How to Choose the Right Business Process Management Suite for Your Company

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More than 15 vendors in the business process management (BPM) marketplace offer BPM suites. These solutions offer a variety of features keyed to what developers think companies want in a suite. As time goes on, more and more vendors will enter the marketplace, offering additional BPM solutions. With so many vendors offering so many options, how do enterprises choose a BPM suite that's right for them?

Most enterprises have the same goal in mind when they embark on a review of BPM suites: to find a long-term solution to business process requirements. That's not easy with so many vendors out there. Some offer solutions that simply add BPM features to workflow-centric or integration-centric architectures. That's not necessarily the best approach, however. It might offer short-term value, but is not the answer a business needs over the long haul. Below are three guidelines to help with your search for a long-term answer.

#1: Find a Suite that Fits Your Process Type

Bruce Silver, an independent analyst covering BPM technology, offers good advice on selecting a BPM solution. He recommends looking for one that fits your specific process type and your modeling and implementation lifecycle.
 
Processes differ in variables like instance volume, intensity of human interaction, intensity of application integration, need for business rule management, content management, automated events and exception handling. Although most BPM vendors address most or all of these issues in their solutions, they do so to different degrees. Process analysis, says Silver, helps managers understand the proper weighting in his/her application.

In addition, Silver says that managers should look for a solution that "enables analysts to play a more direct role in modeling and implementation, reducing the need for programming to build production BPM solutions."

#2: Make Sure the Suite Has The Right Characteristics

BPM suites should have the following general characteristics in a BPM solution. When combined, these characteristics enable a BPM suite to reach its full potential as a management solution. They also enable companies to reap the numerous benefits BPM promises.

• Scalability

Because the BPM suite is part of the company's enterprise process automation efforts, the suite needs to have global scalability. That includes compliance with standards like Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

• Collaboration

Collaboration is the key to getting the most out of a BPM suite. Empowering the business user to design and deploy processes along with members of the IT team is what enables companies to tap BPM's awesome potential.

• Dynamic Changes

BPM solutions need a highly flexible service-oriented integration framework. This enables dynamic changes to be made without retooling other software and also helps firms to leverage existing software, thereby cutting costs and harnessing the power of Web services.

• System Extensibility

To be effective, a BPM solution needs the capability to extend (and customize) the user interface, data model and work flow elements. Extensibility is essential to delivering a competitive advantage through continuous process improvement.

• Data Transparency

Enterprise-wide process automation requires the re-use of data. Because business processes are independent, this capability enables a solution to grow beyond a single, isolated deployment.

#3: Check on the Suite's Technical Components.

To provide the features already described, a BPM suite needs the right technical components. They are the "physical mechanisms" by which those features are rendered possible. Although it can be difficult to find a suite offering every component you want, the solutions you're considering should have at least the following six components:

• Design Tools
• API/Framework layer
• Process Workflow Tools
• Data Transformation
• Connectivity Services
• Business Activity Management

Design tools enable business users to develop either manual or automated process flows. They serve as a bridge between IT people and business users, allowing them to collaborate on projects. They also let business users accommodate dynamic changes to a process without IT's help.

A BPM suite needs the ability to fit into your existing system without making a big impact on current technology. Otherwise, the suite defeats one of the purposes of bringing in a BPM solution. The API/Framework layer enables the suite to extend its capabilities throughout the enterprise while providing considerable functionality right out of the box.

The process workflow tools are, from a purely technical standpoint, the suite's key processing components. They streamline and limit human involvement in processes, which in turn reduces errors, speeds processing and cuts costs. In other words, process workflow tools are the essence of the solution.

Data transformation services facilitate the smooth exchange of data necessary between disparate systems. They eliminate the need for implementing third-party mapping engines, which convert all data to a format that the system readily understands.
Connectivity services are vital to a successful BPM implementation. Technologies such as adapters, web services and integration servers enable companies to integrate back-office systems with front-room activities. Connectivity services are, in a sense, the "glue" that holds everything together.

Business activity management tools let you track events and activities generated by the execution of business processes. The ability to do so, along with analysis and the correct metrics, drives the continuous improvement process. Without these tools, implementing a BPM suite would lose a great deal of effectiveness.

In addition to these components, product architecture is a key element to focus on in a BPM solution. Business users should look for suites that offer open architecture, which eliminates the need for often costly proprietary application services The right architecture enables the deployment of different components to different physical machines, allowing for load balancing and fault tolerance, among other things.

These six components are the "heart" of a BPM solution. They support the essential features that a solution needs to generate the kind of benefits BPM promises. The solution should also have a track record of handling the types of processes you have in your enterprise. Using these guidelines when reviewing BPM suites brings you and your firm one step closer to choosing the kind of long-term solution that you need.