What is BPM, the difference between BPM and OA, the difference between BPM and EAI

From the 1990s to the present, the information technology work of enterprises has been carried out in full swing, and a lot of business systems have been established successively, which have also brought great benefits to enterprises. However, new problems have arisen, the business has been on these complex systems to put forward newer needs, that is, the need to realize the integration between the system. EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) technology is popular for a while, and has become the object of pursuit of people from all walks of life. After the buzz, many people have clearly recognized that EAI is only for the solution of "data silos" born, and can not solve the integration of business processes. In addition, although many business systems also support workflow technology, but due to the close integration of workflow and business logic, so in the implementation of EAI effect greatly reduced. Practice has shown that optimized, efficient, low-cost business processes will provide enterprises with the magic weapon to distance themselves from their competitors. Efficient business processes not only improve the operational efficiency of the enterprise, but also reduce the cost of the enterprise, so that the enterprise reaches a high degree of automation. Therefore, the business process is the core issue of the enterprise.

In order to adapt the business system to the operation mechanism of the enterprise, it is necessary to carry out a more in-depth integration of many business systems, including data integration, process integration, etc., so BPM (Business Process Management) has arisen with it.

In the IT world, there is an unwritten law that likes to take the concept of fooling people. "2005 is the year of ERP", the slogan just came out, overnight ERP vendors are in full swing, everywhere advocating its advanced concepts, as long as it can be with the ERP next to the edge of the ERP system, are called ERP system, so the direct result of the ERP in China is the end of the failure. BPM is also the same, due to the BPM, ERP, OA, BPM is the same, due to BPM, ERP, OA, Workflow, EAI and other concepts have a certain connection, so many are not immune to the cliché, began to promote their own BPM concept. If you are not learned to fool the ability of the developer, a deep understanding of BPM, really enhance the quality of your products, will not be the market fooled; if you are not learned to prevent fooling the ability of the user, a deep understanding of BPM, can really evaluate a good BPM product, will not be the developer fooled.

On the question of "what is BPM", in many materials and does not give a very clear definition (to determine the meaning), the reason is that many concepts in the IT world in different occasions have different meanings, and with time and continuous development, so can not be called the definition, and can only be called to describe, even if it is an authoritative organization, such as Gartner. Even authoritative organizations, such as the United States Gartner is also to "describe" the word. The following is a summary of Gartner's description of BPM: "Rapid change is impractical while processes are embedded in conventional applications.

The Development of BPM Technologies is enabling business managers to realize the benefits of BPM. of BPM Technologies is enabling business managers to abstract process flows and rules from the underlying applications and infrastructure, and to change them directly."

Here's my understanding of this: It's impractical to change processes embedded in conventional programs quickly. Business processes need to be designed so that managers can design them, and the logic of the processes needs to be extracted from the underlying code, and to change them directly.

Before we understand BPM, let's talk about a more familiar term, Business Process.

Business processes are a series of activities performed by corporations, governments, and various other organizations to achieve their business goals. These activities must be performed by two or more people or IT systems, serially or in parallel, and the execution of the activities needs to meet certain rules and conditions. The figure below shows a report approval process.

In the above chart report approval process, first of all, the relevant business personnel (participants for the people) to the relevant leadership to submit the cost of the statement (implementation of the activities), the leadership approval, the system automatically according to pre-set rules on the total amount of costs Total (process carrying business data) to determine when Total>5000 (rules or conditions) when the need for secondary leadership approval, approval Completed by the document administrator to file and save (the participants for the system). In the whole process, contains manual work (tentatively called AgileWork), such as submitting expense reports, leadership approval, etc., also contains automatic work (tentatively called AgilePart), such as whether to approve, Total value judgment, document preservation and so on.

Based on the above understanding, BPM should be a business process management method in the enterprise, and the software system to support its management is called BPMS (Business Process Management Suite). So BPM should be the method of enterprise management, and BPMS is the establishment, implementation, evaluation and management of enterprise business processes of a group of software systems, that is, we often say that the software platform. In summary, BPM should be able to reflect the following characteristics:

(1) business process modeling: business people completely in the perspective of the business, with a flow chart describing the business process, that is, process design tools.

(2) business process automation: according to the defined process, in the BPM system to automatically execute, completely discard the traditional paper, the process delivery without human intervention, that is, intelligent BPM process engine.

(3) system integration: BPM is not only by people involved, some activities can also be involved by the IT system, for example, in the leave process needs to be in the HR system to determine whether the leave-taker has an annual leave period. This requires BPM to provide automatic job execution functions, such as calling WebService, executing a certain class of methods.

(4) business process management: to be able to visualize and monitor the implementation of the process, the implementation of the process of accidental processing, that is, to provide real-time process monitoring.

(5) Business Process Optimization: Statistics and analysis of process execution (including: efficiency, cost, bottleneck, load). According to the results of statistical analysis, the process transformation to optimize process execution, that is, to provide process simulation and analysis tools.

Business process modeling is the foundation, business process automation and system integration is the means of implementation, business process management is the process, and business process optimization is the goal.BPM is a collection of methodologies and software systems, and, as a methodology, has its own planning, implementation, and management approach. Under the guidance of the methodology, the software system realizes the effective management of business processes. From this point of view, BPM is a continuous process, and the various aspects of this process will constitute a closed loop, which precisely caters to the process of enterprise growth. Therefore, BPMS will definitely play a very important role in the informationization construction of enterprises and improve the competitiveness of enterprises in the market.

2, BPM and Workflow, EAI

First of all, let's take a look at BPM and Workflow. talking about Workflow, we will naturally think of the OA system.

Early eighties, with the production of a large number of PCs as well as the popularization of a group of researchers and developers at MIT first put forward the concept of office automation, and in 1981 published an article: "Etude: An Integrated Document Processing System ". The article mentioned the development of an integrated set of tools, including office workstations and software systems for personal interaction, for office employees to improve the efficiency of the office.