. In business process management, a sequence of work can vary from instance to instance: there are gateways, conditions; business rules etc.
context_section_description: While the steps can be viewed as a cycle, economic or time constraints are likely to limit the process to only a few iterations.  This is often the case when an organization uses the approach for short to medium term objectives rather than trying to transform the organizational culture.  True iterations are only possible through the collaborative efforts of process participants.  In a majority of organizations, complexity requires enabling technology (see below) to support the process participants in these daily process management challenges.
  To date, many organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective of optimizing an area that has been identified as an area for improvement.
  Currently, the international standards for the task have limited BPM to the application in the IT sector, and ISO/IEC 15944 covers the operational aspects of the business. However, some corporations with the culture of best practices do use standard operating procedures to regulate their operational process.  Other standards are currently being worked upon to assist in BPM implementation (BPMN, enterprise architecture, Business Motivation Model).
caption: Example of Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern: This pattern shows how business process management (BPM) tools can be used to implement business processes through the orchestration of activities between people and systems.[30]
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