Cloud-based Business Process Management (BPM): What is it, and what are the advantages?

Technological advances in recent years have proven to be as transformational to businesses, as has cloud computing. Under the umbrella of the Supplier Performance Software, greater specialization and collaboration have been achieved within and between organizations through cloud computing. It has also simplified data sharing and faster commercial transactions and empowered a mobile workforce that can access its tasks everywhere, every time.

Organizations can transfer a variety of operations to the cloud, including efforts devoted to business process management (BPM). Categorizing, restructuring, automating and augmenting the discrete, and repeatable sequences of events that make your business work vintages noteworthy positive results. Greater efficiency, cost effectiveness, improved bottom line – even when accomplished on-premises are the advantages of having your BPM synchronized with the cloud.

A cloud-based BPM derives value from three areas:

Financial (no capital investments, pay by use, expand/shrink resources as needed)
Infrastructural (manageable environment and resources for growth and self-service provisioning)
Tactical (outsourced ownership of infrastructure and operations enabling focus on core activities).

A BPM suite must include these elements to be classified as cloud based.

Benefits of BPM on the cloud

According to leading analysts, despite BPM’s extensive history and well accepted benefits, almost half of all BPM attempts fail. Therefore, going only with BPM is like leaving the success of an important business and technology initiative up to a coin flip. However, Business Process Management software in the cloud can help overcome several typical challenges of BPM.

Here is how BPM on the cloud will enable businesses achieve unobstructed success:

1. Negligible technology constraints

No organization can address all its issues through a single BPM tool because the solutions provided by BPM technology may differ from issue to issue. Also, many a time’s technological choices can delay or eliminate the overall BPM success. And the dynamics of the cloud enables companies to test a various technology at one go at cost effective investments. Technology lock-in is effectively eliminated, so that enterprises can earn the profits of BPM across the business.

2. Time to implement

The purpose of employing BPM is to create agility, so that extensive technology operates to counter to the BPM mission. Sluggish deployments are not only heavy on the pocket but also diminish the benefit of BPM and cause losses for future projects. However, BPM in the cloud can reduce the time taken to ready a BPM structure from months to minutes or even days.

3. Collaboration across and within enterprises

Organizations are enabled to collaborate on intra and inter-organizational levels through BPM. But, external and supply chain and value chain processes are not supported by traditional localized BPM implementations. Also, in local environments departmental BPM implementations defeat the bigger goal of coordinating end-to-end business processes and they’re reflected in the strategic KPIs’ and operational distinction.

A borderless environment is created when BPM deployed in the cloud for supporting globally distributed teams and complex processes. The cloud-based BPM streamlines association with every associate across the supply chain and an improvement in management of procedures that which cuts across environments.

4. Enterprise roll-out

Most enterprises are regulated as depository, and their BPM investments are segregated. In an old-style organization, no one is motivated enough to have a shared infrastructure and set of assets that can be leveraged across teams. A cloud environment provides an integrated and commonly accessible BPM medium for attaining enterprise-level process excellence.

5. Centralized control and governance

The focus of an organization shifts to administration, calibration and streamlining for fruitful adoption and realization of BPM advantages when BPM is launched at enterprise levels. And a Business Process Competency Center (BPCC) provides a data warehouse of information to address these needs and hosting it in the cloud makes it easily accessible.

The collaboration and cooperation will be strengthened due to the very nature of shared infrastructure and common environment.

The speed of getting started is a huge benefit of cloud-based BPM. When BPM is offered as a service, businesses can try BPM to see what it is all about and whether it is right for them. Finally, it is easier to organize requests and data that reside in the cloud, therefore BPM in the cloud makes processes more competent.