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.

A trade-off is a concept of losing a value for gaining another. The Quality Cost Time Concept should have a tradeoff to serve company goals.

Owning the customer satisfaction is the key of quality procedures, we mean here an internal or external customer, by breaking few of these procedures we may serve the tradeoff between cost, time, and quality. The concepts of software engineering and system development models like the waterfall model or the spiral model, etc serve in few times this tradeoff. Starting with requirement elicitation that takes a considerable timeframe in a product development lifecycle, to design step, to implementation, then validation and verification. This lifecycle confirms the quality concept, but may not help the time and cost variables, and here we need the tradeoff.

Nothing do everything, here is a concept of specialization. And here it can be easier for shareholders, stakeholders, and customers to understand the tradeoff equations. The three equations of the variables Q,C, and T can be solved if we understand the dependencies of the variables as functions of different factors and its relations to each other.

We don’t need to make such discussion as a mathematical article, but we should understand that quality can be transferred into a constant if we deal with the cost and time variables. Away from saturation and low productivity levels, Time is inversely proportional to Cost, pay more or get more resources you can save time, getting more resources will logically and to some limit increase the quality. If we specialize the product not to be all purpose losing many quality concepts, if we distribute the resources in a mature way, if every resource is evaluated enough; then no need for tradeoffs. But if a QCT tradeoff is needed under the request of the customer, it will directly affect one, two , or all factors in the QCT concept.

BPM from zero to infinity discusses the success of BPM projects in different enterprises, success depends on enterprise type and culture. I mean by type, the company type as a product or service provider to specify company main goals and requirements. And by culture, the way it perform operations and do its internal and external communications.

A lot of basic questions arise here, Is BPM required for each company, What type of company needs BPM more? Is it large companies, small companies or all need BPM, Can BPM be a solution for all problems inside a company and how BPM solves it if it’s a possible solution? Are there any preceding steps to a BPM project, how BPM starts in a company and where it ends? Are there any prerequisites before starting with a BPM project and how much BPR radical process re-engineering is the best choice for a business? However can we own a final answer for all these or more questions? I doubt we can cover all!! The success of BPM is not by doing certain steps or doing a set of plans, but it’s a reflection on the daily workflow behavior for each employee and each process in an enterprise. Before starting with a BPM project you should have defined roles and responsibilities per department and per employee.

From my experience, the most challenging problem that makes an enterprise consume its resources illogically is the overlap in duties especially between departments, lets say if engineering people do customer surveys this will overlap marketing people basic work to contact customers, and/or to analyze their needs. Work must be defined for each job title, responsibilities should have a start and end till a specific person in his/her department handover the process to the other person responsible to continue other steps in another department. On the other hand, a big issue many enterprises face which is the lack of communications between different levels. Defining a rule of communicating information internally and externally in departmental basis should be clear to each employee. So that the general company strategy and planned achievements are known, understood, and audited by each employee. After these important steps of gap analysis in an enterprise, defining roles and responsibilities, defining communication rules and policies, with already defined strategies to meet the goals in a certain timeline, and what resources are needed for each stage, a BPM project can start.

A BPM project will be a vital step in an enterprise or organization especially those providing services and have competitors in their region. The competition now not only in the sales revenues, but its in customer loyalty and employee loyalty; providing a procedural structure for all company workflow activities. Defining the end to end process with its detailed procedures with each stage assigned to the responsible employee, and then optimizing the process quality, cost, and time-wise which will increase the overall performance, whilst such BPM may lead to a BPR if radical changes are needed.

Finally, business performance management is the most important step at the end of a BPM project that makes it go to infinity and this infinity means business continuity and competition and overall advance in productivity, auditing each process in a company and evaluating its performance through defined key performance indicators (KPI). Also from my work experience a supporting step to perform BPM projects is "knowing your employee"; What’s their needs? and putting the right person in the right place! so that he/she can work with their full productivity and then share in the process with best performance and minimal time helping in the competition, this is an important KPI to consider when reaching the business performance management "The Human Factor."

What is a Process? I read a lot of definitions about processes, but I like to call a process "A TRAIN" this train should start from a specific location and ends to a specific destination in a defined duration, each trailer of a train or process have a weight and holds a number of humans, if one trailer fail to reach the destination, all the train or process will lose its balance and will fail to generally succeed. A business process is not the workflow details, but it’s an abstraction of the enterprise workflow combining all resources in a process to cross correlate all company levels; directorates, departments, and assets to do the business successfully. Same as a telecommunications system, if you don’t remove redundancies you cannot save the channel so you’ll lose time and money and if you compress to high bit rates you’ll lose the quality of service, these three factors are the major factors affecting any business process concept and design: Cost, Time, and Quality. So managing enterprise business processes will need a thorough knowledge of business strategy, business requirements, and new technologies that suit the company goals taking the CTQ concept into consideration.