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It is never too much to remember that processes are part of any business. After all, they work as a checklist of steps to be followed by the right people at the right time. Once implemented, they provide consistency, control, and efficiency to the organization.
To meet the challenge of organizing and facilitating low or high complexity organizational processes, internal or external, in corporations, the methodology known as BPM (Business Process Management) was born.
Aiming to add more resources for greater intelligence in processes, BPM has evolved and, thus, iBPM was born.
What does iBPM mean?
To understand what iBPM is we just need to analyze one detail: the letter “i” before the acronym comes from the word “intelligent”. Therefore, iBPM stands for Intelligent Business Process Management. This new direction in BPM integrates cutting-edge technology, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence into daily processes.
Contrary to what you might think, the term is not that new. It was in 2012, during the Gartner Business Process Management Summit, that it was first bandied about. According to the Gartner Group, iBPM would be the “next generation of BPM”.
Also in Gartner’s own definitions, “capabilities such as validation (process simulation, including ‘what if’) and verification (logical compliance), optimization, and the ability to gain insight into process performance have been included in many BPMS offerings for several years. iBPMSs have added enhanced support for human collaboration such as integration with social media, mobile-enabled process tasks, streaming analytics and real-time decision management”.
Simply put, intelligent BPM takes all the advantages of Business Process Management and adds technology such as artificial intelligence to improve efficiency. As such, the tool helps companies dynamically automate more types of experiences and produce automated data analysis.
Therefore, experts consider that while BPM helps organizations plan and automate their complex processes, iBPM goes a step further because it builds a dynamic technology environment
What’s so special about iBPM?
When the term emerged in 2012, it was already clear that optimizing processes to achieve greater efficiency and reduce costs was no longer enough. Since that time, it was already known that companies needed to be more flexible to market changes and agile in deciding their next steps.
Digital transformation and new technologies have shown the importance of real-time data analysis for more accurate decision-making. Thus, the focus of iBPM is not on processes, but on information. We can then say that what makes Intelligent Business Process Management special is that it turns data into information.
With information in hand, the company knowledge expands, and as a consequence it gets much more insights to act on process improvement. The result of this is the continuous improvement in business processes that translates into improved service to the end customer.
By using technologies such as big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, iBPM systems improve the process experience, scalability, flexibility, and automation.
As Jim Sinur, author of the book “Intelligent BPM Systems: Impact and Opportunity,” notes: “intelligent business process management is the next generation of enterprise BPM, leveraging recent technological advances to attain a degree of operational responsiveness not possible with yesterday’s business process platform.”
In short, iBPM enriches BPM by expanding its scope.
Main features of iBPM
Among the key attributes of iBPM, the most expressive is real-time business analysis. By enabling the identification of significant correlations in structured or unstructured data, it improves process visibility and, therefore, decision-making capacity.
On data analytics, by using external context data and social data (such as expert opinion and customer feedback), iBPM empowers users to anticipate customer demands and determine the next action. Once again, decision-making accuracy is the focus.
Another feature of Intelligent Business Process Management is expanded technologies to support mobility. Mobile platforms enable employees to have instant access to business processes, regardless of where they are. Thus, they improve efficiency and the whole process becomes more agile.
All of these already show important advantages of iBPM, but there is one attribute that can bring even more value in the long run. It is the introduction of deep complex-event processing (CEP). CEP analyzes large volumes of data to monitor unexpected patterns and respond to evolving opportunities and risks.
Precisely because it improves decision-making capabilities, iBPM can provide multiple benefits across a variety of industries.
What kind of organization is iBPM suitable for?
Any organization or system can benefit from the advanced technology and analytics of an iBPM. For example, for product development, thanks to the data collected from user feedback, iBPM enables a company to meet the needs of its customers. Benefits include reduced costs in product development and increased market acceptance.
In technology, Intelligent Business Process Management, using real-time data analysis, detects customer problems before they occur, providing the organization with the data it needs to act proactively and avoid a negative customer experience. For finance, users can assess in real time the impact of a potential threat or opportunity in order to develop a contingency plan.
In short, the examples are many and varied. What we want to show is that all companies, and all their sectors, can gain a lot by adopting iBPM.
How to adopt an iBPM software?
This “new” BPM approach is not so new, because, as we showed, the term popped up in 2012. As it is a more advanced Business Process Management vision, there are systems on the market that meet some of the attributes of an iBPM.
Fusion Platform is one of them, and before ending this post, we explain why. One of the benefits of iBPM is the agility in executing processes, right? Well, thanks to Fusion Mobile, requests, pending activities, and tasks can be executed anytime and anywhere.
In addition, the agility in decision making process is promoted through the creation of quick actions in processes, with actions such as Approval, Disapproval, among others. As for analysis and information extraction, with the Analytics solution users create data warehouses and connect various types of databases or webservices.
In other words, Fusion Platform has the tools your company needs for much more agile and accurate decision making.
Try it for 15 days free right now! Or, if you prefer, request a demonstration from our consultants. Count on us to answer all your doubts and help your company!
