Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture work together to help organizations reach strategic objectives and drive meaningful organizational change. Whether the goal is to improve digital services for customers, optimize IT systems, or make any other fundamental change to how a business, processes, or technologies operate, these two disciplines help you create a more efficient and future-ready enterprise.
In this article, we’ll look at the importance of BPM and answer all of the key questions.
Jump to:
- What is Business Process Management (BPM)?
- Why is Business Process Management Important?
- Types of BPM
- Business Process Management Lifecycle in 5 Stages
- Business Process Management Examples
- Business Process Management Benefits
- Business Process Management: Key Questions and Use Cases
- What Are the Challenges of Business Process Management?
- Business Process Management Best Practices
- What is Business Process Management Software?
- Features Every Business Process Management Tool Should Have
- Business Process Management With Ardoq
- FAQs About Business Process Management
What is Business Process Management (BPM)?
To understand what BPM is, we can first look to how Gartner defines Business Process Management1:
“A discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes supporting a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to aligning IT investments to business strategy.”
Why is Business Process Management Important?
BPM, meaning Business Process Management, is crucial because processes do not operate in isolation. To understand what BPM is, Business processes involve many moving parts—people, systems, integrations, data, and interconnected workflows—making them complex and interwoven. The interrelationships can be difficult to identify and manage, especially since many steps are automated and hidden from view. In addition, IT and business professionals often use different terminology when describing change processes, creating confusion and misunderstandings.
This complexity creates a challenge for organizations looking to automate processes, digitalize customer experiences, improve operations, or adapt to regulatory pressures. Changing any element impacts the others, which may be a reason up to 70% of business transformation projects fail.
BPM addresses this issue by continuously mapping the interrelationships between business strategies, capabilities, processes, people, and technologies. With a clear, up-to-date understanding of the interrelationships within the organization and how each part contributes to success, decision-makers can better communicate their vision, strengthen collaboration, and manage business, process, or technology transformation.
Above: Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture create links between business and IT, helping leaders navigate change and succeed in their transformation journeys.
Types of BPM
There are three main types of Business Process Management (BPM): integration-centric, human-centric, and document-centric.
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Integration-Centric BPM: Focuses on processes with minimal human involvement, relying on APIs and systems to integrate data, such as HRM or CRM platforms.
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Human-Centric BPM: Designed for processes requiring human input or approvals. User-friendly interfaces with tools like drag-and-drop make assigning tasks uncomplicated and ensure accountability.
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Document-Centric BPM: Centers around managing specific documents, like contracts, that need to go through various approval steps to finalize agreements between clients and vendors.
Business Process Management Lifecycle in 5 Stages
Business Process Management can be broken down into several key stages. The first three are primarily for defining objectives and scope, modeling the processes, and execution. The final two are part of ongoing optimization and refinement efforts. Like many large-scale organizational initiatives, BPM is not a one-time project but a continuous practice that improves business outcomes.
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Analyze or Design: Define and map out workflows, specifying key inputs, outputs, and participants. Establish clear objectives to ensure the process aligns with business goals and meets organizational needs effectively.
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Model: Visualize workflows using diagrams or tools to simulate processes. Analyze potential outcomes, identify bottlenecks, and adjust parameters to ensure the process operates smoothly under various scenarios.
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Execute: Implement the designed process using tools, automation, or manual workflows. Ensure proper task assignments, align with technology systems, and begin running the process in real-world environments.
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Monitor: Continuously track process performance using metrics and KPIs. Identify issues, inefficiencies, or deviations from expectations to ensure processes remain aligned with business objectives.
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Optimize: Use data and insights from monitoring to refine workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve outcomes. Adapt processes to changing business needs for ongoing improvement and growth.
Business Process Management Examples
Some examples of business processes provided by BPMN include:
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Order Fulfillment: Processing customer orders from receipt to delivery, ensuring accuracy, timely updates, and customer satisfaction.
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Shipment Process: Managing the logistics of transporting goods, including packing, labeling, tracking, and delivery to the customer.
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Customer Refund Process: Handling returns and refunds by validating claims, processing payments, and updating records to maintain customer trust and compliance.
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Invoice Process: Generating, sending, and managing customer invoices while ensuring accuracy in billing, payment tracking, and record-keeping.
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Customer Onboarding: Introducing new customers to products or services, providing guidance, support, and resources to ensure a smooth start and build long-term relationships.
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Account Management: Maintaining ongoing customer relationships, addressing their needs, resolving issues, and fostering loyalty for future growth.
Business Process Management Benefits
By capturing and analyzing processes across the organization, senior decision-makers can realize the benefits of clearly understanding how business capabilities are operationally executed through detailed workflows and activities. These processes may be manual, automated, or semi-automated.
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Improves Visibility and Transparency: BPM provides visibility into how various processes function within the organization. This visibility allows decision-makers to understand how each process contributes to the overall strategy and where improvements can be made.
- Facilitates Process Optimization, Standardization, and Consistency: BPM helps to standardize processes across the organization, ensuring that tasks are performed consistently and efficiently. This is particularly important for companies that want to streamline operations across multiple locations or comply with industry standards and regulations.
- Improves Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management: For industries subject to regulatory compliance, Business Process Management helps ensure that all necessary steps in a process are followed and documented appropriately. It also aids in identifying and mitigating risks associated with various business processes.
- Aligns Processes with Strategy: BPM helps align business processes with the organization’s strategic objectives. By mapping processes, identifying inefficiencies, and streamlining workflows, BPM ensures that operational activities are aligned with strategic goals.
Business Process Management offers visibility that benefits many people, including:
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IT and business leaders
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Process managers and process owners
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Process management participants
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Enterprise, Business, and Solution Architects
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Business analysts and strategic planners
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Process management participants
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Information security officers
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Risk specialists, auditors, and compliance officers
Business Process Management: Key Questions and Use Cases
Some of the key questions BPM helps answer include:
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What Are the Business Processes Across My Organization?
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Which Technologies Are Used to Deliver Those Processes?
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Which Processes Enable Business Capabilities?
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How Effective or Efficient are My Processes in Terms of Maturity, Duration, and Automation?
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Who is Responsible For the Business Processes?
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Which Processes Deal with Sensitive Data?
Answers to these questions are helpful in many situations, such as:
1. During a Reorganization: When an organization needs to merge teams and streamline operations, it needs a clear view of current processes to identify inefficiencies and align operations with new organizational goals.
2. When Planning and Executing a Merger or Acquisition: The overview from BPM helps organizations understand and integrate workflows and evaluate the efficiency and necessity of IT systems connected to those flows.
3. When Hiring and Onboarding Leaders: Insights from BPM provide incoming leaders with a clear understanding of the organization's strategies and workflows. This transparency helps them quickly grasp the organization's operational landscape and sets them up for success.
4. When Cutting Costs or Optimizing IT: BPM helps organizations efficiently analyze their application portfolio, identify application rationalization opportunities, and assess the impact of making IT changes on business processes.
5. When Complying with Regulatory Requirements: Organizations in regulated industries often document key processes in multiple systems. Integrating that information with EA platforms allows process owners, architects, compliance officers, and others to align business processes and dataflows with regulatory requirements.
What Are the Challenges of Business Process Management?
Business Process Management is challenging because it requires aligning diverse stakeholders, navigating organizational silos, and adapting to constant changes in technology, markets, and regulations.
Processes often need more transparency, making it very challenging for any single team, department, or function to identify inefficiencies or overlaps fully. Successfully implementing process improvements hinges on effective cross-functional collaboration, cultural buy-in, and complex tools and systems integration. Managing and optimizing processes can become overwhelming without real-time data informing decision-making and a clear strategy.
Organizations will often struggle with the following key challenges in Business Process Management:
- Unclear Processes Leading to Inefficiency
Vague or poorly documented workflows can cause confusion, redundancies, and delays, making it hard for teams to execute tasks effectively or achieve consistent outcomes. - Misaligned Responsibilities Across Teams
When roles and accountabilities are unclear, tasks can fall through the cracks, leading to missed deadlines, duplicated efforts, and strained interdepartmental relationships. - Difficulty in Adapting to Rapid Changes
Processes that lack flexibility struggle to accommodate market shifts, customer demands, or emerging technologies, leaving businesses disadvantaged in competitive or dynamic environments. - Complex IT System Dependencies That Hinder Agility
Relying on overly intricate or outdated IT systems creates bottlenecks, as changes or integrations often require significant time, resources, and specialized expertise to implement. - Lack of Visibility Into Operations
Without real-time insights or clear performance metrics, organizations struggle to identify inefficiencies, measure success, or make informed decisions to improve processes. - Challenges in Maintaining Regulatory Compliance
Keeping up with ever-evolving legal and industry standards is challenging, especially when processes are not regularly reviewed or lack built-in compliance checks.
Business Process Management Best Practices
With this high-level understanding of where organizations fall short, what are some key practices businesses can use to manage their processes better? Here are 7 best practices to guide better, more effective (BPM) Business Process Management:
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Foster Transparency Across Teams
Ensure all stakeholders have visibility into processes, roles, and responsibilities to reduce silos and promote accountability. -
Leverage Data-Driven Insights
Use real-time data and analytics to identify inefficiencies, track performance, and guide decision-making. -
Integrate with Enterprise Architecture (EA)
Use Enterprise Architecture tools to map processes in the context of the organization's broader systems, ensuring alignment with strategic goals, teams, and supporting technology. -
Continuously Monitor and Optimize
Implement feedback loops and KPIs to regularly assess and improve processes based on measurable outcomes. -
Standardize Processes Where Possible
Develop clear, repeatable workflows to reduce variability, improve efficiency, and simplify compliance. -
Encourage Stakeholder Collaboration
Engage cross-functional teams in process design and improvements to ensure processes meet diverse needs. -
Prioritize Change Management
Prepare for resistance to new processes with clear communication, training, and support to ensure successful adoption.
What is Business Process Management Software?
Organizations may use several types of software to manage business processes.
- Workflow automation tools
Workflow automation tools help streamline repetitive tasks, ensuring processes follow a defined path. These tools improve efficiency and reduce errors but can lack flexibility for complex processes. - Process modeling tools
Process modeling tools enable teams to visualize and design workflows using diagrams like BPMN. While great for collaboration and analysis, they don’t execute processes and require integration with other systems. - Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)
Comprehensive BPMS offer end-to-end solutions for designing, automating, monitoring, and optimizing processes. These are highly customizable and integrate well with enterprise systems but are often expensive and complex to implement. - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPA focuses on automating repetitive, rule-based tasks by mimicking human interactions with systems. It is cost-effective and swift to deploy but needs to be more adaptable to non-standard processes. - Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems
ERP systems provide centralized management for business functions like finance and HR. They improve cross-department efficiency but are often costly and focus more on integration than optimization. - Enterprise Architecture Platforms
Enterprise Architecture platforms like Ardoq are increasingly used to manage and improve business processes. These platforms provide a holistic view of the organization, linking processes, systems, and data to strategic objectives. They excel at uncovering dependencies, enabling data-driven decision-making, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration. However, they require careful configuration and ongoing maintenance to deliver maximum value. Enterprise Architecture platforms can be transformative for organizations aligning processes with broader business goals.
Features Every Business Process Management Tool Should Have
An effective Business Process Management (BPM) solution or tool should have the following key features to ensure it delivers value and meets the needs of the organization:
- Process Modeling and Visualization
An effective BPM tool must allow users to design, model, and visualize processes easily. This often involves using drag-and-drop interfaces and standard notations like BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) to create clear and understandable process maps. - Workflow Automation
Automation capabilities are crucial for streamlining repetitive and time-consuming tasks. A BPM tool should enable the execution of workflows, enforce rules, and integrate with other systems to minimize manual interventions and reduce errors. - Real-Time Monitoring and Analytics
Monitoring processes in real time and analyzing performance metrics is essential for identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. Dashboards and reporting features help decision-makers track progress and measure outcomes against KPIs. - Integration and Scalability
A good BPM tool should integrate seamlessly with existing enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, and RPA platforms. Scalability is also essential to ensure the tool can handle increased complexity and process volume as the organization grows. - Collaboration and Communication Support
Effective BPM tools promote cross-functional collaboration by allowing stakeholders to comment, review, and update processes in a centralized environment. Features like task assignments, notifications, and version control enhance teamwork and accountability.
These features ensure that a BPM solution optimizes processes and supports continuous improvement and alignment with organizational goals.
Business Process Management With Ardoq
Ardoq’s Business Process Management Solution helps organizations overcome siloed teams and disconnected processes to streamline, modernize, and transform. The solution provides a clear overview of how business processes, capabilities, teams, and IT are interconnected.
Ardoq’s BPM solution empowers businesses to create a more efficient enterprise by:
- Capturing and maintaining business processes and owners across the organization
- Providing a valuable understanding of how processes are connected to business capabilities and strategy to help the business stay aligned
- Providing a single source of truth about the technologies and data that are used to deliver the processes
- Analyzing the potential impact of changing processes or IT systems
Ardoq’s suite of integrations and Excel importer eases the maintenance of process models by connecting to existing Business Process Intelligence tools. This enables organizations to get vital process information and insight into interdependencies from a broader EA perspective.
Learn how Ardoq’s integration with SAP Signavio makes integrating and maintaining processes even more swift and streamlined.
In addition to this solution, Ardoq has acquired ShiftX, an AI-driven process modeling platform, and announced a partnership with process mining leader Celonis. These developments aim to expand Ardoq’s Business Process Transformation capabilities significantly.
Get in touch to see how Ardoq can help business and IT teams combat complexity and become more agile.
FAQs About Business Process Management
What Is a Business Process Versus a Business Capability?
Business processes and capabilities provide a thorough view of organizational performance and potential, aiding strategic decision-making and day-to-day operations.
A business capability is a more abstract concept that describes the organization's capacity to achieve a specific business outcome or goal. A business capability map documents an organization’s core functions at a high level, showing what it does to achieve its goals, independent of processes, people, or technology. These concepts reflect the organization’s potential or ability to perform related activities, regardless of how these activities are performed and what processes are used.
A business process is a structured set of activities to produce a specific service or product for customers or stakeholders. Processes are about the execution of activities (the "how”). In contrast, capabilities focus on the capacity or ability of the organization to perform specific activities or functions, in other words, the “what.”
For more information, see What Are the Differences Between Business Capabilities, Processes, and Value Streams?
Is BPM Like Task or Project Management?
BPM is not the same as task or project management, though they share some similarities. Task management focuses on organizing individual tasks, and project management deals with planning and executing temporary initiatives with a clear start and end. On the other hand, Business Process Management (BPM) is about designing, automating, monitoring, and optimizing ongoing, repeatable processes that drive business operations.
While tasks and projects can be part of processes, BPM takes a broader, strategic approach to ensure workflows are efficient, consistent, and aligned with organizational goals. It’s more about long-term process improvement than managing discrete activities.
What are the Various ‘Levels of Concern’ in BPM?
The various levels of concern in Business Process Management (BPM) address different aspects of managing and improving processes. At the strategic level, processes are aligned with business goals and long-term outcomes. The design/modeling level focuses on creating or redesigning workflows for clarity and efficiency. The operational/execution level ensures processes run smoothly daily, often leveraging automation. The monitoring and analysis level tracks performance and identifies inefficiencies through data insights. Finally, the optimization level drives continuous improvement to enhance efficiency and adapt processes to evolving business needs. Together, these levels provide a broad framework for aligning, managing, and refining processes to support organizational objectives effectively.
What is the Future of Business Process Management?
Combining Enterprise Architecture insights with process mining tools will make it much more straightforward for organizations to understand business processes, interdependencies, and optimization opportunities transparently
1Gartner. (n.d.). Definition of Business Process Management (BPM).
