BPM and SOA: Connecting for Success

The advent of online commerce has created challenges and opportunities alike. While success is not guaranteed, the demand for greater revenues and cheaper products will continue to drive the market. In such an environment, profitability is a factor of efficiency and continual innovation. This requires that companies should be quick in adjusting their processes to meet the shift in customer and market dynamics and cost pressures.

Companies are turning to proactive Business Process Management (BPM) solutions to provide them with a practical way to adapt their operations to become more flexible, responsive, and efficient. BPM has matured from earlier iterations when it relied heavily on static flowcharts to map out corporate processes in mostly unchanging organizations; today, it has become a more complete discipline that applies sophisticated software and best practices to design, simulate, automate, manage, and fine-tune processes to coordinate operations with dynamic business priorities.

Forrester Research forecasts that BPM software revenues will hit $2.7 billion in 2009, more than double what they were just two years ago. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has played a key role in BPM’s rise. SOA provides modular middleware and development tools that BPM suites can tap into to quickly build new processes and alter existing ones to react to changing business needs. By using SOA in conjunction with BPM, companies can make rapid changes in processes without having to code applications. This opens the door for business managers to adjust processes as their requirements change instead of having to wait for hours, days, or longer for developers to write new code.

BPM suites provide companies with the tools to optimize both their staff and technology resources. The software identifies operational inefficiencies and automates process changes using business rules specified by the end-user to help them improve the flow of routine business tasks. For example, a retailer that needs to accelerate distribution for a particular product can get order information to supply chain partners in near real time and get the merchandise to buyers faster by automating the process.

Organizations can apply BPM to tackle a host of other issues, such as resolving corporate compliance problems, linking separate processes to streamline overall business goals, and improving the quality of information delivered to customers and partners. A Gartner study from July 2005 reports that 67 percent of all BPM initiatives were fully implemented within six months and 78 percent of all BPM initiatives result in an internal rate of return of more than 15 percent. The beauty of BPM is that it enables rapid return on investment.

Using a BPM solution that can accurately measure ROI, companies can validate project success and apply that experience to make other adjustments. Ultimately, what BPM and SOA offer is the ability to connect business services with the technology and people that support operations. Once that connection is made, companies can reduce much of the complexity associated with their operations to create a more cost-effective and competitive organization. The key to this success is to identify projects that can yield a quantifiable return from process improvements.