BPM Versus BI

BPM is the abbreviation of Business Process Management while BI is an abbreviation of Business Intelligence. There is a direct relation between BPM and BI that BPM management concept adopts purely technological systems like BI and both makes a business more intelligent or more robust to incidences and easier to analyze. The kind of intelligence and robustness BPM and BI offers to a business differs in the concept and purpose.

Lets start with BI, business intelligence software products comes like any software package with different characteristics that makes one desktop application or user interface more user friendly and goal performer. Examples of such BI products are: Business Objects, Cognos, or Oracle BI suite, etc which differs with their user interface and software capabilities. That makes a company who needs BI to have preferences of which BI product to use.

However, why do companies need BI? BI as a software offers a connection to all enterprise databases which allow users build their own schemas and retrieve data, analyze it and publish it in reports in the shape business needs. That will allow a company to collect all its data sources in one data warehouse to see how business goals are met technical wise, production wise and also from a revenue assurance perspective. You can aggregate the revenues per showroom, per region, per sales officer, etc for a service provider. You can retrieve the data of highest dropped calls per city, village, cell per hour, or day, or weak, or month or year in a telecom company. You can draw charts of percentages of drug consumption in different regions and per different durations, this is how BI serves your business through stored data.

On the other hand, BPM is a management concept, it can be automated or not, the basic idea of BPM is to manage the business processes so as to structure and order the total business on a procedural way. Each workflow (not a data) is a part of a process, but can produce data that can be analyzed by business intelligence products or business performance management products. BPM can also be integrated to other IT systems such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and Workflow Engines (Hummingbird, SharePoint, HandySoft, etc). They "BPM with its integrated systems" can be a part of the enterprise adoption of one of the Quality standards like EFQM, ETOM, BSC, etc. An example of such BPM product vendors are: IDS Scheer, Proforma, iGrafx, MEGA International,Telelogic, IBM, etc.

However, why do companies need BPM? BPM a new plan for documenting all work steps and workflow in processes and procedures. The documented procedures should be flexible to fit all work scenarios and will be automated via a BPM software toolset, so that each process is drawn with its phases assigned to the responsible person, you can analyze and optimize each process according to best practices. Now the role of Performance Management tools comes to have scorecards and measure the defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each process and for the company; structural and procedural wise. You can also draw graphical representations to follow up process delay, or a hanging step. You can monitor the behavior of employees through process performance, you can either evaluate weak points in the workflow to design better steps in a process, or do a radical process re-engineering according to results. You can measure your KPI’s according to competitors in the region.

Applying BPM to the enterprise not only saves the incremental improvement but also adds a radical improvement due to its support to strategic business planning, modeling the enterprise, evaluating processes, benchmarking and best practices, change management, and information management. Whilst applying BI to enterprise different data sources or databases will help in taking decisions, assuring consistency, greater access to information, managing operational costs.