BPM for All

RPA mission is automation of processes. BPM focus is on process modeling and management. If RPA is done without BPM, it implies unmanaged processes . Unmanaged processes are especially dangerous when they are robotic processes bare of any human control and supervision. Implementing RPA without BPM is direct way to erasing control in an organization. On another hand, RPA is an ideal environment for implementation of BPM initiatives. It allows for a quick practical structuring of processes in an organization through easy universal scripting of traditional human-centric interfaces. This implicitly initiates a convenient library of business objects suitable for further modeling, modernization and optimization. In this way, RPA de-facto delivers company-wide process mapping as an essential but often disregarded side effect of its usage. Skillful attention to this aggregated formalization through a prism of BPM allows to integrate legacy processes and IT infrastructure of a company on a ...

Major companies are not easy to transform digitally due to inertia of a large structure and deeply rooted traditions. Diverse IT landscape and distributed faculties make it especially difficult and expensive to migrate established business routine. On the contrary, smaller companies can quickly transform their operations into digital field due to limited footprint and simpler workflows. For the same reason, an effect of innovation appears much quicker, is easier to measure and correct depending on obtained results. Smaller companies simply cannot afford being inefficient, unlike their bigger counterparts, which have at least a temporal security belt of size and established market share. Quick technical and operational optimization offered by digital tools is the primary factor of growth for an emerging business. Digital transformation offers to smaller companies unique competitive advantages by effectively replacing costly manual operations by affordable and adaptive automation of busi...

Due to explosive growth in robotics and AI automated processes are quickly becoming an essential part of business. Wide adoption of automated processes creates significant challenges for business management. Automated processes are both simpler and more complex to manage, compared to manual processes. Simpler, because automation is void of any personal attitude or bias of human workers. More complex, exactly for the same reason of absolute impersonation and concentrated responsibility. In case of an error in manual process there is always a space for an additional control and adjustment of task by a worker. In contrast, automated tasks run autonomously and on far higher speeds. It makes a mission of controlling automated tasks far more stressful and dangerous. Any occasional error on a single process step can randomly propagate the whole running process chain causing catastrophic damages for the whole business. These elevated control requirements for automated processes make it impossi...

Agile project management is becoming a popular practice, especially in IT development. It offers significant merit in splitting large missions into small sprints dynamically configurable across work teams. When applied creatively, agile approach may significantly improve business responsiveness to emerging challenges in dynamic economic environment. Despite tempting benefits, agile management bears also significant business risks. Due to simplified decision making and direct informal communication agile approach may potentially dissolve centralized coordination and endanger strategic planning in higher level scope of the whole organization. For this reason, large corporations are typically very cautious on implementing agile practices and sustain from scaling them too widely. How a company can combine all benefits of agile management and avoid associated risks? Key factor in achieving a balance is accurate business modeling. BPM technology brings necessary structuring and transparenc...

Crucial and often missed factor of success for an automation initiative is careful evaluation of process interaction with other processes. As a rule, processes, which have excessive dependencies and external communications are especially difficult to automate. Complexity of automation may grow exponentially with the increase in process linking. Overall degree of link density for processes inside a business model is essential but rarely discussed measure of integration and stability of business as a whole. Cascading process links with progressive nested dependencies further complicate and potentially delay positive process outcomes. To correctly estimate true potential of process improvement, business analysts should never consider any process standalone but only in the context of its interaction with other parts of business model. Automating a process alone is as artificial as running a single department without the whole company in place. Preparing to enterprise automation, always b...

Predominant trend of business development in technology age is growing complexity. This complexity is not concentrated densely in any specific area, such as IT but is distributed evenly across all areas and aspects of business. At certain stage it became evident that it is impossible to hold and manage growing complexity of business by traditional means of classic business administration. BPM came to scene as a way to cope with versatility and volatility of modern business environments through systematic modeling and structuring organizations towards contemporary technology trends. The idea appeared so tempting that many first stage BPMS pretended to be one stop solution for all business operations, especially in IT field. Of course, it was an exaggeration and false interpretation of real complexity challenge, which caused this development. Consequently, the scope of BPM systems gradually dissolved into various workflow engines and form processors. Of course, this scope is too narrow a...

Due recognition of strengths and weaknesses, ability to focus on primary directions and outsource side activities are crucial for efficient development of any business. It is manifestation of universal principle of separation of labor , which dominates economical development for past centuries. Further deepening of specialization became even more essential with formation of global market and rapid digitization of economy, which progressively eliminates few yet existing boundaries. The ability to optimally delegate secondary tasks becomes a key in achieving business efficiency. However, this established global trend also bears substantial dangers. A company may easily loose competitive advantage and even corporate identity by improperly outsourcing its core technologies and know-how. Proper recognition of relevant delegation scope is a crucial factor for survival and balanced development of an organization. BPM plays especially important role in evaluation and planning of outsourcing ...

Simplification of business through IT is often seen among primary benefits of the ongoing digital revolution. Low-code / no-code business applications are considered as a primary way to facilitate digital transformation of business. Complex digital solutions are respectively seen as failures in delivery of this expected and promised simplicity. This collision is not related to IT or to modern technological age. Rather, it is a result of irrational and deeply rooted belief in miracles . It is so tempting and attractive to believe in a magic new software, which will instantly resolve all business problems, that many experienced managers eventually fall into this dangerous illusion. Multiplied by poor IT awareness and aggressive advertising of vendors, it yields false strategic decisions based on misconception of an illusive simplicity . Why true and efficient business platform cannot be low-code / no-code? Because it must hold and enforce objectively complex real business logic of a comp...

Lack of alignment between IT and business is often seen among primary obstacles to efficient business development. However, it is an exaggeration to literally associate IT and business. With all its power, IT serves just as a tool enabling business operations. As any tool, it has a complex inner structure, which ought not coincide literally with business structure. Therefore, the gap between business and IT is natural and justified. It should not be obligatory avoided. Elimination of this gap will yield either in a sub-optimal IT structured equally to business or in inefficient business borrowing internal logic of IT. Instead, business should aim a synthesis of operations and technology by cultivating distinct features inherent to each domain. The primary gap between IT and business is the gap of misunderstanding . BPM plays the crucial role in overcoming this deficiency of communication. The goal of BPM is in seamless integration of business and IT, not in direct merging of them. BP...

In its early days Facebook had a famous motto "Move fast and break things" once coined by Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, this principle is typical for every startup. In a wider sense, it is also well known fact of economics that developing economies grow much faster than developed ones. When a company grows big it takes hundredths times more time, cost and effort to make the same change as in a small company. It creates a niche of survival for a small business. But it also creates a trap of immobility endangering the existence of large corporations. It can be viewed as a phenomenon of maturity or aging. Alternatively, one can see it as an objective and inevitable side effect of the size and complexity . Knowledge and experience too often degrade speed and appear a killing manifestation of age. BPM is a crucial technology to leverage this fundamental contradiction between accumulated business experience and the ability to quickly respond to newly emerging challenges. BPM turns sta...

The progress of digital technologies is so rapid, so many new promising products appear every day that it creates a false illusion of infinite opportunities to transform an organization. No matter what bright options were missed yesterday, tomorrow will bring even more and better alternatives. This might be a classical argument of a manager who postpones digital transformation. However, this impression of abundance and availability is dangerously elusive. As a rule, the number of technologies, which ideally satisfy requirements of a company, is very limited, if not void at all. The search for the right technology is tedious, requires significant effort and expertise, implementation is complex and error prone. Small quantitative changes tend to gradually accumulate into principal qualitative shifts . If a company fails responding to small day-to-day challenges in digital transformation carefully watched and followed by competitors, it will definitely face one day an abyss, which is imp...

Micro-services is a technology, which enables creation of enterprise applications from small functional blocks distributed across heterogeneous server environments. Micro-services gain popularity due to increasing cloud adoption across organizations undergoing digital transformation. Due to their principal positioning as interoperable blocks of business logic, micro-services win an increasing attention among BPM professionals as a valuable resource of business automation. However, micro-services are not unique in this respect. Interoperable aggregation of business objects dominates development of corporate IT during all its history. Nearly every notable digital business platform offered its own paradigm of distributed interoperability. Micro-services are just a manifestation of this long trend on the current level of technology. As any growing ecosystem of business objects, micro-services principally require systematic structuring and maintenance achievable through BPM. Without delimit...

Consistent integration of heterogeneous enterprise systems is among most distinctive characteristics of corporate IT. Diversity of enterprise architecture appears as a natural answer to objective volatility and complexity of rapidly evolving business environments. Wide palette of IT systems used in an organization ensures quick and flexible response to a variety of existing and potential business challenges. However, universal governance of this versatile landscape is not easy. Enterprise Bridge addresses this persistent problem in corporate IT management by seamless transformation of corporate data and meta-data across the wide range applications and environments. Configurable scenarios of automated migrations ensure enhanced consistency of transformation and incremental continuous integration of dispersed corporate assets. Repeated execution of migration scenarios is achieved through extended persistence capabilities available in new version of Enterprise Bridge. Save your complex a...

Most important indicator of failure in any business initiative is an absent plan or undefined implementation process , in other words, absent business model of the expected change. It is especially relevant to digital transformation due to its complexity and wide implications on the whole business structure. The typical schema of transformation is more or less similar in most organizations. It goes through standard procurement of RFI, RFP, RFQ, POC, etc. Due to common recognition of this procedure, it is generally protective from bureaucratic viewpoint to safeguard decision makers against risks and responsibility on failures. However, it entirely omits most essential questions on how business will evolve during the transformation, how efficiency and revenue potential will change. Usually, a company decides for a solution already implemented in another reputable company with plausible results. It might imply a reliable low risk implementation. Much too often, all "transformation p...

RPA is often considered as an alternative or even replacement to BPM. However, both technologies are complementary and closely similar. RPA plays an important role to introduce modern process governance and automation into business domain, which most desperately needs it, namely, outdated legacy IT systems missing any other alternatives to orchestrate and automate. Implementation of RPA over such systems de facto includes them into modern BPM workflows. Realization of RPA indirectly creates ready and practically proven BPM mapping, which can and should be further used as a ground for systematic upgrade and gradual replacement of existing legacy IT systems with contemporary architecture. In this way, RPA paves a road to efficient BPM driven digital transformation of an organization based on process discovery achieved during RPA deployment. It is important, however, not to consider RPA as an ultimate goal but as a starting point in digital modernization.

Visualization of business processes in BPMN is among strongest features available in recent releases of SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio and SAP Solution Manager. Graphical design of new processes and compact visual representation of existing processes significantly simplify user perception of all complexities behind versatile SAP system landscape. However, direct access to these impressive architectural innovations still demand substantial experience in SAP, relevant education and skills. It might impact the speed and quality of workflow adoption across organizations implementing modern SAP solutions. On another hand, wide process awareness is known as a key factor of success in digital transformation of enterprises. Microsoft Visio and SharePoint serve as an ideal platform to instantly boost process collaboration across an organization, evangelize benefits of process management to all users, radically decrease learning curves and instantly improve process efficiency due to amplified vi...

Primary features of BPMN.Sharp: Full conformance to the latest version of  BPMN 2.0 specification by OMG . Import models from all  major BPM vendors Strict validation of the model according to BPMN specification. Arbitrary scaling and zooming view of most complex diagrams. Support of raster and vector image output. Batch processing of multiple BPMN files. Simple API to create and edit BPMN models. 100% Microsoft .NET managed solution. Loyal open source license for private and commercial use. Grab your copy on NuGet for one-click inclusion into your solution and quick BPMN enablement. Find more details, demo project and commented code samples on GitHub .

RPA mission is automation of processes. BPM focus is on process modeling and management. If RPA is done without BPM, it implies unmanaged processes . Unmanaged processes are especially dangerous when they are robotic processes bare of any human control and supervision. Implementing RPA without BPM is direct way to erasing control in an organization. On another hand, RPA is an ideal environment for implementation of BPM initiatives. It allows for a quick practical structuring of processes in an organization through easy universal scripting of traditional human-centric interfaces. This implicitly initiates a convenient library of business objects suitable for further modeling, modernization and optimization. In this way, RPA de-facto delivers company-wide process mapping as an essential but often disregarded side effect of its usage. Skillful attention to this aggregated formalization through a prism of BPM allows to integrate legacy processes and IT infrastructure of a company on a ...