IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW)

Digital business process management with IBM technologies

In the 21st century, there is a growing demand from companies and organizations for digital automation – electronic document management, business process management and automation – which, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, is no longer just an efficiency-enhancing opportunity, but a basic tool for economic survival. The main objective of the use of Business Process Management (BPM) systems is to increase the operational efficiency of companies and organizations by reducing human errors and communication problems and by eliminating bottlenecks that reduce efficiency. Their systems approach helps to control and optimize processes in the enterprise. BPM tools generally support activities that are linked to the following business processes and business rules:

• planning
• business processes and business processes management
• implementation
• measurement
• optimization

All the above functions contribute to the optimization and refinement of processes and elementary process steps involving human resources and IT applications. BPM systems are often used as a bridge between the business and IT organizations of companies. As a result of implementing BPM systems, the following benefits can be expected:

• cost reduction
• ensuring regulatory compliance
• increased customer satisfaction
• more agile internal operations
• simpler and more transparent operations
• increased efficiency/productivity
• competitive advantage in the market

BPM functional characteristics and capabilities

Practical BPM implementations usually focus on serving the needs of business users rather than IT professionals, by enabling them to create new business processes involving multiple independent systems, preferably without programming. Visualized process design and modelling BPM applications enable process design, testing and monitoring. The main capabilities of enterprise BPM systems are:

Workflow management: business users can use them to design, test and run business processes that manage and control the interactions of workers, systems and data. BPM also automates much of this.

Business rules engine: It enables business users to formulate complex business rules during process design and execution.

Form generation: business users can create and share forms without coding.

Group work: BPM systems often support the idea management, decision process management and opinion stream solutions familiar from WEB2 systems.

Analytics: it is possible to create metrics to measure processes and to produce ongoing reports.

Integrations:  A prominent feature of enterprise BPM systems is the ability to integrate out of the box with existing business systems such as ERP (SAP), DMS (Filenet), Teamwork (SharePoint), etc.

BPM typical business use cases

• Employee onboarding and HR processes
• Procurement
• Cost accounting
• Leave requests and approvals management
• Customer management
• Claims management (client, internal client)
• Credit application
• Compliance
• Customer service processes
• Complaints handling
• Project management

BPM functional characteristics and capabilities

Practical BPM implementations usually focus on serving the needs of business users rather than IT professionals, by enabling them to create new business processes involving multiple independent systems, preferably without programming. Visualized process design and modelling BPM applications enable process design, testing and monitoring. The main capabilities of enterprise BPM systems are:

• Workflow management: business users can use them to design, test and run business processes that manage and control the interactions of workers, systems and data. BPM also automates much of this.

BPM non-functional characteristics

Low Code Capabilities: BPM systems in general, although having “codeless” or “low code” capabilities, are not “low code” platforms, as their primary goal is to increase business efficiency and not to accelerate development by using development “building blocks”.

Cloud and/or on-premise design: today’s modern BPM systems almost invariably offer their services SaaS-style from the cloud, but in large enterprise deployments hybrid (cloud and on-premise mixed) or on-premise-only deployments are still the maximum due to prevalent security or data management requirements.

BPM framework: BPM systems can be divided into 3 main categories based on the functions they cover:

1. Complete “wall-to-wall” BPM frameworks, where all relevant BPM functions are included, covering all needs within an application.
2. Horizontal BPM frameworks support the business needs of the enterprise by designing and developing processes only
3. Horizontal BPM solutions cover a specific industry solution but are difficult to implement in other areas.

Operability in a large enterprise environment: many clever, state-of-the-art systems are suitable for implementing business processes, but only a minority of them are suitable for running continuous 7x24x7, DevOps-supported, volatile or very high-load processes in a fail-safe and monitorable manner. For some solutions with impressive interfaces, even change management in different environments (DEV/TEST/PROD) is problematic or requires too much regression testing, which can be a major burden on both the business and IT side. Not to mention the availability of vendor support or English-speaking technicians.

IBM BPM = IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW)

Our company has developed its BPM competencies for large enterprises, financial institutions and institutions based on the IBM Business Automation Workflow software, a BPM product from the global company IBM.  The main reasons for our choice:

• Wall-to-wall enterprise BPM framework (process design, modelling, implementation, measurement, optimization)
• Proven performance and scalability
• Cloud, on-premise and hybrid modes of operation
• Factory “out of the box” integration capabilities
• Reliable, English-language product support and training = investment security

IBM’s BPM system can be found as IBM Business Automation Workflow or IBM Cloud Pack for Automation for customers interested in the product. The IBM BPM product consists of a web-based design interface (Process Designer), a web-based portal (Process Portal) and a web-based administration interface. The design interface provides assistance in the development of applications and reusable modules, the portal is a business user interface and the administration interface is used for server and application configuration and process maintenance. The elements of the design interface are processes, data, screens, services, external system connections, user groups, reusable modules, and debugging and tracing. The building blocks of the processes are human tasks / data entry, server-side scripts, client-side scripts, server-side (micro-)services, decision points, message sending and receiving, sub-processes