The 3 Types of Business Process Management Solutions (BPMS)

Learn about the three types of business process management solutions available so you can choose the right one for your organization. Fortunately, with AI, your options and potential for transformative results are greater than ever.

In brief:

• Understanding the three types of business process management solutions is essential for selecting tools that best optimize your company’s operations.
• Business process management solutions (BPMS) help model, automate, manage, and optimize key business processes for improved efficiency.
• Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly enhanced BPMS capabilities, enabling smarter automation, predictive analytics, and faster process adaptation.
• Choosing the right BPMS enables organizations to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and achieve strategic goals.
• It’s crucial to identify and match BPMS features to your organization’s unique process needs for maximum benefit.

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 BPMS 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.

Salesforce found that 74 percent of information technology (IT) and engineering leaders estimate automation saves close to 50 percent of their time, and over 60 percent are using triggered actions to build their automation.

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.

The 3 Types of Business Process Management Solutions

Traditionally, BPM solutions are either human-centric, document-centric or integration-centric. While the lines between the three different types of business process management solutions have blurred more and more as artificial intelligence (AI) and the market matures, 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 business process management solution for you.

1. Human-Centric BPM Solutions

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. These solutions 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.

Today, we have the option to apply an AI agent to these human tasks, which can either replace the entire task or shorten the time to completion, allowing the human to simply approve the result of the AI agent’s work.

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 (or AI agents) 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.

How Generative AI Enhances Human-Centric Solutions

Generative AI strengthens the human-centric BPM model by drafting simple communications or offering decision-making support. For example, AI can compose a response to a client, generate a proposal outline, or flag a report for inconsistencies. These solutions would then be sent to a human for review. This symbiotic relationship saves time while allowing people to stay in control.

We believe when employees are included in the AI implementation process early on, they gain a better understanding of how it supports their day-to-day responsibilities. It helps them see AI as a tool for enhancing their work rather than replace it.

As John Malone, Centric Consulting Management Consultant and Operations Leader, explains, “This approach paves the way for heightened levels of employee engagement and acceptance of AI, the requirements of any successful business transformation.”

2. Document-Centric BPM Solutions

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. These solutions 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 that 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 focuses on documents, people are still a major component and should collaborate to ensure agility within document management. However, like the human-centric processes above, AI agents can be used today in similar ways to read and summarize documents, identify areas for further research or decisions by humans, and remove the dependence on humans.

3. Integration-Centric BPM Solutions

These types of BPM solutions try to avoid human interference as much as possible by focusing on 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.

Combining SOA with BPM within an integration-centric BPMS minimizes management overhead and allows you to reuse your application objects or system artifacts, thanks to its model-driven development. Applying AI agents to workflows can remove dependencies on static decisions, allowing the automated workflow to continue processing through dynamic data and solve issues on the fly.

You can use generative AI to analyze process data across multiple systems and suggest ways to optimize workflows. It can then generate integration scripts that previously required an IT developer. This system intervention can help businesses modernize their operations and connect systems quickly and more accurately.

For instance, a bank implemented a custom machine learning model that automates about 90 percent of the work needed to generate reports crucial to making loan determinations.

Choosing the Right Type of Business Process Management Solution

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. Selecting the right type of business process management solution depends on your organization’s goals, workflow complexity, and the level of automation required.

Each solution plays a distinct role in improving business performance, and many organizations find the greatest success by blending elements of two or more business process management solutions to meet their business goals.

To decide which solutions to implement first, start with a thoughtful, unbiased review of existing processes to uncover inefficiencies, understand their root causes, and engage stakeholders across the organization. Armed with that clarity, you can more clearly see which type of BPM solution will deliver the most powerful impact for your organization.

Business process management provides end-to-end process optimization driven by deep process analysis, prioritization, visibility, and control across your organization. Talk to our BPM experts about how you can get started. Contact us