When you first implemented your ERP system, or if you are about to, rethinking all your business processes before system configuration was a opportunity to take a big leap forward, weeding out redundancies, inefficiencies, obsolete procedures and dumb ideas and adding new functionality, streamlined workflows and significant automation of quotidian tasks. It is that business process re-engineering that delivers the first big benefit to organizations when they go live. So, how do you keep that spirit of process improvement alive and keep your ERP system from beginning a long, slow, inexorable slide into obsolescence? Business Process Management (BPM) is the answer.
Think of BPM as a €continuous improvement engine€ for your ERP system. BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change. Studies indicate that BPM helps organizations to gain higher customer satisfaction, product quality, delivery speed and time-to-market speed. Processes, simply put, are all the things an organization does to get work done and keep clients happy. Improving how processes flow and how they affect other processes is an ongoing opportunity to remove waste and add value. BPM is the tool you can use to create better processes and, in turn, enjoy lower costs, higher revenues, proactive employees, and happier customers. BPM is more than software. It is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organization.
BPM
enables businesses to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors. BPM principles and tools allow users to:

Strategize - create functions and processes
Define - baseline the process or the process improvement
Model - simulate the change to the process.
Analyze - compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
Improve - select and implement the improvement
Control - deploy this implementation and monitor the improvement in real time and Re-engineer - revamp the processes from scratch for better results.

In today's fast changing business environment, organizations can't be tied down to rigid rules and procedures. They need to be to be agile and ready to respond in real time to whatever challenges and opportunities come their way. BPM provides that agility by giving companies direct control over operational processes.
BPM can help your organization become more agile in a number of different ways:

" Increased productivity: In today's economy companies need to find ways to do more with less. BPM principles help organizations boost productivity by streamlining and automating processes, freeing personnel for more productive work.

" Time to market: When a new idea or product comes along, effective BPM helps you be the €first mover€ and reach markets when margins are high and competition just emerging.

" Globalization: BPM can help continuously re-map your supply chain operations, so you can take enter new markets, respond to opportunities and lower manufacturing costs.

" Staying in compliance: Keeping up with complex, constantly changing compliance, regulatory, and corporate governance requirements can be costly and time-consuming. Using BPM enables you to re-engineer processes to essentially automate compliance.

BPM creates a culture of innovation, an appetite for change and a method for continuous improvement that will keep your ERP system, nimble, responsive and relevant, year after year.