Business Process Management
#TechBite05: Advent Calendar 2022 by Büro am Draht
What is it?
Discussing digitalization projects with clients often reveals complex workflows that need to be implemented. In many cases, they are hidden, not well documented, and involve multiple actors. But they must be well understood before they can be automated entirely or even in parts.
The practice of modeling, analyzing, and optimizing end-to-end business processes is called Business process management (BPM). Its goal is to help meet your strategic business goals, such as improving your customer experience framework.
Why do we recommend it?
Modeling of business processes in itself has value. Being aware of the processes that run your business enables you to speak about them, explain them to different stakeholders, and as a consequence, optimize, automate and scale your processes.
Using a graphical language helps communicate between development teams and business owners. Using a standardized language such as BPMN (Business process modeling notation) saves half of the effort when later automating the process.
We can execute those BPMN diagrams using tools such as a workflow engine. This adds a lot of flexibility to your project for optimizing and adapting the underlying process later when circumstances and requirements change.
When do we recommend it?
In today’s fast-paced world, processes are often complex, need flexibility for future changes, and have high requirements for scaling. Building upon established workflow engine tools is highly recommended in those scenarios and quickly amortizes.
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In many cases, off-the-shelf software can fulfill your needs. But automation tools should be seriously considered when your business relies on individual steps and tasks.
Are there examples, providers, or tools?
Our experience when using Camunda is excellent. Their use of standards, tool support, flexibility, and robustness makes it a great tool and a reliable investment for the future. Their newest version focuses on scaling process instances that run on distributed microservices landscapes.
Not every business process has such high demands for scaling, but many direct competitors, players, and alternatives exist in the field, from low-code tools to microservice orchestrators. We will happily discuss which tool suits your needs and fits into your IT strategy.
How do we use it?
Before deciding whether a workflow engine can advance your digitization goals, you must understand the underlying workflows. Büro am Draht supports you in identifying existing processes and defining digital ones.
We help you to take make-or-buy decisions, support you with development, and utilize our broad experience with integrating systems into existing IT landscapes — always keeping the users in our mind that will later live those processes and with a focus on your long-term needs.
Author: Silvan Golega
Illustrations: Kai Sinzinger
This article is part of a series called #24TechBites. To sweeten the remaining time until Christmas, we aim to inform you about current technologies, inspire you or give you an opinionated review of software trends — all in the form of 24 small daily surprises in the German tradition of an “Adventskalender”.
To enjoy all the other #TechBites and find out more about us and our advent calendar, click #24TechBites!
About
Büro am Draht is a Berlin-based consultancy helping our clients to build resilient and adaptable digital platforms to support today’s business requirements and even launch tomorrow’s business models we might not yet foresee. Hence, we work closely together at every stage of the digital transformation process — from digital strategy to solution design & development to operational support.
Our agile approach to developing versatile and scalable solutions ensures that our clients consistently deliver engaging and personalized customer experiences. To learn more about how we help companies across industries visit:
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