To understand business process management software or BPM software, it's important to understand that BPM software is not the kind of software that does a specific thing (ex. A word processor facilitates the creation of text documents) but rather it is a combination of many kinds of software all created to serve one end goal.
The term encompasses multiple types of software which may have different functions, but extremely serve to improve a business through the enhancement or support of a company's workflow and operational processes. A business process is a collection of interrelated activities or chain of events that extremely lead to the delivery of a product or service.
Core BMP software applications can be customized to suit the needs of any organization. They're built around the skeleton of business process modeling notation or BPMN, which is the standard method of graphically representing business processes in a workflow. This is then used to design or assess an organization's operational processes and activities.
However, the scope of BPM software is not limited to planning. Instead, the innovative use of computer software in BPM ranges from process modeling to sharing and security applications to business activity monitoring applications and more. These management tools help optimize the resources available to any given organization.
In the past, BPM means sitting down with the key people of a corporation to literally drawing out plans in diagrams and then delegating tasks and giving new instructions. Business process management software has changed the face of BPM with business process automation (BPA). BPA integrates software applications into the company or organization's workflow in order to automate tasks that can be done without manual labor, so cutting costs.
BPM software and BPA are the way of the future.