Business process management (BPM) has been referred to as a “holistic management” approach to aligning an organization’s business processes with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to improve processes continuously. It can therefore be described as a “process optimization process.” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes are critical to any organization,[citation needed] as they can generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach, BPM sees processes as strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value-added products and services to clients. This foundation closely resembles other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches.

BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM offers an approach to integrate an organizational “change capability” that is both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.

BPM or Business Process Management is often referred to [by whom?] as ‘Management by Business Processes’. The term “business” can be confusing as it is often linked with a hierarchical view (by function) of a company. It is therefore preferable to define BPM as “corporate management through processes”. Process governance is all of the company’s governance activities, which by way of allocating on the processes, work towards reaching its objectives, which are both operational and progress-related.

Process management is all the management activities of a given process which work towards reaching the objectives allocated for this process. Roughly speaking, the idea of business process is as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, and outputs.

Although BPM initially focused on the automation of business processes with the use of information technology, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the use of technology. For example (in workflow systems), when individual steps in the business process require deploying human intuition or judgment, these steps are assigned to appropriate members within the organization.

More advanced forms such as human interaction management is in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.

BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present, such as relationships between processes. When included in a process model, these relationships provide for advanced reporting and analysis. BPM is regarded by some[who?] as the backbone of enterprise content management. Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite).

BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors – creating competitive advantage.

jBPM is an open-source workflow engine written in Java that can execute business processes described in BPMN 2.0 (or its own process definition language jPDL in earlier versions). It is released under the ASL (or LGPL in earlier versions) by the JBoss community.

In essence jBPM takes graphical process descriptions as input. A process is composed of tasks that are connected with sequence flows. Processes represent an execution flow.

The graphical diagram (flow chart) of a process is used as the basis for the communication between non-technical users and developers. Each execution of a process definition is called a “process instance”. jBPM manages the process instances. Some activities are automatic like sending an email or invoking a service. Some activities act as wait states, like for example human tasks or waiting for an external service to return results. jBPM will manage and persist the state of the process instances at all times. jBPM is based on the Process Virtual Machine (PVM) which is the JBoss community’s foundation to support multiple process languages natively.

We are using jBPM to automate complex BRs (Business Rules) for process and/or workflow management specially. It helps us to develop complex systems to processing of documents coming from different channels and routing the documents to the next process step.