Over the years, companies have acquired various applications to run their business. Companies started with accounting and financial systems, then went ahead and implemented ERP and then jumped into CRM and many others like SCM, HRM along the way.
Soon companies realized that these applications need to exchange information and started “integrating” them, which primarily meant updating data across systems. Such point to point integration of applications works for some time and then business changes and companies need to make “customizations” to the applications. That starts another six months to a year cycle of changes, updates, customizations and testing of applications. Application capabilities have always lagged behind the business needs. Business changes at a much faster rate than applications can.
What if all these updates could be done in days, not months? What if we could separate out a layer of business logic that is dynamic, from the layer that remains constant for a long time? What if making changes to applications and extending applications did not take months and years? Can we do that?
Yes, we can, with a Business Process Management System. Surround enterprise application with BPM layer. One of the key values that BPM delivers is extending your applications and providing an agile layer of business logic that can be changed as quickly as your business changes. This strategy of surrounding all your enterprise applications has 4 key benefits:
- Fill the process whitespaces created by disjointed applications.
- Move customizations to business process management layer for agility.
- Extend applications with new business logic.
- Extend legacy applications with new capabilities like social, mobile etc.
Let the applications do what they were designed to do. If you need to add capabilities, make customizations, add processes, do that in BPM. BPM will orchestrate the activities across the applications in a unified process without making unnatural and persistent changes to the enterprise legacy applications. When there comes a time to change, model driven BPM process is much simpler to change than, for example, changing the logic inside an ERP system.
Check out the webcast discussing how BPM helps extend enterprise applications.