What is business process management?

Business process management (BPM) is a structured, layered approach to optimizing how work within an organization gets done. An incredibly broad discipline, BPM encompasses everything from process discovery, analysis, modeling, redesign, change management and continuous improvement post-implementation. 

Though successful applications of BPM are certainly enabled by technology, the term refers to a set of principles or guideposts that help organizations structure, codify, optimize, and continuously improve operations or processes. In other words, re-engineer processes so that they’re more efficient, agile and aligned with business strategy. 

One of the more nebulous terms in the business jargon lexicon, BPM can mean different things to different organizations depending on its size, IT maturity and strategic objectives. For example, BPM can be applied to an entire enterprise to enable large-scale business transformation. Alternatively, BPM can be used to document and optimize a single process.

Overall though, BPM methodologies aim to do the same thing: redesign, automate and continuously optimize business processes to increase operational efficiency, reduce overhead costs and enhance the user experience. 

Furthermore, the 5 steps or stages of the BPM lifecycle are generally recognized to be:

• Design. Analyze existing processes to understand how they can be improved
• Model. Use this information to model and test new redesigned processes
• Implement. Leveraging automation, execute new, optimized processes
• Monitor. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track performance
• Optimize. Continue to track and continuously improve performance

What is Business process management software (BPMS)?

To confuse matters further, business process management software (BPMS), also known as business process management platforms (BPMP), is an enterprise-level software solution that enables and centralizes process automation, monitoring and management. 

BPM systems optimize and accelerate processes, increasing efficiency. By ensuring that work is handled in a consistent manner and that tasks are delivered to the right users at the right time, business process automation enables staff to focus on higher value work and exceptional cases.

Intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS) take things a step further by combining BPMS with business intelligence, AI, cloud computing and process mining. This enables iBPMS to process complex events, deliver real time analytics and support mobile platforms. Many iBPM also allow users to pull and leverage data from external sources such as IoT devices and social media. 

What is hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation represents the next frontier of business process automation. The term connotes two main things:

• By combining traditional automation tools such as RPA and workflow automation with machine learning, hyperautomation enables the automation of any repetitive task, even ones that are undocumented and rely on unstructured data
• The goal is to not only automate as many as possible, but create a self-perpetuating, self-healing automation ecosystem. In other words, it's a smart, holistic approach to advanced automation.

Similar to BPM, the term “hyperautomation” does not describe any singular technology or methodology, by rather an advanced approach to enterprise automation and a toolbox of enabling technology (i.e. process mining, RPA, AI, iPaaS, etc.). As such, one organization’s approach to hyperautomation will undoubtedly vary from the next depending on its culture, digital maturity and business objectives.

In fact, one could say that hyperautomation is the natural extension of business process management or that hyperautomation is an enabling strategy within a larger BMP framework. 

BPM is the bedrock of hyperautomation 

Effective business process management lies at the heart of not only hyperautomation success, but any sort of digital transformation or process automation project, whether it be large or small in scale. In fact, one could say BPM is critical to business success in general.

By ensuring end-to-end processes are documented and optimized, BPM enables organizations to not only scale automation, AI and other cutting-edge technologies, but continuously improve and integrate such investments. In fact, iBPMS technology suites are one of the key enabling technologies in the hyperautomation toolbox.