When choosing a business process management solution, you need to know the three types of business processes and solutions available to your company.
Your organization runs on processes — they align your resources, technology and supporting structures so you can attain your business strategy and gain competitive advantages. But to get there, you need to optimize those processes for how your organization wants to run.
Many technological solutions can help you, and you need to choose the right one before you begin. If you need something that will show you how your company is running from end to end, a business process management solution (BPMS) might be the right answer.
A BPM solution will provide you with a platform to model, automate, manage, optimize and quickly fine-tune your business processes while allowing your teams to work with each other and with clients more efficiently.
The right BPMS will help you meet multiple needs across your organization’s business areas. But when you choose a BPMS, you must be able to identify the right features to meet your exact needs. To do that, you need to know the three business process types.
Learning the Different Types of Business Process Management Solutions
What are the three types of business processes, and how are they managed? Traditionally, BPM solutions are either human centric, document centric or integration centric. While the lines between the three different types blur more and more as the market consolidates, most of these tools continue to solve for one of these three broad, primary focuses.
Here’s a quick definition of each business process area to help you find the right BPM solution for you.
1. Human Centric
Human-centric BPM solutions focus on the relationship between people and tasks to foster better collaboration. This approach acknowledges there are several activities that only people can complete.
A human-centered approach ensures hard-to-replace tasks still have a process flow in place. They allow you to reassign tasks, pause them and get back to them later — which can reduce risk, improve management and give you higher compliance rates.
These tasks include reviewing data; creating (repeatable) documents, such as contracts, proposals and reports; developing images for design; approving or authorizing; and so on.
While humans still have to carry out the actual task, automation is built into the human-centric BPMS through notifications, alerts and warnings to help users understand when a certain activity either hasn’t been performed or is ready to be performed.
2. Document Centric
If your organization is involved in law, engineering, clinical testing, contract management or any other industry that relies on reports or other papers, then this might be the type of BPM solution for you.
A document-centric BPM model places importance on the flow of documents from one team to another due to the high level of important documentation within that organization’s industry or company. As a result, they help move documents from formatting and verifying to routing and getting the document signed.
Document-centric process management enhances your company’s processes by organizing the document flow people use in their jobs. The primary goal is to dive into the processes as a whole and find any obstacles preventing the document flow from occurring seamlessly.
While this BPMS approach primarily zooms in on documents, people are still a major component and should collaborate to ensure agility within document management.
3. Integration Centric
These BPM models try to avoid human interference as much as possible by focusing on repetitive transitions and automated workflows. An integration-centric BPM solution builds and improves applications to combine business process management with service-oriented architecture (SOA), so your organization can keep up with changing market conditions. SOA defines how computer programs and other computing entities interact with each other.
The combination of the two within an integration-centric BPMS helps to minimize management overhead and allows you to reuse your application objects or system artifacts, thanks to its model-driven development.
Choosing the Right Types of Business Process Management
When it comes down to it, you need to consider how your organization currently runs and where you want it to be in the future. Choosing a BPM solution is not an overnight decision, but you don’t want to take so long that you lose out on the benefits of having highly efficient — and at least partially automated — business processes.
Join enterprise automation experts to learn the benefits of combining complementary RPA and BPM software engines to help your organization save time and money.
