What is BPM - Solastis

1. WHAT IS A BPM SOFTWARE? KNOW EVERYTHING. In this article, we will explain to you all you want to know about BPM software. If you search this topic on the internet, you will often find a theoretical discussion about this subject which is hard to understand. If you check Wikipedia, the standard definition of BPM reads like this: “Business process management (BPM) is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyse, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes”. Unfortunately, this does not give a clear idea as to what exactly BPM and BPM software is. So, here, we are presenting this topic in a manner which is very easy to follow. Let’s begin! WHAT IS A BPM SOFTWARE? The purpose of BPM software is to help manage your business processes and digitalize them for better efficiency. By digitalization. we mean moving a process to a computer or cloud based platform. Business processes can be of many different types, for example sales is a business process, so are support processes. So, in any business, there can be varied processes that needs to be managed. To understand this well, let’s use an example. Suppose there is a large bank, which provides credit cards to the people in that country. For every credit card, there is an annual credit card fee of 100 USD and most of the clients call the bank to request for a credit card fee waiver. Every day, a 1000 people call the bank to request for the waiver. As you can see, this is a high customer volume. When these processes are run on a high scale (meaning high in numbers on a day to day basis), the manual supervision and approval of such processes becomes difficult. For example, imagine a department of 70 people receiving a 1000 calls daily and another team of 30 approvers approving the requests. This, as you can clearly see, will overwhelm the system, and the 70 people might not be able to respond to calls fast enough, or the approvers might not be able to get through the application fast enough. So, people thought, “Is there any way to automate these processes, so that requests that come in are all evaluated or checked against some parameters, and a decision is reached as to whether waiver can be granted or not? If such a system can be developed, then it will be immensely helpful as the computer system is taking the decision here.” In this situation, BPM software with workflow comes to the rescue. COMPONENTS OF A BPM SOFTWARE BPM software has its own components, and those components help as follows. FORM GENERATOR Most of the BPM systems will have a tool to generate customized forms. On these customized forms, you can capture the required fields and possibly write your own rules as well.

2. So, in the above example, when a customer calls in, the person attending to the call opens a form called ‘Request for Credit card fee waiver’ and captures all the relevant details (like Person’s National Identification Number, bank account number, etc.). The form is generated in this component of the BPM software. BUSINESS RULES ENGINE (CODING PLATFORM / LOW- CODE PLATFORM) Once the details are captured in the form, the system needs to process the data using some rules. For example, you can implement a rule saying that if a person has purchased 10000 dollars of goods in the previous year using his card and has paid all his credit card dues on time, then the waiver can be allowed. So, this rule will need to be coded (programmed) into the software to check for the necessary details and arrive at a conclusion. Work on this coding will be done in this component of the BPM software. WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT Most of the time, the rules will not be simple and straightforward as mentioned in the previous step. They can get very complex, as follows; If spending last year was more than $10,000 and credit card fees were paid on time, then allow waiver with no approval from higher authority. If spending was more than $7000 but less than $10000 and credit card fees were paid on time, then allow 80% waiver with senior person’s approval. (So, the case will be re-routed for approval later) If spending was less than $7000 but person has also taken a home loan, then route the case to a senior manager for manual override. As you can see in this scenario, there are lot of ‘if / then’ and ‘routing for approval’ possibilities. This part of the work is taken care of by the workflow in the BPM software. TICKET / CASE MANAGEMENT A ticket or case is a basic object which is created when a customer calls in. So, every request for a card fee waiver becomes a ticket. It is then subject to the Business Rules Engine and Workflow to reach to a conclusion. In that sense, the ticket is just like any normal ticket, incidence in any CRM system. As you can see, BPM software is not very different from a CRM system in terms of its ticketing capabilities, but it is made special or powerful by its Workflow and Rule engine. As you can see above, there are three special components of a BPM system called Form Generator, Rule engine and workflow, which make it capable of handling high-volume scenarios. COST OF A BPM SOFTWARE From the example mentioned before, it will be clear to you that full-blown BPM software are really made for very large companies and high volume transaction companies like banks, insurance companies,

3. and government departments (Visa and consular). Thus, they are very expensive if bought standalone, with a minimum total price of at least a hundred thousand dollars, the breakup of which can be as follows. INSTALLATION COSTS Installation of the BPM software is often done in the in-house servers, though cases of cloud installation are also common. However, in a high-volume environment, businesses generally prefer to co-locate the BPM server with other systems of the company. Thus, the cost of installation in that case can easily cross 10000- 30000 USD. LICENSING COSTS Licensing costs needs to be paid to the company providing the BPM software suite. While it largely depends on the number of users on your system; the minimum one time licensing cost exceeds 20000 USD with a 25% – 30 % annual recurring charge for support. IMPLEMENTATION COST If you have gone through the above example, you will realize that you need to run a project to implement the BPM suite as you need to; Design the forms Program all the business rules Setup the workflow to route the ticket Develop codes for any other specific requirements Generally, a single process is implemented as a separate project, which can take anywhere from 2-6 months to complete with a small team, and the cost of which can easily exceed 50,000 USD depending on the complexity and number of processes to be implemented. MAINTENANCE COST After the project is over, you will still need to retain a small team of IT technicians to maintain, monitor and change the processes and workflow as and when required. The salary and other costs for such staff will need to be managed. In general, full-blown BPM software is only suitable for large enterprises with a large daily volume of processes. Unless the volume of specific processes is more than few hundred per day, the BPM implementation is not usually warranted. Small, medium and large enterprises (with low transaction volume) will not be able to use full-blown BPM to its fullest potential.