1.1. The Benefits of BPM An organization's decision to build a BPM solution is made by its business architects , CIO, CTO, or CEO. Possible motivations for choosing BPM include the following:
Formalize existing process and spot needed improvements Adopting BPM forces a business to think through and formalize its understanding of current processes. Along the way, those running the business invariably spot potential improvements, such as the removal of steps, automation of manual steps, or the reengineering of a part or the whole of the flow.
Facilitate automated, efficient process flow Given that a process spans multiple activities, the less time spent between activities, the better. When BPM software drives the process flow, downtime between activities is almost zero, unless the software itself is down. Even better, BPM supports process parallelism, so that independent sequences of work can be performed concurrently in isolation of each other, with their results merged and synchronized later in the flow. A process controlled by some other meansfor example, by phone calls, emails, or inter-office mail exchangeis bound to be significantly slower and prone to getting lost or stuck.
Increase productivity and decrease head count Get work done faster with fewer people! Actual BPM case studies provide some interesting results: a financial services was able to reduce staff from 613 to 406 while decreasing processing time and increasing customer satisfaction; an insurance company trimmed off 40% of its staff and increased its rate of claims handling.[*] [*] C. Plesums, "Introduction to Workflow," http://www.plesums.com/image/introworkflow.html.
Allow people to solve the hard problems Although BPM is often about removing or decreasing human participation in a process, one of its benefits is its flexibility to use people to help fix problems, as in Figure 1-4, where an exception in Step D is passed to a human resolver, who corrects it and resumes the process at Step E. Figure 1-4. Person resolves process failure 
James Raby, vice president of engineering for a claims processing outsourcer, observes that BPM doesn't necessarily eliminate people but has them "do the hard problems."[*] For example, if an automated step (such as a query to a legacy system) fails, a manual workaround is assigned to an operations clerk (who does the query and passes the results back to the process). [*] D. L. Margulius, "Workflow Meets BPM," InfoWorld, April 2002, http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/04/18/020422fessentialpmtca_1.html.
Simplify regulations and compliance issues As the Butler Group points out, BPM helps businesses build auditable processes that help organizations comply with various regulatory requirements: "Organizations do not really have much control over compliance. The smarter businesses will therefore look to offset the cost of compliance with the benefits of closer process control and management."[ ] ] Butler Group, "Business Process Management: A Guide to Navigating the Process Minefield," 2004,http://www.butlergroup.com/reports/bpm/.
In the financial sector, for example, the introduction of regulations such as the Patriot Act and the Basel Accord has forced companies to build new processes, or improve existing processes, to track money laundering and to buffer against risk.
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