It becomes every company's objectives that it can do its operation to meet business objectives with more agility. In order to achieve that a company has to manage the interaction between human and application that support the business so that it drives business results and create value. A redundant, overlap and island of applications often create difficulties to meet this target. This is where Business Process Management (BPM) discipline can fit, as it refers to activities to optimise the business process in a company by automate manual process based on rules. BPM coordinates interactions between systems, business process and human interaction. Having BPM in place, then tasks can be routing to employees taking away non-value adding activities such as routines decisions, extracting data, filling up the forms.
To support a company in managing various aspects of BPM, Information Technology vendors develop an application suite. The application provide tools so that a business process can be visually design and model, simulate and test business process, automate and control the process as well as provide monitoring and reporting. This apps commonly understand as Business Process Management Systems.
One important key aspect is that the system must be able to talk to external systems, so that is not a stand alone system. Industry has come up with a standard technology which is called Web Services. A common framework of how this technology is deployed is called Service Oriented Architecture.
