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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) & BPM |
When organizations deploy Enterprise Resource Planning systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and others, many in the organization conclude that they do not need any other BPM system. However, many business processes exist outside the application and cannot be managed by a single application.
The Transportation Ecosystem
 The best way to understand that one monolithic application cannot address all BPM needs is to look at the transportation ecosystem. Like most hierarchies, the transportation ecosystem does not rely on a single mode of transportation to deliver on all needs. Ships, trains, and planes are expensive investments, but provide effective mass transportation. Trucks, busses and cars are somewhat less expensive, but provide more personalization on where you want to be picked up and dropped off. The lowest cost and most customized transportation are motorbikes and forklifts.
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BPM Opportunity
Business processes are like the transportation hierarchy. Highly specialized applications such as ERP systems provide great benefit for specialized, high value transactions they were designed to control. However, companies also have many cross-functional processes that exist “outside” the application. These processes tend to be important, but unique to each company. At the least structured level of the business process ecosystem are mass-personalized or ad hoc processes that people usually handle through email, phone calls, or status summaries.
In the BPM ecosystem, large enterprise applications handle the specialized, high value processes while Ultimus BPM is added to manage the next level of processes that are cross departmental and require more agility to respond to exceptions and change. |
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