Main areas of growth for business process management include HR/HCM, financials and accounting, business process outsourcing, procurement (direct and indirect spend) and healthcare.  Each of these growth markets has seen new vendors appear, and most of them offer new functionality that was previously unavailable. The new functionality has spiked the increase in the number of vendors in each space.  Specialized functionalities within their industry further differentiates them in the BPM space. Industry expertise is a key area organizations are investigating when selecting a BPM vendor.

Reducing organizational costs, restructuring or re-engineering existing processes, providing flexibility to scale operations, standardizing and consolidating processes, complying with governmental and industry standards, improving analytical capabilities, and forcing change into business operations are areas where BPM can be utilized. 

Vendors have started to address deficiencies such as lack of workflow, business process execution, exception handling, business process modeling, optimization and control, and business activity monitoring (BAM) tools, lack of industry defined processes, audit trail compliance, process management dashboards, modular workflow editing, holistic reporting, unified UI, device agnostic, configuration versus coding for modifications to accommodate changes, and turnkey bi-directional integrations.  These new features and functions have raised the level of solutions being delivered within the BPM space.

What has changed is that vendors have evolved to provide a true BPM platform where business processes can be combined with software, hardware, and services, while providing a mechanism to execute work.  The new model of BPM that organizations should be cognizant of is the inclusion of software within the BPM as an entire solution. Usually a SaaS infrastructure, back-end or technology stack supports the BPM functions and provides a platform for the BPM to occur.

A new trend in BPM software is the inclusion of content management and project management into traditional BPM software.  Management of work on a BPM platform lends itself to controlling the content and managing the tasks and activities of workflows and mobility thereby extending the functionalities of existing systems.  Combining the new trends enables these vendors to offer a greater range of products and services to cater to individual organizational requirements. The strength of the technology backbone enables them to offer an end-to-end scalable solution to organizations due to the technological flexibility. 

                                                 The Outlook

Technological agility has shaped the BPM market into the direction of providing BPM software, services, combining mobility, business processes, content management, and project and task management, which has created a new BPM platform delivery business model.  Organizations will decide what products, services and software are to be included in BPM delivery. What will define vendors in this space is their ability to bundle BPM services and define new types of managed services models for organizations to consume.